Surrender: Sankalpa
Sankalpa: Gotta Stop to Be Found
What I’m about to tell you could save your life, really: It is a proven fact that if you are lost in the woods, the absolute most efficient thing you could do to save your life would be to stay put and not try to find your way out.
That’s right, doing nothing is dramatically more beneficial when you’re lost than doing something. In terms of being lost in the woods, walking in circles burns up your energy, puts you at risk of predators, and zaps your hydration. But one can only imagine how challenging that would be— when we are lost we are in a hurry to find our way back from where we came. In this case, it would take our deepest practice of surrender to let go of the urge to fix the situation from the outside, and put our energy into the conscious patience of being found.
Most of us may never need that advice in particular, thank goodness, as we are not actively hiking in the backcountry. But, we all get lost in the forest of samsara and often we make ourselves even more lost as we try to find our way out. In this case, we could also benefit from following the advice of the woods— when you’re lost, stop, get really present and don’t try to find your way back yet, as we are prone to just make the situation worse when we are in that state.
How do you know when you’re lost? Imagine walking in the woods— being lost doesn’t usually happen all of a sudden. It’s something you realize quietly and slowly. Losing our path is a different experience for each of us, some of us get angry, some of us get depressed, others get anxious or worried— and as we mature in our practice we start to recognize these limited states of being, and they help us know when we are off track, out of balance, lost. The feeling of begin lost in a tension is actually a valuable part of our practice that we improve at over time.
So what do we do when we finally realize we’re lost? That’s when we use the advice of the Park Ranger— stay put. Wait, what?! Stay lost? Well, yes and no. It took you a while to get lost, so just because you don’t want to be lost doesn’t take back the last hour of steps. In fact, whatever state of being got you lost is probably still going strong even as you realize you’re lost, so instead of running in that same direction, stop and surrender. Find your footing and stay put for a moment.
This is the nature of surrender, consciously choosing to stop getting lost in your tension. As Babaji says, putting down the hammer you are hitting yourself in the head with. Expanding and releasing, internally, not externally, as we saw in the essay, over and over again, until you are found. That’s the part of surrender that’s hard to swallow, you have to do the work of letting go and expanding, but you don’t know when the park rangers of the heart are going to find you— it could be in one breath, or it could be in 100. That part is not up to us, the only thing we have the power to do is our practice— if we’re not doing it, statistics say that we are bound to burn up our resources running in circles, pushing ourselves further “down into the field of ignorance” as the Sutras put it. If we are doing our practice, though, we conserve our resources, expand our potential, and attract a much higher possibility of being found.