Extra Credit: 'Warrior You'!
The Power of Surrender:
Transforming Tension into Spiritual Fuel
Note: This Extra Credit essay looks a little deeper into the idea of surrendering our tensions as a means of growth. This concept was covered in the primary essay, but perhaps this deeper dive will inspire you to try it more in your own life.
When something isn’t going our way, our natural instinct is to ‘fix’ it, that is, to change our external circumstances in order to uplift our internal experience. As Muktananda writes, ‘from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, we spend our days pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.’ But to the yogi, ‘pursuing pleasure’ leads to attachment— the idea that we can’t be happy without a certain object or experience, blinding us to the Bliss in our hearts. And ‘avoiding pain’ tends to lead to aversion, the idea that something external could ‘take away’ our bliss, causing us endless anxiety. (Yoga Sutra 2.7, “The seed of attachment is pleasure”. Yoga Sutra 2.8, “The seed of Aversion is Pain.”) The Sutras summarize this in saying that, ‘A Yogi neither accepts, nor rejects’— that is, to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls, the Sutras recommend that a yogi neither pursues pleasure nor avoids pain. But what else is there?
In his book, Spiritual Practice, Shambhavanda tells us about a third option,
“What students normally do is… try to change things externally so they don’t feel bad. It is much better to learn how to work inside and to get free of the need to react. Manipulating the world outside of you doesn’t solve anything. What does resolve your difficulties is that you can change your state of being through an inner practice and meditative discipline.”
Essentially the practice of meditation will teach us this third option to ‘fixing’ our life. As Babaji tells us, this third option is ‘learning to work inside’ in order to ‘change our state of being’, instead of spending our energy trying to avoid the challenges, or distract ourselves from it. This ‘internal work’ is the foundation of yoga, and is the experience being described by the term ‘Surrender.’
To most people, the word ‘Surrender’ denotes ‘failure’, like waving a white flag to indicate that you ‘give up’. But from the yogic perspective, what we are ‘giving up’ when we surrender is our own tension, our own limitations. And this ‘letting go’ is actually incredibly challenging, and takes alot of practice— it’s not as easy as just waving a handkerchief. Because what we are letting go of, or giving up if you will, are deeply held attachments and aversions— the things we were talking about earlier.
“Rudi referred to the challenges of life as fuel--fuel to burn, fuel to heat up this inner purification that takes place when you begin a spiritual practice.” Shambhavananda writes, “[Rudi] said our tensions create natural resources. We have mountains of fuel inside to use and the way one burns these tensions (this fuel) is through the process of surrender. Surrender means not rejecting, but releasing, our tensions, and this process creates a chemistry… We are able to create such a tremendous flow and heat that we are performing a massive purification… The difficult things in our lives hold the greatest potential because they symbolize a big chunk of locked up energy in our bodies and nervous systems. We don’t have to go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds us, but we have to know how to handle it when it shows up.”
To the yogi, agitations are not the enemy, they are fuel, they are the manifestations of an inner limiting condition— an “energetic knot” so to speak. A place where energy is stuck. If you push it away, distract yourself, or revel in it, you only make the knot tighter. Only through our practice can we untie this knot, and as Babaji says, release the energy that is bound up within it.
This energy released is what fuels our spiritual growth, and the true warrior is simply one who is committed to this process. It is not an external fight, it is an internal one. We are not battling anyone or anything, we are battling against our own attachments and aversions. Our sword is not made of metal, but of inner focus, and we don’t swing it with our hands, we swing it with our breath.
We’ve all heard of Warrior One and Warrior Two, but what is ‘Warrior You’? What is your experience of working deeper inside, and igniting this spiritual fire? Try it, and find out for yourself. Feel the inner strength it takes to breathe into an inner knot of tension in the midst of your life. Feel the heat of ‘burning’ up your limitations through your practice, purifying from the inside out— without necessarily lifting a [physical] finger.
Tell us about it below, and be prepared to guide others through that same work just like it were a yoga posture called “warrior you”— because this is indeed the work we are teaching.