60. Surrender: The Spiritual Practice High Performers Resist Most

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: Welcome to The Authentic Path. I'm your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, Harvard-trained physician and healer. I integrate science and ancestral wisdom to support you in creating the success you desire in all areas of your life. In today's episode, we're exploring one of the most powerful and perhaps unexpected tools that can really help you get into a flow state, be more focused, get more done. And also it can help you feel so much better. And it can help you create something that so many of us are searching for, which is a deep sense of inner peace. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. We're going to talk about a concept today called surrender. And I don't mean that as giving up or being passive or lowering your standards. We're talking about it on a much more expansive and sort of larger, more powerful way. And we're going to explore it through the lens of neuroscience, psychology, and ancestral wisdom. You're going to learn why this practice has been taught across cultures for thousands and thousands of years. And you'll see that surrender is not about giving up. it's not actually even the opposite of power. It may actually be sort of an invitation or a doorway towards our own sense of deeper inner power. So if there's anything in your life right now causing you stress, anxiety, frustration, or fear, you are going to want to stay with me because this episode is for you. Hi friends, back to the Authentic Path. I am so happy you're here. ⁓ I have been about this episode for a very long time ⁓ and I know an incredibly important topic that I am bringing to you today. ⁓ And I sort experienced it with a lot of reverence and a lot of humility because ⁓ for two reasons. I think this topic is incredibly important and creates ⁓ so much peace in folks when they start to practice it. But I also know that it can be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. So what we're talking about today, this concept of surrender, the way I'm going to introduce it to you is share with you what it actually is. I'm going to define it for you. And then we're going to talk about why it matters. And then we're going to explore the concept of surrender. both through the lens of ancient wisdom, but also through the lens of human physiology, like what's happening to our mind and to our body when we practice surrender. And then at the end, I'm going to just share with you some ways that you can start practicing it today. So when I think what surrender is, I think it's really important to start with what it is not. So surrender in the way we're talking about it today does not mean giving up. It does not mean apathy and it does not mean defeat. What it actually is is being open to this concept of divine intervention to a benevolent consciousness working in your favor. And you can call that whatever resonates with you. Call it God, call it the universe, call it super consciousness, whatever resonates with you. Just think about it as this sort of ⁓ energy, benevolent energy that's always working in your favor. Now, I know this can sound incredibly naive. And this is especially true if you've had to overcome some really hard stuff in life, or if you look around you and the world seems like it's on fire. what I'm going to do today is I'm going to introduce you to a concept that you might push back on and that's okay because skepticism is incredibly healthy and it's really, really important for all of us to have healthy skepticism. can tell you right now, I'm one of the biggest skeptics in the world, but skepticism is not the same as cynicism. Cynicism means negativity and just being closed. ⁓ means being curious and being open. So what I'm going to ask you to do as you listen to this episode, ⁓ is not necessarily believe and adopt everything I'm sharing with you, but be open to it and consider it potentially as a working assumption and just start to notice what happens in your body when you do. Because what I have found through my own lived experience and through the lives of all of the folks that I coach and I coach really smart, high performing leaders and high performing professionals, high performing entrepreneurs is that living as if This concept of surrender or benevolent energy working in our favor, living as if that's true, changes so much about how you see the world around you, how you feel inside and how you start to move through life. And it changes all of it for the better. last thing that I want to just briefly introduce here is something that I think is so important because The more and more I sat with and I started to practice surrender, what I started to realize is surrender is actually the ultimate act of courage. So many of us want courage because courage sounds good. We want to be courageous people. as you all have known, if you've ever practiced courage or if you've been listening to this podcast is that courage actually does not feel very good when you're practicing it. It feels horrible ⁓ in order for you to practice courage, That means there has to be fear because there is no courage without fear. If you are doing something and you're not afraid, then you're just taking action. That doesn't mean you're brave or that you're courageous. Courage means you're doing something when there is fear present and that feels really