Episode Transcript
Brian Hyman (00:00)
I wanted to hopefully inspire you to think a little deeper when you read something like you mentioned surrender or acceptance. So when you read about something like that, think about it. Surrender is a great one. Ishvara pranadana is the Sanskrit term where we surrender to God, to a higher power. It's the same as 12 step work to me personally. The idea is you're going to turn your life and your will over to the care of a higher power.
You better have an idea what that higher power is and you're going to surrender. That's a third step. We turn our life and our will over to the care of God. That's huge. That's a big decision to make. We made a decision to turn our life and our will over to the pair. That's the same thing we're doing with with surrender in the yoga tradition is who's in charge here? Is it you? Are you in charge of the universe? Did you create everything? Are you willing to believe that maybe there's a force and energy? There's something else out in the world that has maybe a better idea of
how everything should work, not just for today, but through all time. Are you willing to maybe think that the way the sun rises and sets, the way the waves come and go, the seasons come and go, maybe something, there's something there. Can you surrender to that idea that today you don't have all the answers, but maybe someone or someone else does? And this leads into humility. There's a lot of humility that when we realize, yeah, you know what? Yeah, I can surrender.
I didn't create the universe. don't know how to make the waves come and go. I can't tell the sun when to rise or fall. I can surrender the idea that I have any kind of power to do that. Now I have power within my own means. I don't have that kind of power. So can definitely surrender that there's a higher power, there's a higher force working here. Even gravity, know, for those who, from a secular perspective, if you hold a pencil up and you open your hand, the pencil will fall.
You can't control gravity. So even gravity is a higher power that we have to surrender to. So even those who have a hard time surrendering, I see this a lot with people who they can't surrender their addiction, the alcohol, whatever, the drugs, the sex, the food, the shopping, the money, the gambling. There's so many addictions, but they can't surrender. At some point, we have to make that connection that it's not that it's surrendering a specific thing.
It's getting familiar with the idea of just let go. Just let go for today. Just do your best to just turn it over. Just see if you can just release some of the attachment to it. And then the surrender begins. It's really neat because when you start to get into this, some people, it's philosophy. For some people, it's psychology. For me, it's just a way of being, to live at the surface.
If you've come this far as a yogi, as someone in recovery to still live at the surface, I think it's doing a disservice. We talked a lot about being a service. That's disservice to yourself. We're here to live, to thrive, to grow, to be our best, which means we probably have to look a little deeper into our feelings and emotions and qualities and concepts and especially principles. Like what does surrender look like for you today? What does it look like? And to really sit with that, to meditate on that.
Surrendering for me personally, just briefly, I surrendered alcohol more than 16 years ago. So that's not a problem for me today. I'm not going to drink today. I surrendered that. What I have to surrender today is maybe some financial situations. I'll have to surrender that. So my idea of surrender looks different today. It's not substance. It's more of maybe a fear. Maybe it's an insecurity. Maybe I'll have to surrender that. Maybe I have a huge
to do list today. So I have to just surrender that I can only do what I can do today. I'll just do the best I can. Whatever I can't do today, I'll just try to do tomorrow. So I'll surrender that. So there's no end to the processing and the way that we can work with these principles.
