Living in a body with RA has taught me a lot about the limits of force and the usefulness of surrender.
I used to think surrender meant losing, failure, quitting, a total collapse of will and effort… something to be avoided at all costs. Now I see surrender as an active process of rebalancing power that’s more like a truce, a negotiation, a compromise.
Surrender is the active strategy of living in relationship.
It becomes useful when you find yourself confronting something powerful, when fighting becomes useless. Instead, you renegotiate your relationship and advance by flowing with, and modifying the greater power in new, often surprising, directions.
You can surrender to the flow of water to help you swim faster. You can surrender to the almighty pull of gravity and let it roll you from your lying on your back, up to sit (like we did in a recent Feldi lesson). You can also surrender to the ebb and flow of life's trials and find surprising and effective ways of negotiating its challenges.
Some things we can, and need to fight. Others, we can only surrender to and flow with, and by doing so, modify. We need to have both strategies in our toolbox for addressing life’s challenges.