hard. It can feel really uncomfortable. I'll tell you from personal experience, I've had to take a lot of courageous action and it feels so uncomfortable. And the way I think about surrender is I think about it as the ultimate act of courage. And I think about it as this incredibly important act of a spiritual warrior Now, ⁓ I am going to just briefly about I mean when I talk about ⁓ being a spiritual warrior, because I sort of All of us are spiritual warriors. ⁓ And let me tell you why. Because ⁓ when I think about warrior or the concept of being a warrior, again, not through the lens of like school fighting a war, ⁓ but through the lens of consciousness and compassion, what a spiritual warrior does is not fight an external battle. ⁓ but instead fighting an internal battle for self mastery, for radical presence, for a sense of peace, for a sense of connecting to something so much bigger than us for the purpose of giving back, giving back to this world and leaving this world a little bit better than we found it. And in order to do that, a spiritual warrior has to face inner shadows, internal shadows, frustrations, triggers, and they have to face that with courage. Spiritual warrior has to choose to live in alignment with truth with compassion and choose awareness and intentional living instead of living on autopilot If you're listening to this podcast, you're someone that really values intentionality living a life of purpose living a mission-driven life and that requires us to do things that are a little bit out of normal because most people are walking around sort of doing things based on social programming and autopilot and if you're listening to this podcast is because you have started to question all of that because you know that that probably doesn't serve you to become your highest self to live in alignment with your with your sort of I would say highest self or your divine self ⁓ reason why this matters is because every time you as an individual choose to do that choose to face your inner shadows, choose to live in alignment with truth and compassion, choose intentionality instead of being on autopilot. Every time you do that, you are actually elevating and expanding your consciousness. this matters because when you elevate consciousness, instead of reacting from fear, ⁓ what you start to do is you to pause and respond from intention, from purpose. and from a place of love. And what that allows other people to do is it gives other people the safety to do the same thing. And this tiny little act of pausing, of choosing intention, of choosing a conscious action, that tiny little act multiplied across the rest of your day, across all of your days, across all the interactions you're having, you know, across everyone you interact with, it starts to transform not just you, but the people that you interact with. And that is how we transform collective consciousness to one of more compassion, of kindness and love. I think that that is one of the coolest legacies to leave behind, ⁓ legacy of love, of kindness, of compassion. If we can leave the world just a little bit more compassionate, ⁓ than we found it, ⁓ I think is an incredible gift to leave for the generations that come after us. So. ⁓ I say we're going to talk about surrender, talking about it ⁓ as way for us to have an incredibly large impact in the world, not just for us, but for everybody we interact with and for the generations that are going to come after us. OK, so does surrender matter? I mentioned all those things. So that's incredibly powerful stuff already. But surrender also matters because when you practice it, you start to experience a deep level of inner peace and you start to notice that you are becoming someone who is in right relationship with a higher source, with divine, with spirit, with universal consciousness, call it God, whatever you call it that resonates with you. what it does is it reminds you that you are not alone. You are not walking this planet by yourself. You are in fact in partnership with something so much bigger than you. And I think that's so important because there are gonna be many times in our life when we feel tremendous grief. If you to live this life really big and you wanna experience unconditional love and you wanna just give yourself to somebody with love, on the other side of that is grief. And so in order to live life big, ⁓ you to be open to experiencing grief. if you want to... ⁓ set big goals, you have to be willing to feel failure and experience failure. And it's in those tremendous moments of grief and of pain where we can lean into this concept of surrender because we can remember that we are not alone, that we are not facing this by ourselves, that we are in partnership with something so much bigger than us. And I think that that is just an incredible, beautiful thing to always remember. Surrender as this sort of gateway to inner peace because, you know, this is not an excuse as like, you know, just think positive. That's not at all what I mean here. Surrender is a way to know that life gets hard. Part of life is going to be beautiful and lovely and joyful, but the other part of life is going to be hard and sad and there's going to be grief and that's hard, but that's life. And peace is not defined by what's happening external to us. Peace is a state of internal being. And that is what's possible for you when you practice surrender. Because life can get hard, but