July 26, 2026 • 43 mins
The idea of surrender has never appealed very much to me.
I’ve found more value in qualities like desire, passion, creativity, and personal agency.
But lately life has pushed me to the place where surrender is my only option.
And I’m learning not only why surrender matters but when it matters. Because surrender alone isn’t the answer to all of your problems (or mine).
But when the moment of surrender arrives, you have a choice: to trust and leap or to suffer at the edge of what’s calling your name.
The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer - https://amzn.to/3RiE07l
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer - https://amzn.to/3RiE07l
The Second Mountain by David Brooks - https://amzn.to/45d7fvv
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The pieces of your life, put them back together with
the words you write. All the beauty and peace and
the magic that you'll start too fun when you write
your story. You got the words and said, don't you
think it's time to let them out and write them
down and cover what it's all about and write, write
(00:30):
your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about surrender and I specifically want
to talk about the role that surrender plays in your creativity.
And again, by creativity, just like I've been talking about,
I don't mean the art that you're making. I mean
the expression that you have with your life, the expression
(00:57):
that you have with yourself, the way that people feel
when you walk in a room, like think of like
how you express uniquely and individually in this world. That's
what I mean when I say creativity. So I don't
necessarily mean something you made, although when you express, you
make things. When you express, you create relationships. When you express,
you create a family, a community, a neighborhood. When you express,
(01:20):
you create a business. When you express, you create a
book or a piece of art or something like that.
So expression includes your art, but isn't necessarily only about
your art. It's like the essence of who you are.
And on last week's episode, I talked about grief and
the role that grief plays in your expression, your creativity,
and I talked about how grief is the opening to
(01:42):
help you discover more deeply who you truly are. If
you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen
to that before you listen to this one, because I
do think that you are deeply connected. Grief is like
this opening to help you uncover or discover more of
who you truly are in your essence. And we tend
to venture away from our essence through the course of
(02:03):
our life because we're exposed to more expectations, to more programming,
to more conditioning. Over the course of our life, we're
responding to the environment around us, and so we're trying to,
like you know, figure out what does this person want
for me? What does this person want for me? What
kind of response do I get when I act this
way in this setting. So over the course of our life,
we sometimes veer away from our truest essence. And this
(02:26):
is why a lot of people will talk about going
back to your childhood, remembering who you were before the
world told you who you were supposed to be, as
a way to reconnect with that true essence. So grief
can help us touch back into that true essence. And
I think surrender plays a really important role here as well.
So that's what I want to talk about on today's episode,
(02:47):
is this element of surrender. What role does surrender play
and how can surrender as an act of faith help
us also to reconnect with our true self. Now. I
picked up the book called The Surrender Experiment a long
time ago. I picked up this book for the first
time in twenty sixteen. I first read The Untethered Soul.
Actually about both of the books together, because they were
(03:09):
recommended to me by someone when I was going through
my divorce. It felt like a perfect time to read
books titled The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, and
they came extremely highly recommended, so I was excited to
order them and read them. I was reading so many
books at that time in my life. I was just
really really hungry to learn and to understand better what
was going on with me? Like? How had I gotten
(03:30):
to this point in my life? How had my life
fallen apart in this unique way? Or not even so unique?
It wasn't like no one else had had their life
fall apart in this way? How had my life fallen
apart in this specific way? Is more of what I meant, Like,
how had this happened? Like this thing a divorce that
had been something I had thought about and tried to
(03:50):
avoid my entire life. How was this a thing that
I was now experiencing? And it got me thinking about
my childhood trauma, It got me thinking about my upbringing,
got me thinking about the environment in which I was raised.
