“The more you surrender, the more you are able to surrender. The mind grows stronger in its capacity to surrender.”

Surrender is a great challenge. It’s a challenge that goes against the whole tide of conditioning. When you are ready to meet this challenge, you are finished with complaining about why and them and me and should have and could have.

People sometimes have an infantile idea that spiritual life is about learning something, after which you get a good grade, a good evaluation, and this proves you are very good. You graduate into the spiritual realm.

True spiritual life is the realization of the endless totality of being as discovered in this moment, here and now, in every circumstance. Every moment of every day is a vehicle for that realization. Good times are beautiful, pleasant vehicles. Bad times are horrible, unpleasant vehicles. Still, all is the vehicle for self-realization and always another opportunity for surrender.

Surrender means to surrender all of your suffering. Surrender all your ideas of not now, shouldn’t be, not me, can’t be, too simple. Surrender all of your impulses to turn away from surrender.

Our clinging and struggling for control give rise to many impulses to protect, to fight, to pretend, to deny, dismiss, trivialize, and indulge. Some impulses are extremely strong. Some of them are biochemical. Some have been practiced and worshipped.

In the surrender to the crucifixion of a moment, there is resurrection. As soon as there is total surrender, you discover that when everything is lost, everything is found. The very peace and bliss that you have unsuccessfully been seeking in habitual, harmful activities is realized to be here.

Deeper than our impulses to control is the call to simply be. In surrender to being, an even deeper surrender is revealed. The more you surrender, the more you are able to surrender. The mind grows stronger in its capacity to surrender.

The invitation to surrender to yourself is absolutely radical, and yet surrender is absolutely effortless. You can surrender, right now. You can take full responsibility for the recognition of what is already unconditionally at peace within you right now. Nothing is needed from the past, the present, or the future to augment that peace. You can accept the responsibility to be true to that—not as a theory, an abstraction, or more mental punishment. Simply surrender the mind to peace. The possibility of surrender can be found in whatever emotion, circumstance, fear, or hope is appearing, without resorting to the habitual pattern of making war with it.

Right now is the opportunity to stop and tell the truth about the flame of consciousness that is the essence of your being. To choose to deny it is to suffer. To choose to surrender to it is the end of all unnecessary suffering. When you meet yourself, when you love yourself, when you recognize that this flame of truth that you love is yourself, you have no need to search for love or to try and extract love. You are fulfilled.

It is my belief that if you are reading this, you already have a deep intention to be free. It is this intention that calls you home. I am here to support the return of your individual consciousness to the ocean of consciousness that it truly is.

What if, in this moment, just as an experiment and in the spirit of self-inquiry, you put aside everything you have learned about who you are—including all of your hopes and fears of who that might be—and open your mind to discover the truth of who you are. It is very simple. That truth is always here. My invitation is to surrender all movement of your mind away from truth so that you can discover directly, for yourself, this jewel that is alive within you.

Join Gangaji on Sunday December 6 at 11 AM PST for an online conversation about finding a deeper surrender. Learn more