Surrender Bootcamp: A Heart's Initiation

I thought love would be the destination — but it turns out, it was leading me here: to the sacred work of surrender.

And so, I'm turning myself over to this surrender business, starting with typing "surrender" into Spotify and listening to every song that has this word as its title. The first one? A sultry R&B jam by Kut Klose. Somehow, it felt like the right entry point.

I've recently come out of a relationship — not by my choosing. It feels less like a breakup and more like being exiled from a place I deeply wanted to stay, to build, to grow old.

Our relationship wasn't fraught because we didn't care or connect. In fact, the connection was almost always very sweet, easeful, and fun. The turbulence came in the space — from the ghosts of the past, the mind's looping narratives, the protective armor built from past wounds. Love requires a certain surrender of control, and that was where it got tangled.

My partner, with too much fear to ever fully enter our relationship, vacillated between warmth and distance, clarity and confusion. In his attempts to prevent all future pain and disaster, he was unable to drop into the beauty and goodness we had brewing between us, and as a result, I never quite knew where I stood. My nervous system was in a constant state of alert, trying to find ground where there was none.

When you come out of a relationship, and the other person is no longer looking back at you, providing input and content to feel and communicate your way through together, you are left with the residue of what just happened. And you are left with yourself to reckon with. And when you blend the two — the other person's tendencies that had your nervous system in a state of haywire, and your own reflection looking back at you in the mirror—if you're willing, you begin to ask the harder questions.

One of mine is: How am I also resisting surrender?

In the aftermath, I've been sitting with that. Talking with friends. Feeling into my own body.

I'm realizing that resistance to surrender is rooted in two things:

1. Fear.

2. Attachment to outcome.

   
   

But really, attachment to outcome is just a fancier way to talk about fear.

And fear, as we know, is the opposite of love.

We can't cling to a particular outcome and simultaneously emit the frequency of love. Love is expansive. Attachment contracts.

And the truth is, I was deeply attached to the relationship surviving. I believed in it. I believed in our capacity to grow through the hard stuff, to build our trust in one another, to create something strong, steady, and joyful, slowly but surely, over time.

But even in my commitment to love, I wasn't surrendering. I wasn't placing it all—my hopeful, tender heart, the outcome—into the hands of something higher. I wasn't very open to any outcome beyond, "we're doing this shit, and we're succeeding."

Just as he couldn't surrender to love, I couldn't surrender to the possibility of its end.

And now, here I sit. Heart frayed, aching for reconnection. And I gently ask myself:

Honey, with all due respect… how do we bring you into a state of surrender? How do we loosen the grip on the outcome your heart craves, and open to what this miraculous universe has in store?

That's my work right now. Melting my desire for reconnection into the expansive ocean of surrender. Because we don't attract what we want; we attract what we are. And if I can't get my surrender on, I will keep drawing in people who can't either. And when we can't surrender, we can't truly give ourselves to love and receive all of its medicine.

This season of my life feels like surrender boot camp — held in the healing chambers of my heart.

And I'm experimenting.

Mantras help:

• What is for me will always take root. What is for me will always reach back.

• I trust this completely. The Divine knows what's up.

• There is profound higher purpose to this unraveling.

  
  

Breath helps too — slow & deep, right into the aching center of my chest.

And today, I realized: writing will also help.

So here I am. Showing up to my surrender practice. Because while we can't author outcomes, we can author our inner states. We can uncover the parts of us who grip on for dear life. We can give those parts safe spaces to express and be heard. We can let them know that there is no part of us that is unlovable. Absolutely none.

We can live in a way that cultivates presence, appreciation, and deep trust. We can let go — not as a giving up, but as an opening. An offering. A becoming.

Surrender is a sacred kind of strength, and I'm tottering along its path like a baby deer — unsteady, delicate, and slowly finding my legs.