It got me thinking about so many different things. So
I was just really open at that time to learn
and grow and understand better. I was going to yoga
all the time, I was reading any book that anyone
(04:11):
who would recommend to me, and this was one of
the books that was recommended to me. So I picked
up Untethered Soul and Surrender Experiment. They're both written by
Michael Singer, and I had a really hard time with
both of these books when I was reading them during
that time, I first of all am, this is just
an important note to make for you. I'm extremely, extremely
(04:32):
picky when it comes to the writing of a book,
obviously because this is my training, it's my career, it's
my profession. It's just something that I care deeply about,
and so I tend to be really drawn to books
that are like structured very well, where the writing is
nice and tight, where the voice is very clear. I
have a harder time reading a book that isn't as
(04:53):
well written. It's not that I won't do it, and
I think that there is definitely a time and a
place to read a book that doesn't have, you know,
like the top notch, top tier writing style, but it's
definitely something that is an obstacle that will get in
my way as a reader. If a book is not
well written, it's much harder for me to lose myself
in the book. I always know when I lose myself
(05:13):
in a book, Like a book I read recently where
I completely lost myself was Yesteryear. And I know this
book is extremely popular and gets very mixed reviews from people,
but I have to say about the writing of that
book that the writing is so top tier. It is
just so completely top notch that I completely lost myself
in the story of that book. And that's how you
know that the writing has done really, really well. It's
(05:35):
not that the grammar is perfect, you know, although that
is obviously helpful as well. It's more like the structure
is done well, the dialogue has done well, the turn
from sentence to sentence is done well, and just the essence,
the voice of the book comes through so strongly and
clearly that you can lose yourself in the story because
you're not thinking about the structure of the book. So
(05:57):
that's an example of a book that's very well written.
When I picked up Untethered Soul and Surrender Experiment, no
offense to the author, because I think the content of
the book is very important, but the writing style didn't
draw me, and like that, I didn't feel like the
voice came through quite as clearly. There were areas of
the book where I was like arguing with the structure.
As I read, I was just like, oh, I would
have moved this here, I would have started here instead,
And so that was kind of getting in my way.
(06:19):
And I think the other thing that was getting in
my way was just that the content of the book
was something that I wasn't totally ready for, or the
content was such that it was coming into my life
at a point when it isn't exactly what I needed.
So the concept of untethered soul and surrender experiment both
is this idea that when you can let go of
(06:40):
the thoughts in your mind, you can let go of
your personal preferences, you can let go of your feelings
about how things ought to go, you can let go
of your expectations, you can let go of your egos
tight grip on what your life is meant to look like,
how it's supposed to go, what you think should have
or not have, what step comes next in your process,
when you can loosen the grip around those things and
(07:00):
get in the flow of life and just listen to
what life is telling you and take what life offers
you next, that you step in to this energy, this
life force, this inexplicable power that knows what you should
do next, that knows, yeah, I don't know. You step
into this river of life that will take you places
(07:24):
that you could have never dreamed of, or take you
places you could have never visualized, or take you places
that you could have never put on a vision board,
or you could have never set as a goal for yourself.
And I think one of the reasons why this concept
ran so counter to me during that time is because
one of the things that I was learning for the
first time in my life in twenty sixteen, as I
was leaving this really toxic and abusive situation, I was
(07:49):
learning about my own agency. So I think the agency
lesson needed to be learned first before surrender could even
be a topic of conversation, before surrender could even be helpful.
And this is one of the things I want to
talk about as it relates to surrender is I feel
like I grew up learning about surrender. I grew up
(08:09):
in the Christian Church in nineties evangelicalism, and that's kind
of like, you know, a broad umbrella to help you
understand what my upbringing was like, but basic kind of
nineties church stuff as much as you can take yourself
there mentally. So I have learned about surrender. I learned
about surrendering your life to God. I mean that's kind
of like the premise of Christianity from the very beginning
(08:31):
is like, you surrender your life to God, to Jesus,
you follow what Jesus does you do, like what would
Jesus do? That was the big thing of the nineties.
So you think about what Jesus would do in any situation,
and you do it Jesus would do rather than what
you would do. So you're living your life like Jesus.
You're surrendering your life to God. You're praying to God
and asking him like, you know, what should I do next?
(08:52):
Or where do you want to send me? Or who
should I speak to today? And you can maybe hear in
the tone of my voice some of like a slight
hint of sarcasm, because well, I'll get there. There's a
slight hint of sarcasm there, I think, because I think
the way this stuff is taught is incomplete. But there's
(09:12):
also like this full circleness to it now, like you'll
hear me talk about on today's episode. I've come all
the way back to the surrender experiment. I'm rereading it again,
and I think there is something so profound here for
each of us, so profound here for me in my
life where I am right now, and maybe something profound
for you too. And this is where I want to
(09:33):
bring us as to this full circle moment all the
way back to the surrender experiment. So I grew up
with an understanding about what it meant to surrender, and
I grew up with this teaching that the spiritual path
(09:56):
was about surrendering your own preferences, surrendering your own likes
and dislikes, surrendering your own desires in order to follow
something deeper, in order to follow something bigger. And I
will say the first point in my life where I
started to realize that there was another side to this
coin was in my twenties, when I found myself in
(10:21):
a role that just wasn't working for me. So I
had graduated from grad school at that point, I was
working my first big kid job and I was going
to work every day and I would just drive my
car to my job and feel like I'm driving in
the wrong direction. I don't like what I'm doing, I
don't feel like myself doing this. I feel stuck, I
feel trapped. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing.
