How Can Surrender and Acceptance Reduce Stress?

Surrender and Acceptance are Stress Reducers

SURRENDER. In our culture this word is loaded with negative connotations, such as giving up, wimping out, being weak, unable to cut it. However, surrender in a psycho spiritual sense is a deep feeling of letting go of the reactive struggle and conflict we feel when faced with something we do not want or like. These days we have plenty to not like so developing the ability to let go can help us a lot!

Release Inner Conflict
Surrender is about accepting what is in the moment, not fighting it – accepting the reality even as we seek to change it. In essence it is giving up the internal conflict we feel when things are not the way we wish them to be. This creates disruptions in our mind and bodies that deplete our energy.

Surrender, as in a release of inner reactive turmoil, helps to bring our hearts into coherence through the inner peace and calm it generates. We surrender when we let go of wanting, yearning, wishing, needing things to be different NOW.

Sometimes we become stuck and even paralyzed by these feelings. Since our energy reflects our inner state, it is stuck, paralyzed, not moving, so it holds us in place rather than moving freely so it can be channeled in a stronger, more positive direction.

When our focus is on what is missing from our lives, we create more of what we feel we don’t have. We create more of what is missing. We keep ourselves stuck in our anger and resentment.

Move Beyond Resistance
Developing an attitude of acceptance – acceptance of the way things ARE – enables us to move beyond patterns of resistance and bring peace to our heart. Acceptance does not mean that something or someone is right or wrong. Acceptance is acknowledging things just the way they are now. It’s just allowing them to be, releasing our need to judge. Judgments tear at our energy and do us much more harm than the person, place or thing that we are judging.

Anything can be viewed from many perspectives. Broadening your perspective can help move you toward acceptance, letting go and a state of peace rather than staying in a state of anger, fear, frustration, guilt or any other low vibration or emotion. It’s easy to get stuck in our view of a situation and stay with it persistently because of our need to be right.

The next time you find yourself pushing against something, complaining, blaming or resisting, try to accept the situation as is. Move yourself into a FEELING state, if necessary: imagine what it would feel like to be in a place of acceptance. As you do so, watch your resistance melt away. Note how you feel as a result.

It can be hard to just move into acceptance. So if using imagination does not work easily, you may want to use something like EFT (tapping method) or one of the techniques in our recording Letting Go, https://bit.ly/3b1t2Ib , to release the angst that can then allow you to shift to acceptance.

Once we move into acceptance we have energy to move more proactively, with strength in a direction that is more life enhancing. We can rest in stillness and open to inspiration and intuition that will help us to know the the next best step for ourselves.