Surrender As Performance Power

Endurance sport is hard! Is that not why we do it?

Life is hard, is that not why we are living it?

How hard is it really though? Don’t use your mind to answer that question or we will be pulled into a cyclone of past and future based regression and projectional thinking.

How do we define challenge and difficulty?

How we react to it is the measure of it, in other words, it’s about as hard as we think it is.

We make the rod for our own backs both in sport and in life because we try to navigate the challenge with thinking and reaction.

Human beings are lousy at surrender, whenever we talk about surrender people immediately think of giving up. Surrender is not giving up.

In an athletic context and in any life challenge, I am talking about the exact opposite. The surrender is actually the strength and the resilience that we search for in the anxiety of our search for toughness.

What we are actually searching for is a sense of wholeness.

There is no overcoming yourself, that’s a delusion.

Technology is not an answer for a lacking sense of self. Nothing external can fill that void, it takes a willingness to surrender to the deeper aspects of yourself to begin to fill that void.

Our unwillingness to surrender ourselves to the challenge and the task only mirrors what is happening inside.

You either become one with the challenge, or you stand apart from it.

If you stand apart from it, you will be forever trying to employ objective tools to overcome a subjective experience.

What is my key piece of advice for an athlete?

An object is no substitute for a subject. In other words, Trust yourself!

Whilever we continue the search for the answer outside, we are in resistance to the challenge, this is largely unconscious in a lot of athletes.

We are in resistance because we are never happy with our current condition, so there is always a projected goal that dissociates us from the task itself, it’s always out there.

You don’t have to be happy with where you are at, but you do have to stay with it, anything else is fools foil.

In a strange way, what the challenge calls for is the surrender of your mind, and the expansion of the intuitive heart, and yes we all have it. Most of the time there is just not enough inner space to feel its presence nor its intelligence, it takes a level of inner silence to really sense it.

We are so busy trying to patch holes that we miss the deeper gold hidden in the intuitive messages.

Intuition tells us that if we want to embody a task, challenge or overcome a difficulty, then we must find a way to surrender to it. We need to find a way to flow with its direction, the path of least resistance.

Surrender and giving up are two completely different things, only a mind can give up.

The intuitive heart wants to put you in touch with your own authentic power, and that power requires that we surrender our mind based attachments to the power of intuition, flow, non-resistance and acceptance.

Surrender says I can accept this challenge, I will stay present with it regardless of what happens, I will flow like water and bend myself around the difficulty, I will allow the current of the task to take me in the direction of least resistance.

When we use the analytical judgemental mind we believe that there is no direction, that we have to overcome the task and ourselves, that we have to search for answers.

We have spawned generations for millennia hell bent on head butting the task, going to war with everything and everyone. Brought up on a diet of resistance and non acceptance, this is the root of a lot of humanity’s suffering.

If you think that generational DNA is not floating around in your psyche through your athletic endeavours, it’s time for a reality check.

If there is no trust here, I can’t trust myself or the task, by extension it makes it difficult to trust anything or anyone. Ok then I’ll head butt the lot.

Wherever we find challenges in life, we will find complexity. Have a look around you and you will see it is true, why does humanity insist on making things so difficult for themselves?

Because we listen to the internal dialogue of mind and thought, both individually and collectively.

Now we have added the extra layer of objective technology to the layer of thought, belief and mind. Technology is great as long as it doesn’t become an extension of the mind, if it does we become ever more lost to ourselves.

The opportunity here is to allow yourself to be with what is, to realise that if you want true performance from yourself that you do in fact need to be yourself, fully.

To stay rooted to where you are in the process and be aware that the path of least resistance means that you only focus your awareness here and now.

The seamlessness that athletes speak of when they talk about flow just means that you are not in resistance, you have become one with the process, you have become it, you are no longer standing apart from it.

The second you go up into your head in a process, you create a duality.

Pain judged is pain expanded!

Try and see that wherever you put your awareness will expand, if you put your awareness in the task it will expand, if you put your awareness into judgment it will expand, if you put your awareness into the past or the future, they will of course expand.

If you put all your awareness into what you think then it will expand to the point where you are not aware of anything else other than the thoughts in your head. This is an extremely limited mode of living, and many people live that way.

We only need to look at the limits of language to understand the limitations of thought.

Can a tag or a label adequately describe the depth of the ocean, or the depth in a new born baby that cannot yet speak?

The beauty of the natural world that has the ability at any moment to take all your words away and make you fall silent into awe.

What is the power in that silent awe that robs us of the words, thoughts and language that we are all so attached to?

The force of the awareness that words and thoughts arise in are so much more powerful than mere words and thoughts. Superficial mental conversation is the paper thin layer that floats on the entirety of the substructure that you really are, but you can only become aware of it by diving underneath thoughts and words, where you become aware that you are in fact awareness itself.

Surrender is the practice of falling back into yourself and trusting the deeper intuitive aspects of your own life force that encompass that awe we are talking about, all you need to do to gain it is put your awareness into yourself instead of onto the external.

Every single thing other than that is objective, and you are not an object.