(10:44):
But this is just definitely not it. I could feel
in my gut, in my system that this was not right,
and I didn't really know what to do about it
at the time, but I just was logging the fact
that this wasn't working for me, and in the meantime,
while I was working this job, I could feel myself
in the after hours feeling passionately engaged and excited about
(11:05):
this idea of writing a book. I had always wanted
to write a book from the time I was very,
very young, and I was inspired by this dream that
my dad had. Actually, this is just coming back to
me right now in this moment. I'd forgotten that this
was the inspiration for the book. But my dad had
had this dream and had recounted the dream to me.
The dream I believe was about me. But when he
recounted the dream to me, I was like, Ooh, that
(11:26):
would be an amazing fiction story. So I took my
knowledge from my English program. I had taken several writing
classes in my English program in undergrad and I started
to apply it to write this fiction book that never
has seen the light of day. But it was something
that I was working on that I was so passionate about.
I was so excited about. I remember I would feel
(11:48):
completely just electrified every time that I would sit down
to work on it, and then I would like begrudgingly
wake up the next morning and go back to my
job that I wasn't enjoying. And it wasn't like I
hated my job because it was bad. I just didn't
feel excited about it. It didn't light me up. It
wasn't I wasn't passionate about it, and yet I was
(12:08):
going through the motions of going and doing the same
thing every day. So fast forward about twelve months. I
met this friend at church at the time, she and
I started talking about how excited we were feeling about
our creative endeavors. Like I was working on this book project.
She was a musician. She was really wanting to start
recording her own music. She was on the worship team
at church. She was singing, she had this beautiful singing voice,
(12:30):
but she also was writing music. And she and I
were both talking about how we were working these jobs
that we didn't really love. We had these lives that
just felt kind of bluff Like it wasn't that they
were bad, they just weren't really lighting us up. They
weren't really getting us that excited. And so we were like,
what would it look like if we just did the
thing that we've been dreaming of doing. So for me,
that was writing a book, and for her was writing
(12:52):
and recording her music. So we started to dream up
this idea of quitting our full time jobs. And the
gimmick this was kind of the gimmicky part, was we
were going to sell everything that we owned. We were
going to pack our stuff into my Super Outback, and
we were going to drive across the country. She could
play shows at coffee shops, or we could busk, you know,
on the sidewalk to make some money, and I could
(13:14):
keep a blog of our travels while we traveled. So
part of this was a genuine leap into the unknown
for us, and part of the gimmicky part was like
selling all of our stuff. The reason we sold all
of our stuff is just so that we wouldn't have
to pay rent in our apartments while we were gone.
And then also we could raise some money so that
we would have some cash in the bank while we traveled.
So no joke, like a married couple, we opened a
(13:34):
joint savings account. We had hosted this huge sale. We
sold basically everything that we owned. We took the money
and put it into the joint account. We packed what
was left into the Super Outback. We rigged it up
so we could put her sound machine in the trunk
of the car. We hung a clothing rack in the
back of the car. We put a cooler back there,
and we made plans to set off and drive through
(13:55):
all fifty states. Our plan was to drive through the
kind of top half of the country in the side
months we left in July, and then the bottom half
of the country in the winter months, so that we
could do some camping. I think we had a lock
box on the top of our car. We packed like
a tent and a bunch of camping gear to women,
just you know, camping by ourselves in the middle of nowhere.
(14:15):
Perfectly good idea. Anyways, we set off on this epic
adventure and it was the first time in my life
where I started to follow my own passion, my own desire.
Because I had been under this teaching about surrender, surrenders, surrenders,
surrender what you want, Surrender what you care about, Surrender
what you're passionate about. To get in this flow of
energy that's so much bigger than you. Okay, I had
(14:38):
never felt or experienced what it might be like to
follow my own heart, to follow my own passion, to
follow my own pleasure, to follow my own desire. And
let me tell you, when I started following my own pleasure,
in my own desire, I lit up from the inside out.
