The Niyamas Week 5 - Ishvara Pranidhana: Surrender to the Supreme Reality
We gather again,
the final week of initiations into the yamas and niyamas.
Dan dropped by for tea earlier,
and we were talking about beliefs.
he asked —
what do I actually believe in?
And it got me thinking…
You know how I often use God and Life interchangeably.
Not because I planned to,
but because hardly anyone can deny
that they’re alive.
So that’s my evidence of the Divine:
You.
The fact of being.
An intelligence so vast
it’s living you —
breathing you —
right now.
It doesn’t ask for belief.
It doesn’t say,
“Convince me before your next breath.”
It just gives it.
What a mystery,
that Life lives us uniquely —
each configuration
never to be repeated.
That doesn’t make you special,
it makes It special.
And that’s something
I can bow down to completely.
Because despite billions of lives before,
there has never been this one —
this pattern, this heartbeat,
this consciousness.
So I sit in awe,
in devotion to that force
which keeps living us
even when we doubt it.
And maybe that’s where
true spirituality begins —
not in belief,
but in wonder,
in surrender
to the living intelligence
that moves through us all.
We've woken up to something.
It's a great privilege,
a great honour,
a great responsibility,
a great possibility.
It's all there, isn't it?
Acknowledging this light inside.
And so these ten initiations
have really been a way
to guide us
into how to live from our soul —
how that might look,
how that might express itself.
Now we come to the tenth…
The tenth contains all the previous nine.
If we knew only the tenth,
it would be enough.
The tenth
is the essential ingredient —
the activating principle
on every spiritual path,
in every tradition.
It holds the central place,
the hub of the wheel.
There isn’t one tradition that denies it.
All will say:
the spiritual process
is one of self-surrender.
A surrender
of our pseudo-self,
our contracted, limited self —
our psycho-self,
our fear-based self —
into what Patanjali calls Ishvara,
the supreme reality
that always underlies
your little contracted ball of “yourself.”
Into the presence within.
So the tenth initiation
is into Ishvara Pranidhana —
surrender to the Supreme Reality.
Surrender to God.
Surrender to Truth
Surrender to Love
Surrender to whatever it is you feel you are surrendering into.
Our blessing
is that we already know
what surrender feels like.
You know the psycho-physiological
surrender response.
We do it each time we exhale in double breathing.
Actually…
Your inhalation
is as much of a surrender
as your exhalation.
To receive,
we must open to receive.
We must surrender resistance
in order to receive.
And the exhalation too
is surrender —
because we have to let
what we currently consider ourselves to be
flow out.
Your system
is continuously being primed by sadhana —
by this mechanism:
Will you open to receive Life
into yourself?
And will you release,
and let Life flow out?
Will you cease
to get in the way of Life
happening through you?
Will you give way
to the greater flow
of your existence?
Or will you trap it in thinking?
Lock it in disbelief?
Hold it in possessiveness?
Defend yourself against it?
And the answer is — yes,
all the bloody time.
But now I know
what it feels like
to not do that.
I’m getting hooked.
I have a feeling relationship
with the surrender mechanism —
the let-go mechanism —
that allows me
to open more deeply,
to release with depth.
And as that grows,
I am stretched.
My capacity to receive
and to release
increases.
As it increases,
it rubs against
my psychological boundaries —
my belief structures,
my fixed identity,
what I think myself to be.
So again,
I am asked
to surrender
a little more of myself.
Do you sometimes feel restricted —
like you’ve got a lid on your box?
That there’s more Life in you
that you can’t quite reach?
More possibility,
more love,—
but something feels contained.
That is your container
expanding to its edge.
You’re beginning to sense
your own limitation.
Is that a time to mourn,
or to celebrate?
Celebrate it.
You’ve reached your boundary.
That’s when most spiritual complaining begins —
but really,
it’s the edge of discovery.
“I can feel something,” we say,
“but I can’t yet see it.”
So what do we do?
We keep gently surrendering.
We relax even the need to know.
Life will fill you eternally.
It will always try to make you
as vast as itself —
as open,
as expansive.
That's the spiritual journey
The understanding is —
that journey is a process of surrender.
It turns out there’s nothing more sacred than that —
no belief I hold
more sacred
than what I relax into
when I surrender all beliefs.
I’m not knocking beliefs.
They have their use.
But ultimately,
they are scaffolding —
temporary resting points
for something much larger.
And what are you surrendering into?
You can call it so many names.
Sometimes it even feels rude
to name something
so intimate,
so deeply personal.
It is a revelation in you.
There are structures in the psychology,
in our conditioning,
that resist naming it certain things.
We’ve taken the G-word to town this season,
And it may have rubbed up
against your inner constructs.
I’ve enjoyed that.
We’ve had a good rub.
But you feel me.
You sense what I mean
when I say “God.”
We’re purifying that word —
taking away its constrictions,
its social conditioning —
and feeling it again,
from the inside.
You are feeling into your own relationship with the divine.
It is the relationship of all relationships
don’t spoil it,
don’t be in a hurry with it.
Let it be a revelation in you.
So what you’re surrendering into
is your thing.
And where you’re surrendering from
can come from any angle at all.
I can surrender
the need to defend,
the need to pretend,
the need to control.
Attachment.
The need to prove something.
To be something.
