Hello everyone! It has been awhile since I’ve posted anything. Sorry about that. Hopefully this is worth the wait.
Trying to decide what to start out again with was difficult, you guys have nominated some amazing people that I can’t wait to interview. That being said I am currently obsessed with the idea of surrendering, so I wanted to share what I’ve found and why.
To help you understand why this is such an important topic to me at the moment I need to tell you a little bit about what has been happening.
I’m your typical Type A control freak. During my divorce I put my emotions aside and made a checklist of all the things I needed to do to provide for my family. I’m really not into feelings and am big on setting goals, making plans, and working hard to make things happen. This cartoon pretty much sums me up:
Now knowing this…let me explain to you how my summer has been.
Almost all of my siblings have moved out of state. I had the feeling to quit my job, which I’ve been working towards for years, and become a full time mom. A relationship that means the world to me ended and dealing with that has really sucked. I have no idea what next week looks like, let alone the rest of the year.
I put some of the blame on this on an amazing book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. I had been trying to embrace uncertainty since it gives me tons of anxiety and this seemed like a great book to help me. It is seriously amazing, highly recommend.
So the energy had been thrown out to the universe that I wanted to figure out how to let go of control so the universe delivered quickly. So as I’m learning the art of surrender I figured I should learn more about it.
When looking into this concept of surrender most of what I run into is information and guidance from a Zen, Buddhist, standpoint. Makes total sense! Meditation and yoga has been focused on a lot as a way to let go. I’ll talk about this a bit but I don’t know a lot about it so if any listeners out there know more or someone who does I would love to chat with them sometime so reach out on my website.
The other focus is on religion and surrendering to God and/or Christ. This is the path I’ve worked with mostly and a lot of behavioral studies touch on this path in particular and the psychological effects it has on those that practice it.
A couple of the behavioral studies I read mentioned The Surrender Scale, also known as the Reinert S Scale. It was originally used in a study on alcoholics and how surrendering effected their recovery. By some miracle I found the PDF for it so you can actually take the assessment for free if you’re curious. Keep in mind that the studies that used this scale were testing the effectiveness of surrendering to God, not just trying to surrender in general.
What I find super interesting is that in every study on surrendering to God/Universe/Higher Power it always helped! Reducing stress in pregnant women, increasing addiction recovery success rate, and more. But WHY does it work? I do believe in a higher power but there has to be a reason. Also keep in mind that in these studies the ones that “surrendered” but didn’t take the actions that everyone else was didn’t have a decrease in stress or success in addiction recovery so you still have to do something.
I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to why it works…it could be as simple and surrendering allows a higher power to help you. It could be a huge comfort to your brain that you’re not trying to figure it out alone. I have no idea so I’m going to try to find out. Any ideas?
Kaili Speaks 