Surrender Isn’t Giving Up... It’s Giving into Something Greater

I’ve been wrestling with the idea—and practice—of surrender, ever since I read Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment a few years ago.

It is a book about letting go, but not in the way people usually mean. It’s about surrendering not just your big plans and the forced ambitions, but also the small, constant reflexes you probably have to shape, direct, and control every detail of your life.

Singer describes a kind of radical participation in life… one in which you stop insisting that your preferences are right, and start listening for what life is actually trying to do through you.

One of the clearest illustrations comes early in the book when he describes writing a college paper. He had been delaying it, unsure of what to say, and then suddenly he just sat down and began typing. Not from effort, but from flow. The words poured out… not because he prepared, but because he got out of the way.

That moment revealed a difference between logical thought and creative inspiration. He says, “It came from a much deeper place… in total silence, with no effort or commotion.” It’s that deeper place that surrender lets you access. It’s a deeper place that’s beneath your thinking.

Singer keeps coming back to this idea: that we are not here to control life, but to work with it. Most of us, he says, only surrender to life when it suits us. If a job offer aligns with what we wanted anyway, we say yes. If a door opens where we hoped one might, we walk through. But that’s not surrender. That’s preference.

Real surrender happens when life offers you something your mind didn’t ask for, and you say yes anyway. You stop trying to tell life what to do, and start asking, What is life trying to tell me?

So… what is life trying to tell me?

I see numerous signs that life is trying to get me to change course. It wanted me to stop taking on new clients for my social media ghostwriting practice. It wanted me to stop trying to keep up with the algorithm changes on LinkedIn. These days, I’m writing more on Substack, where I have 2,000 subscribers, than on LinkedIn, where I have over 500,000.

It wants me to stop trusting my head more than my heart.

It wants me to stop intellectualizing life, and instead to simply experience it.

And yet, when I recently published a two-part fictional short story (here and here), the response from readers was almost perfect silence. I use my heart, and no one cares; I use my head, and people respond. This is complicated shit, this surrender experiment.

While I know bits and pieces of what life is trying to tell me, I lack enough of an understanding that I can drop my outdated impulses and simply surrender into the flow. Things are still so hazy that “surrender” requires me to keep formulating ideas and new plans. That doesn’t feel like surrender; it feels like an intentional pivot.

The bottom line is that surrender is still a fascinating concept to me, but not yet a living practice.

At this point, you may have guessed that my intention in this piece isn’t to teach you anything. It’s to open the door so that perhaps you may be willing and able to teach me. If that’s selfish, so be it. (I hope you don’t mind.)

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