The Pathway of Surrender

On the joy and peace of letting go.

Image: Navy Seals “Drown-proofing,” defense.gov

Of the many intriguing spiritualities sprung from the fertile mind of George RR Martin in his fantasy epic Game of Thrones, I find the Drowned God of the Iron Islanders to be the most fascinating. As sea-faring people, their lives revolve around the ocean, which both nurtures and chastises. It is their teacher, their parent, and the focus of their lives. Their primary religious rite consists of submitting to drowning by their high priest Aeron Damphair, who then proceeds to resurrect the devotee. 

Their motto is “That which is dead can never die but rises again, harder and stronger." In one scene, a young acolyte does not (understandably) want to be drowned.” With his head held firmly under the water, Damphair says to him, “It does no good to struggle.” 

In a more reality-based example, during the aptly named “Hell Week,” tryouts for the Navy Seals endure an exercise known as “Drown-proofing.” To pass the test, one need only jump into a nine-foot-deep pool with hands and feet bound and survive for five minutes. As it’s impossible to keep your head above water with your appendages tied, a different strategy is called for. The first step is to not panic, as panicking consumes oxygen. The second is to allow yourself to sink to the bottom, kick up to the surface to refill the lungs and repeat and repeat. 

The overall idea here is well-known but hard to put into practice. Along the lines of Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, there are things we can have some direct effect on and (many) others that we cannot. Confusing these two realities tends to result in emotional distress and confusion. The great trick, when one has determined that a particular reality is unchangeable, is to fully submit to that reality—to recognize it, acknowledge it, and prepare to endure it. The Seals know what is expected of them, and the goal is at least clear, but what if we don’t even know why we have been thrust into a terrible challenge? What recourse do we have? 

Seeing the wisdom at work

Part of the solution is coming to the realization that there is a force at work that is orchestrating how life unfolds for us. By force, I don’t mean atomic structures and immutable laws of physics but rather the force behind the forces, a wisdom that is manifest throughout creation. For instance, when I cut my finger, a cascade of chemical and biological processes is set in motion, though not by me. I can glare at my bloody finger, urging it to clot until the cows come home, but have exactly zero control over (or even understanding of) the process by which it happens. Something else is doing it, something with a remarkable intelligence. 

Many great thinkers have encouraged us to try to become more aware of this power that resides in between, underneath, or behind conscious thought and is accessed through stillness. Eckhart Tolle suggested, “Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.” Many meditative practices train us to note the quiet field of consciousness that underlies all of our thinking—in the space between the thoughts. 

When we become more adept at it, we can more easily lean into the lack of control that we all fear and allow ourselves to sink, knowing that we will once again rise. We can have confidence in the system, which requires a certain amount of descent (and sometimes the feeling that we may drown). Some may actually drown, and though it’s counterintuitive, maybe even that’s okay—just a part of the process.

In today’s day and age, we are taught that pain, especially of the emotional variety, is bad—something shameful and indicative of some internal deficiency. There is a tendency to want to medicate it away or at least to create effective distractions from it. It is well known that the decision to avoid the confrontation only delays the inevitable as the pain will unexpectedly surface time and again in other areas of our lives. Much better to deal with it head-on.

In his book “Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, David Hawkins maps out a system to do just that:

Eventually, you will discover your inner self. You always unconsciously knew it was there. When you come upon it you will understand what the great sages of history were trying to convey. You will understand it because Truth is self-evident and within your own self.

Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind, and everyone has experienced it on occasion. 

What prevents us from living this way? Why are panic and flailing so often reactions to unpleasant circumstances? Partly, it's the result of fear, but more than that, it’s the unwillingness to accept the reality of fear. The moment of letting go, the decision to take the pain straight on the nose, is a step into a much larger (and much happier) world.

When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.

― Pema Chödrön