Something changed dramatically in me. I experienced a life life
(15:00):
in a whole new way, and I started to think, Oh,
my gosh, this is actually an experience with God, an
experience with spirit, the flow of life that is bigger
than me is experienced in this following of my own pleasure,
in this accessing a desire that is deep within me
that I genuinely didn't even know was theres Like, I
(15:23):
went from like almost like a low grade depression to like, ugh,
I'm alive, I'm excited. We're doing this thing every day now.
That aliveness and that excitement in full transparency, also showed
up as frustration. It showed up as conflict. It showed
up as I learned so much on that trip with
(15:43):
this friend of mine who is still like a beautiful
friend of mine to this very day. Her name is Sharia.
And this was also the topic of my whole first book.
So if you've never read Packing Light, that's my book
that came out in twenty thirteen, and that book details
the experience of this trip but my friend Scharia and
I we were like a married couple on this trip.
I mean we were living in this small car together. Essentially,
(16:04):
we would eat out of the trunk of the car,
out of the cooler that was back there. We lived
off of the kindness of strangers. We couch served, We
were gifted, you know, hotel points to stay at verious
hotels along the way. We did do a fair bit
of camping, especially during the summer months. And you know,
we were in very close quarters for a long period
of time. We were on the road for six months.
(16:26):
We came back right around Christmas. We took a short
break and think in February we went to Hawaii and
then we booked tickets to Alaska. And I'm trying to
remember what month we went to Alaska, maybe March or April.
So we completed all fifty states in our road trip
without actually driving to Alaska, which would have been quite
the drive. Anyways, all of this to say, I'm sharing
(16:48):
this all to highlight that difference between this life of
surrender that I was taught to the life of like
following my passion, following my desire, following that little spark
of inspiration within me that I've tid talked about so much.
And then the next real turn in the story is
when I went through my divorce. So I'll I'm skipping
(17:09):
over a bunch of years here, because we went on
the road trip in twenty twelve, no sorry, twenty ten,
and then finished in twenty eleven, and then I got
married at the end of twenty eleven and was married
through twenty twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The marriage ended at
the end of twenty fifteen, and in twenty sixteen was
when my divorce was final, and that was when I
was really going through the thick of the divorce stuff. Now,
(17:32):
as I was going through that divorce stuff, I did
pick up the surrender experiment. I did pick up untethered soul,
and I was intrigued by this idea of letting go
of my personal desires. But I feel like I hadn't
really yet scratched the surface of what it would mean
to really listen within, you know, listen within to what
(17:53):
I wanted, to what I truly desired, what mattered to me,
And this had gotten somewhat distorted in the relationship, I
think because there's too much back and forth here to
really share this with any kind of clarity. But essentially,
I think my early programming around surrender what you want,
Surrender what matters to you, surrender your desires, surrender to
(18:14):
something bigger than you was part of what landed me
in a situation where I was willing to totally surrender
what was important to me in order to enter into
this relationship. Because this relationship was with a person who
claimed to be a Christian, who was actually varied about Christian,
who was a pastor at the time, who was in
the middle of planting a church. I opted into this
(18:36):
church plant There was something about this, and I'm sharing
this thinking maybe someone will resonate. There was something about
this that made me feel like this was extra spiritual somehow,
or this was extra holy because I was surrendering what
I really wanted in order to opt in to this
situation that wasn't really what I would have picked. Like
(18:58):
I wanted to be an author. I was really working
on growing my online presence, my platform. I was focused on. Yeah,
I was focused on like growing that part of my
career was top front and center for me at that
moment in my life. And yet in walks this person
who's like, come with me plant this church. We're gonna,
you know, do all this work for God. And that
(19:20):
was really compelling to me because it felt kind of
extra spiritual at the time. So then fast forward to
my divorce, I'm like going back and forth between these two, like, wait,
do I surrender what I want? Or do I follow
my desires? And at that point when I was getting divorced,
I was I had really lost track of myself. I
(19:42):
had really surrendered every aspect of myself to this person,
to what this person wanted me to do, to his dreams,
to his desires. There's so many threads I could follow
in here. I can't possibly go down all these rabbit trails.
But there's like a whole thread of like how women
are indoctrinated, how you know, women are taught to be wives,
(20:03):
how that happens in the church and out of the church,
and all of it. There's so much to unpack, and
I'm not going to get into all of it because
I really want to circle back to the idea of surrender.
But essentially, in twenty sixteen, when I encountered the surrender experiment,
I just was not in a place where I could
fully receive it because I was still trying to capture
(20:23):
the feeling of my own agency, the feeling like I
get to choose what I want my life to look like.
