I Surrender All

I have been practicing yoga for over 25 years now. As time marches on, my practice has evolved, devolved and reinvented itself. That’s part of the beauty of yoga, there isn’t one right path. People come to yoga for different reasons and to receive different gifts. One main reason why I tried it in the first place was because it was exotic. Back in the late 1980’s, yoga wasn’t common place like it is today. You didn’t have a choice in studios-if you could find one. I was fortunate my local community school offered a class in yoga-not hatha or yin or vinyassa or Bikram or anasura or any of the different varieties. It was down and dirty yoga, in the school gym. Not a studio, not anything special. It was the instructor and the students.


I gained more than just poses from that class, I learned to connect my mind and body and develop awareness. For a very long time, I was completely disconnected. My brain did one thing, my body did something else and ego got in the middle all the time. As a result of savasana, I began to long for a spiritual discipline. I began to pray the Rosary (and yes, Episcopalians do). I chanted and om’ed my way through life. There were some pretty profound changes. I still wasn’t ready for complete surrender, however. Making that complete correlation between mind-body-spirit is hard work and I wasn’t ready for ishvara-pradnidhana yet. I didn’t look to what I was eating (or not eating) as part of my practice. In other words, I dealt with a lot of disordered eating: binge and starvation, yo-yo dieting, crazy diets, and never once did things stick. It was about appearance and physicality. I looked at my yoga as the physical (asanas) and the spiritual but not the intertwining of everything-mind, body, spirit.

I wasn’t ready to surrender all. Yoga, Christ, anything.

The events of this past year have led me on a path where I needed to get down to the basics of surrender. I needed to be broken down to be made whole again. The concept of ishvara-pradnidhana defined by guru Shyam Mehta is:



the final act of surrender when you say to God: "From now on, I give You my body, my mind and my heart, to do with as you please. Let me not influence what they do."It is also every action that you do in order to prepare your mind for giving away your body, mind and heart to Him.



It’s the same as when someone accepts Christ into their hearts-you are giving your power to a higher being.

I surrender all.

I have been dealing with terrible back pain off and on for years. Its musco-skeletal, and its centered in my upper back. For the past six weeks, it has been excruciating. Every night I lay on the sofa, stretching out to try to relieve it. Nothing worked-in spite of using a heating pad, my massage cushion…everything. I visited a chiropractor who advised me that I had the tightest upper back she had ever seen, despite being a practicing yogi. The adjustment helped, but she suggested that I seek out other treatments because this was muscle based, and she couldn’t adjust it away. I talked to my friend who is a holistic healer, and she suggested that I invest in myself.

Huh?

She reminded me of the old adage-garbage in = garbage out. When you fill yourself with garbage-food, thoughts, activities-you will produce garbage. I have been filling myself with garbage, as a way to avoid surrender. This all came to a head with the back pain. I couldn’t do anything on my own to relieve it, so I had to surrender and trust that God would heal it.

And you know what? It kinda worked. I’m not saying that the pain is entirely gone, but there is a level of comfort. If its psychosomatic, that’s ok because I can do more now than I was able to a few weeks ago. I began to look at what else I was stuffing away in my life, and made a list. All those emotions that I tried to hide instead of surrendering them to my Higher Power have created garbage. I had been polluting myself.

By making poor choices to fuel my body, I gained extra weight. I surrender.

By not filling my cup, I suffer from burnout. I surrender.

By not exercising and moving more, my muscles are tight. I surrender.

By not keeping up with the housework, I spend all weekend cleaning. I surrender.

By not practicing my spiritual disciple, I am stressed. I surrender.

By not resting when I needed to, I am tired. I surrender.

By not focusing on my priorities, I lost sight of them. I surrender.

By not listening to my body, mind and soul, I hurt. I surrender.

I surrender all.