Even the need to understand.
I can surrender my IQ,
my CV
my “I am this.”
Does Life need your CV?
No.
If we get ourselves into the God position
we can look out from there
and have a bloody good laugh at ourselves.
It’s a humbling,
pride-dissolving,
wonderfully revealing,
love-enhancing project —
and you’re on it.
There’s the talking about surrender,
and then there’s
the taking of it —
receiving the initiation itself.
And when that comes,
something in you says,
Alright — I’ve got to work now.
This is the most important project
of my life:
to learn to keep surrendering.
Through every experience,
every breath,
every meeting.
You begin to understand
everyone else
according to the level of your own surrender.
When you meet someone
from that surrendered space,
you feel such a soul connection.
They could be black, white, green, hairy —
it doesn’t matter.
To the degree that you’ve surrendered,
you’ll meet them in their soul.
And when two have surrendered deeply,
beliefs don’t matter.
They meet in love.
They meet in the depth.
Surrender is the very core
of spiritual practice.
If you knew nothing else,
this would be enough.
The yogic practices —
they simply lubricate surrender.
According to your readiness
you invite a relationship with that which you are surrendering into.
Every inhale
you invite that power in.
(I’d say aim big on that one)
Every exhalation
offers you out to It
in devotion,
in service,
in letting go.
Until that mechanism awakens to such a degree —
so that when you stop it,
you feel pain.
Self-created suffering.
It is different from the pain of being grown,
which is the ache of expansion,
but the pain of resisting
your own growth.
We know the difference.
So — surrender, yogis.
Surrender.
And your joy,
your life,
will be the image
of your surrender.
It will glow
with the light
you’ve allowed in
through that opening.
Taking it deeper…
It’s natural on the path
to become aware, at times,
of certain tendencies or behaviours —
things in us that no longer serve.
You notice them and think,
“Ah, there’s that old habit again.”
And to see it
is already a wonderful thing.
That awareness itself
is grace.
Because when something comes into awareness,
it’s ready.
It’s due for surrender.
Surrender can take many flavours.
Sometimes it can happen in an instant —
a great burden drops,
and it’s gone.
Other times,
it’s more of a process.
We become aware of something,
and we live with that awareness for a while.
We coexist with it.
That’s important —
be patient in that process.
Because surrender
is not something we do.
It’s not an act of ego.
Life surrenders itself.
So when something comes up
and doesn’t immediately dissolve,
don’t worry.
It’s the karmic way of it.
Some patterns however run deep —
deep into the system.
The yogis call them vasanas —
the deep-rooted tendencies
that came in with us,
the old companions
we’ve hardly known life without.
They’ve been there so long
we didn’t even notice them
until the light of awareness
grew strong enough to reveal them.
And when that happens,
it’s like —
Wow.
I can really see it now.
It’s been my life partner,
my familiar identity.
These can be difficult to shift.
First thing…
Once it’s seen, it’s in the light
it can’t control you from behind the scenes.
It’s no longer in the dark.
It becomes something
you can watch.
That alone
is massive.
It’s back in your hands, certainly.
But willpower —
despite its qualities —
won’t be enough for this.
You know these ones.
No matter how many times
you’ve told yourself,
and brought forth your willpower —
you’ve failed.
I have too.
So here’s my suggestion:
replace willpower
with willingness.
Willpower
is the ego’s attempt
to change itself —
which usually creates suppression.
We box it again.
It runs for cover
under the force of our effort,
then waits
for an opportunity to return.
It hasn’t dissolved.
It’s just gone into hiding.
Which means
you’re still living with it,
undercover.
But now you know
there’s something deeper within you —
a stillness
at the end of the exhale,
a silence,
a God-power.
Wherever you sense it,
Whatever you call it,
you offer it there.
You say,
I see you.
I know you.
You are no longer
in service of my life.
I understand
why you appeared —
the fear,
the trauma,
the protection you were born from —
but still,
I do not need you anymore.
Because now,
I have something else.
And I offer this directly
into the solution of all solutions —
the healer of all healers
the will of all wills —
the Divine Will.
I offer it up.
I’ve done this myself,
sat on that precipice of offering something up.
And the strange thing is —
I know that if I drop it in there,
She will have it.
It will be gone forever.
And yet I realise—
there’s a part of me
that doesn’t want to let go.
You know this one.
Sitting there,
holding it over the precipice,
offering it
to the best of your capacity —
into the Great Dissolver.
Because if it goes in there,
it’s gone.
And the deepest part of you
knows it.
That’s the answer to all prayer —
throwing it
into God itself.
And because we know that,
we hesitate.
We sit on the edge and feel it —
the burn of that attachment.
We still have affinity,
still some energy with it.
So you hold it there
and you feel the burn of it.
And as you hold it there,
you feel the vapour
of the Inner Presence
beginning to rise —
to take hold of it.
As long as you can bear
and suffer that moment,
hold it there.
And say,
I would rather live without this
than remain bound by it.
But I do not have the strength to over this limitation
That’s willingness.
That’s surrender.
And it trumps willpower
every time.
Just the willingness
to bring it
into the vicinity
of the Presence —
to hold it there —
is enough.
If there are things
moving in you,
keep bringing them.
Keep offering them.
Love you so much.
Thank you so much.
Namaste.
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