that doesn't mean that you can't experience peace through the stuff that's hard. I just think about when my mom got really sick and when she passed away many years ago, about three years ago now. ⁓ I remember every time her disease would escalate, she had metastatic cancer. Every time we'd go to the emergency department or get another CAT scan and we'd see that her disease had progressed, I had these deep moments of grief and just feeling so overwhelmingly sad. And then I would come back up again. A couple of days later, we would neutralize again and come back to baseline. Okay, this is what we're dealing with. Let's figure it out. And we had these roller coasters. Eventually I said, man, I cannot, I cannot hold this on my own. This is something that I get to give to someone bigger than me because I can't keep holding this. Instead, what I want to do is just be fully present and do my best to live in a way that I will have no regrets. When my mom transitions over to the other side, I want to have zero regrets. emotional thinking about it because I remember telling myself. that no matter what, I want to make sure that there's nothing left unsaid, that I am with her as much as I can, that I spend so much time with her because I wanted to experience peace. I wanted her to have that level of peace when she passed and I wanted to feel it for myself. And the way that that was possible for me was by practicing surrender. And the other thing that I've realized is that the The root of so much of our suffering is not caused by what's happening external to us. The root of our suffering is caused by our resistance to what's happening externally. And by clinging, by bracing, by having this internal argument with what's happening, that is what causes our suffering. know, Buddhism says that the root of all suffering is an attachment. an attachment to the way that you want things to be. It's like resisting the way things are. And when you practice surrender, you release all of that. You release your resistance. You can let things just be, and then you can now be in full control of what you can actually control. ⁓ ⁓ you to essentially ⁓ in your life in a way that's in a flow state. And I think that that's really powerful. It puts you again in right relationship with divine. And I think that this is maybe a really important frame for a lot of us that have not been in right relationship before with something higher than us. Right relationship means that you remember that you are not alone on this planet, but instead you are in relationship to something bigger than you. And that relationship is incredibly sacred. And when you can honor that sacred relationship that you have to self, to yourself, and to something bigger than you, you can allow yourself to be carried, to flow, allow yourself to access something that I think a lot of us don't realize we have access to, which is this beautiful flow state. It's like ⁓ just water to carry you. ⁓ I what's so interesting is, this paradox because there's a paradox that I have personally experienced which is I believed, I used to believe that I couldn't surrender the things that mattered the most to me because I had to have control over those things because if I had control over those things then I could be 100 % sure that the outcome was going to be exactly what I wanted it to be. I just think that I just have so compassion, so much compassion for that version of myself because this is a paradox that so many ancient traditions point to. The paradox when you surrender, you're going to lose all your power. But that's actually not true. What tends to happen is something so ⁓ to that. ⁓ you surrender, you don't lose power. Instead, you gain access to a power that you never had access to with your controlling. Because if you think about control, control is this sort of fear based attachment. Like you're gripping onto something so tightly because you're so afraid to let it go. Because you think that you are so powerful, so strong that you have to control it. When in reality, as soon as you start to release control, all of a sudden things start to open up for you that were not available to you before. ⁓ pretty powerful practice. So I want to just briefly talk about surrender across wisdom traditions, because this is something that's been practiced for thousands and thousands of years across the globe, across all ancient traditions. Everyone had a practice words for this concept of surrender. In Taoism, there's this word for effortless action or non-forcing the Wu way. And part of Taoism believe that, I just think that this is so beautiful. ⁓ Lao Tzu wrote that the soft and yielding overcomes the hard and the rigid. The soft and the yielding will overcome the hard and the rigid. That's actually very in line with what Martin Luther King taught when he was talking about One of my favorite quotes of his, is, hate does not drive out hate. Only love can do that. And I think about love as the soft and the yielding versus the hard and the rigid, which is hate. And Martin Luther King also said, darkness does not drive out darkness. Again, only light can do that. So light being soft and yielding versus hard and rigid. And in Taoism, they have this saying, which I think is so, so beautiful. If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon and you stand at the top of the Grand Canyon and you look down and you see how incredible that this incredible canyon was formed