What is your relationship with surrender? What is your experience when you land on the surrender square in the game of your life? Do you embrace the opportunity to let go? Or resist it with every fiber of your being? Can you drop into the vast emptiness that surrender brings? Or do you exhaust every other possible option, leaving claw marks on your way down?
When I was younger, surrender was not part of my vocabulary. I associated surrender with things like weakness and depression. I saw it only as a last resort. I certainly didn’t consider it as part of my creative process.
I also experienced surrender as a kind of cathartic calm that came after an emotional purge. In these instances, I didn’t consciously choose to surrender. It just sort of happened to me. I’d collapse into an emotion like rage, for example, and let it take over my body, exploding and releasing through me, similar to a lover. Then I’d lay for a few moments completely vacant on the floor, until I’d wake up and wonder what had possessed me. That’s what it felt like – like I had given myself to something outside myself.
Sex quickly became my favorite way to surrender. Because I could collapse into another human being. I didn’t see it as collapsing. I saw it as connecting. I saw surrender as a way of letting go of control rather than responsibility for myself. I didn’t understand why I’d become more and more insecure and child-like as I “surrendered” myself to my relationships.
I didn’t realize that collapsing is not the same as surrendering-that when I collapse, I actually check out and lose consciousness. In this way, sex was less connecting and more of a narcissistic emotional purge, similar to a temper tantrum.
Most heat-of the- moment, hormonally driven sex is nothing more than this. Your root chakra is blown open by a dick or a dildo, which allows you to touch into suppressed emotions you’ve unknowingly held there for lifetimes. Usually a good mix of unconscious terror, shame, rage and grief. You have an emotional purge and call it ecstasy. And it is! And it isn’t. Or it’s so much more. Which is why you collapse and check out. ‘Cause it’s too much to bear. At least for a child. A child can only have temper tantrums and feel the relief after.
Although tantrums can quiet your inner child, they can not help you to integrate your experience. Similarly, deeper sex requires that you not collapse into your child and your child-like responses. Because in order to integrate deep sexual experiences and the sublime gifts often held within heavy hitter emotions like terror and shame your Woman with a capital W must be present. When we learn to surrender as Woman, our experience becomes more expansive than vacuous. We let go and hold everything simultaneously, resting in the mid point of this dynamic tension.
When I do yoni work with women, they often experience strong unexpected emotions. The tendency is to clench, to not feel the pain. When this happens, I remind them to soften- to not just tolerate, but drop into and even rest in their experience-to consciously choose to surrender.
The moment we choose something, it becomes our ally.
Surrender has been my longest learning curve and my single most important initiatory gate into womanhood. I now understand surrender as a place of strength within me that does not need to control or collapse into my experience. Although it’s taken all of my fifty years to become an above average surrenderer at best, I don’t believe age or hard life experience is necessary to learn this feminine art.
In the days of priestess mystery schools, surrender was the first capacity a woman had to master before she could learn the other arts. Because without it, she can not open to her full feminine receptivity nor can she learn to wield the power of her desire, nor experience the full range of her sexual and creative expression.
Why do you think a woman in a state of deep sexual surrender is such a coveted thing of beauty? Surrender is a primary feminine power.
If you are ready to be initiated into a deeper feminine experience and expression, go to my website www.SexualMystery.com and sign up for my Women’s Sexual Mystery School. If you can’t join us this round, get on my email list and receive 3 tips to turn on your feminine sexual super powers. And keep in touch-I’d LOVE to hear from you!
Love and Shakti, Lisa
