In every serious spiritual practice, there comes a moment when everything shifts. The work no longer centers on striving or discipline but on resting, opening, and allowing intention larger than the self to move through one's being. Yet for many, this surrender provokes not relief but fear. The emotional body tenses, the self resists.
We live in contraction. Jaws clenched, breath held, hands tightening around the rope of control. We reach for substances, chase achievements, cling to whatever reassures us: I must hold on, or I won't be safe. I won't be valued. I won't be enough. This is what the Buddha called upadana—the grasping that perpetuates suffering.
And yet, paradox arises.
To transcend the self, one must first have a self to transcend. A healthy, integrated sense of identity is not the enemy of awakening but its foundation. As the old Zen saying goes: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. We must embody our individuality before we can discover what lies beyond it. The question becomes not whether we have an ego, but how we hold it lightly enough to ask: What is being asked of me now?
The deeper current of awakening points us toward a natural state in which awareness flows without interference, where action arises from the whole rather than the narrow will of "I." It is the recognition of timeless presence within ordinary life, the settling of awareness into itself while the world continues to unfold. Freedom does not come from effortful control but from loosening the hold that sustains the illusion of separateness.
But here lies the difficulty: surrender cannot be forced. Like falling asleep, the harder we try, the more it slips away. We can cultivate conditions—steady attention, integrated selfhood, committed practice—but the crossing happens by grace. Effort carries us to the threshold. Surrender carries us across.
And what do we discover on the other side? That which we most feared losing was never separate from what we are.
Liberation is not the annihilation of the self but the softening of our hold on it. The rope we clung to for safety was never keeping us alive; it was binding us. And when at last the hand opens, we discover the paradox: what we were grasping to preserve was never apart from what we sought.
What remains is not loss, but the spacious ground of being itself:
Timeless, vast, already whole.
Emergence with Rachel Weissman is a weekly exploration of the interconnections between consciousness, technology, and planetary flourishing.
If you find this writing valuable, leave a heart ❤️, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
You can't skip the preparation, but you also can't force the breakthrough. It makes me wonder: are there ways we can sense when to let go?
Perhaps there's a kind of relational coherence required in surrender too? In your piece on the held breath, the archer waits patiently for such alignment before choosing the moment of release: inner practice meeting outer conditions. Maybe surrender is more like fruit dropping from a tree - still requiring relational coherence (the right conditions for ripening), but the release itself is a fundamentally different mechanism. The archer decides 'now I let go' while the fruit simply stops clinging when ripe.
Although these represent two different types of agency (one where you act with patience, one where you stop acting), the same intuitive awareness of relational coherence can guide us in both. Maybe that is how we sense when it’s time.