by water. That's crazy. It was formed by water flowing through it. What you start to understand, and this is actually a Taoism saying, is that water doesn't fight the rock. It moves around it and over centuries it shapes the canyon. When I heard that saying, it just blew my mind because that's exactly what surrender is. You stop fighting, you allow yourself to flow and you realize you're so much more powerful when you flow. That's surrender. And in the ancient yogic traditions, the Bhagavad Gita and in Hindu traditions, there's this word, this saying, Ishvara Pranidhana, surrender to the divine. I think about that a lot because, you know, if you're someone who practices yoga, you may have had a yogic practice, and there's a pose in yoga, it's called the humble warrior, the humble warrior. And what the humble warrior is doing in yoga is essentially a pose of surrender. You are bowing down gently, your head is bowing down gently. and you are in full devotion to your practice. You are surrendering. And so when I think about this concept of surrender and again, being a spiritual warrior, I see how all of these things are sort of interconnected and interwoven and how beautiful it is. This like somatic practice of yoga, reminding you that a humble warrior is surrendering to the divine. I think that's really beautiful. if you're someone who comes from ⁓ ⁓ a Christian background. There's Christian contemplatives who also ⁓ the concept of surrender. ⁓ mean, ⁓ Christianity, I was raised as a Christian and there are so many, ⁓ many sayings in the Bible that are essentially akin to surrender to God's will. ⁓ will be done. ⁓ not my plan, it's God's plan. ⁓ That is essentially surrendering to something higher than you, surrendering to divine providence. And many of you know I have indigenous backgrounds from pre-Hispanic Mexico and El Salvador from Central America and Mexico and many ancestral traditions, not just the ones from Mexico, like Latin America, but also the Lakota, the Yoruba, the Celts, across continents. They all knew the same thing, which was this. that human beings are not the center of the universe. That instead what we are is we are this thread in a vast web, you know, all around us in connection to something so much bigger than us. And we can surrender to Mother Earth, to the river, to the wind, to our ancestors who walked before us. Not because we don't have our own power, but because when we are in right relationship with Mother Earth, with the divine, when we can surrender, we are able to flow. And that requires a deep level of both and being open and trusting. ⁓ ⁓ of to you what surrender is, why it matters. And we talked about surrender through the lens of this ⁓ ancient wisdom and ancestral traditions. And I want to talk a little bit about ⁓ surrender when comes through the lens of human physiology ⁓ and psychology. what is happening to our body and our mind? when we practice surrender. nervous system essentially speaks two languages. we talk surrender, have modes of operating in our nervous system. We have the mode of our sympathetic nervous system, which is sort of fight flight, the fight flight response designed to protect you. And we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest, our ⁓ resting state, okay? ⁓ Also known as theory, our parasympathetic system. So most of us, without knowing it, are living with this chronic activation of our sympathetic nervous system. And chronic activation of our sympathetic nervous system means that we have a ton of stress hormones constantly, know, our body, overwhelming our nervous system. ⁓ we think that that's just baseline. We think that's normal. We think... deadlines, running all over the place, not being like lying down at night and thinking about all the things you didn't get done throughout the day, that that's just normal. Or having to go on vacation, but before you can actually enjoy your vacation, you need a day to reset. Most people think that that's just normal, but I'm to tell you right now, that is because you are likely living with a chronic activation of your sympathetic nervous system. On a physiologic level, what's happening with surrender is that it is moving you from your sympathetic nervous system outside of your fight flight response into your parasympathetic nervous system. So it is sending a signal to your body that you are safe, that you can turn off your stress response that you can just be present. And it's kind of powerful because this is not just words that I'm seeing. You can actually measure this. You can measure this through your heart rate variability, through your respiratory rate, and through your hormone levels. When you allow yourself to surrender and practice surrender over and over again throughout your day, throughout your weeks, start to notice a measurable difference in your physiology and you start to feel better. And course, you know, I, from everything that I've read, I have not seen anything that mystics also had language. You know, they didn't talk about the vagus nerve, for example. they did talk about what happens to the body. ⁓ talk about the body relaxing, softening up, whenever practice surrender. And when think about it through the lens of the mind or psychology, there's actually some really powerful research that's done on surrender in psychology. And they don't call it surrender. ⁓ But in psychology, there's this concept called acceptance and commitment