Surrender

To the military and in common parlance, "surrender" means you have been defeated and have to give up. In spiritual practice it means to let go and to allow something other than our usual selves to guide us. The difference between giving up and letting go is huge. Letting go is of course all about trust. Trusting in something to look after us, or that the process is benign. Such trust and surrender is a feature of the higher chakras in the body. The first three chakras (the base, the sexual and the belly) are mostly to do with survival in the world. To do that in evolutionary terms it is better to fight, never surrender and not trust anyone or anything very much. Moving up the body, the heart, as usual is the transformer to higher states and connections to others, nature, the universe and the divine. For all of these we have to let go of some control, we have to allow in the other or even immerse ourselves in it. The raindrop surrenders to the ocean.