theory, also ⁓ known as the therapy, acceptance commitment therapy. one of the most well-researched therapeutic of the last two decades. And it's built on this core insight that suffering is going to increase when we what is, when we resist, like what I just mentioned earlier. ⁓ And suffering decreases when we accept what is. and commit to acting on what we actually value. That's essentially surrender in clinical language. When we can accept what is and we can surrender to what is, then we can start to take actions on our own values and that's surrender. There's a lot of research also on rumination and control because again, the opposite of surrender is holding onto something so tightly and thinking that you are in control. And studies consistently show that the more we try to control, the more we try to control our thoughts, our feelings, our outcomes, that's actually just resistance. And what we resist will persist, as Carl Jung says. happening our anxiety doesn't become better, it gets worse. And then we start experiencing other mental health issues, including depression. why does all of matter you? Why does this matter for you? Because you don't have to be a mystic to benefit from this concept of surrender. As you can see, you just have to be a human, a human being with a nervous system and a thinking brain and someone who wants to feel better, who wants to access a sense of peace, who wants to turn off their sympathetic nervous system and turn on more frequently the parasympathetic nervous system and access a flow state. So if that is you, then this is for you. ⁓ want to ⁓ shift now ⁓ talk about how we can start to practice surrender. So I'm make this super, super, super easy because I'll tell you right now that the best places to practice surrender is anywhere you have fear. You know, me, just as personal examples, ⁓ anytime I'm gonna speak on a stage that feels big and scary, you know, I... a year ago had the opportunity to speak on a stage with an audience of about 2000 people. And that's the biggest stage I've spoken on. And it was a type of stage where there's a bunch of bright lights on you. There's these huge screens behind you that are essentially like recording you live so that the people way in the back can see you. And you can't really see the audience because the lights are so bright. I was super nervous. I was like, okay, this sounds, this feels really scary. And so I practiced surrender. And so I'm going to just share with you how you can start to practice it, but you can practice it anywhere when there's something scary, when you have a big goal that you want to achieve and you're not exactly sure how to do it, but you know, you want to do it. ⁓ maybe you've recently been diagnosed with something, maybe a chronic illness, maybe cancer, ⁓ it feels like a lot for you to carry. These are all things that you can surrender to something bigger than you. So a simple practice that you can take with you is this. Next time that you feel fear in whatever way it shows up, maybe it shows up fear, as like actual fear. Maybe it shows up as anxiety, overwhelm. It might show up as nervousness, some discomfort in your stomach, a trigger, anger, however it shows up for you. What I want you to do is just pause. And this is what I do. I place my feet flat on the ground because I want to feel grounded and connected to the earth. And then I place my hands on my heart and I leave my shoulders nice and open with my heart open. And I put my hands on my heart and my head up nice and tall connected to divine. And I say out loud what I'm experiencing. I say, OK, I notice the fear of this or this or this, whatever it is. I notice the feeling of this. I notice I'm afraid of this outcome, I'm afraid of this control and I cannot carry this on my own. And so then you can offer it up. So you pause, stand with your feet flat on the ground, name what you're experiencing and then offer it up to whatever you call your higher power, divine source, the universe, consciousness, higher consciousness. And you can just say, okay, I surrender this to you. And I ask, for whatever's in my highest and greatest good to be created. I release this to you and I ask for whatever's in my highest and greatest good. That's it. That's all you have to do. And all you need to do after that is just ask to be supported, ask to be guided. I ask for peace. I ask for my highest outcomes. I ask for health. doctor's hands that are going to treat me to come from love and to be to be ready to take care of me, whatever it is you wanna ask for, you have the capacity to ask for it. And that's all. Surrender doesn't have to be something super complicated. All you need to do is be able to notice when you're experiencing a discomfort, be able to name it and offer it up to something bigger than you and allow yourself to be moved. And again, I do this for everything. For goals that I'm setting in life, I do this for something that feels scary. Every time I'm transforming and going through a big growth phase, I practice surrender and that is what's available to you. So if you notice here, this is a concept that's been practiced for thousands and thousands of years across centuries and it's something that's available to you that is so simple and yet so effective and so powerful. But again, don't take my word for it. Go out and practice it on your own and see what's possible for you. All right, sweet friends, I'll see you next time. Adios.