Come to think of it, like the whole Packing Light experience.
Going on that trip was my first go at believing
that I get to follow what matters to me, I
get to choose, like I get to decide what I
want my life to look like. And then when I
(20:46):
came to the end of that experience, that was right
when I met my now ex husband, and so I
think I had like a bit of a like there
was this expansion with Packing Light, and then I was
just like, oh, no, I should probably go back to
serving God because thought was too much for myself. What
I just experienced was too much freedom, is too much excitement.
I don't think I'm allowed to have that. So I'm
(21:07):
going to go back to this thing that feels more
familiar to me. Then I'm going through my divorce and
it's just like, oh, take two on this thing. Do
I get to follow my own heart? Do I get
to think about what I want? Do I get to
follow what matters to me? Do I get to care
about my passions, my desires? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
(21:27):
And it was a reconnection with that or reconnection with
my truest essence with myself, and a trusting myself that
I could trust that I knew the next step to take.
And then fast forward to now when everything that you know,
if you've been around here for a while, you've been
listening to episodes, or even if you go back and
listen to the Grief episode from last week, you know
(21:48):
that I have. I've had years now of following my
creative inspiration of trusting myself, of taking risks on myself,
and the the business venture pinewitzerf Club that I've talked
about ad nauseum is an example of a time where
I really trusted myself. And like I've said many times,
(22:10):
this is the first time where I trusted myself and
in some ways I wasn't met in the same way
that I have been in the past. I trusted myself.
We took this big leap on the fifty state road
trip and it turned out to be this amazing, wonderful
thing and I was completely met and we you know,
had this unreal experience and I got to publish a
(22:30):
book about it, and you know, lots of financial gain
has come to me over that. Then I took the chance,
you know, post divorce, and trusted myself and followed this path.
You can read about that in Indestructible, which is my
second memoir. And that again I was met, I met
my husband, We have these two beautiful kids. We built
this amazing life together. Then I take that same learning,
(22:54):
the same sort of protocol, the same strategy, the same framework,
the same blueprint, and apply it to Pin's our club
and it's like, oh, everything falls apart, everything crumbles. We
lose so much. And so it just has brought me
to this place and then back to back to back
to back pregnancy losses, and it has brought me to
(23:15):
this place where I have no choice but to surrender.
And one of the things that I'm learning during this
time is that surrender doesn't really have a lot of
weight to it. It's not really important until you have
something to surrender. So, in other words, you can't really
teach a child. You can, but you can't if you
(23:38):
teach a child who doesn't really know themselves yet to surrender,
to surrender their personal preferences, to surrender their desires, like
as a blanket statement all the time you say, like,
surrender what matters to you, Surrender what you think, surrender
to the will of God. They don't really know what
they're surrendering yet. But when you know yourself and trust
(23:58):
yourself and believe in yourself and then you're asked to surrender,
then it's like this massive leap of faith. It's like
this insane just well of trust that it requires. You know,
what's coming to mind too, This is a weird, weird
like connection. But what's coming to mind is mo Wana
(24:18):
wanta to. Actually, my kids have been super into ma
Wana too. They've been listening to the soundtrack a lot lately,
so it's top of mind for me. So it's possible.
This is like a bizarre connection. But as I'm talking
about it, I'm going to look up the lyrics to
this song that I've heard so so many times. I've
heard my kids sing it, I've heard it play and
it gets stuck in my head. It's from the song
(24:40):
called Beyond that's in ma Wana too. It's from the
song called Beyond that's in ma Wana too. And she
makes this comment that feels so poignant to me. So
(25:03):
I'm gonna share. I'm gonna share it with you. I'm
gonna read some of these lyrics. Actually, she's talking about
taking this second trip because in Mahana one she's called
to go out and save the heart of Dafeti and
save her village. In Mawana too, she's called to go
out again on another epic adventure. And so the first
(25:23):
time she's called, you know, her biggest obstacle is her dad,
who doesn't want her to go. Oh my gosh, I'm
seeing the parallels in my life right now as I
talk about this. The second time she goes out, her
biggest obstacle is herself, because it's not her dad that
doesn't want her to go the second time, it's herself.
She feels tied at home to her little sister. She wonders,
(25:43):
is her little sister even gonna you know? Will who
will teach her little sister basically if she's not there.
But this song says, I know these stars above the ocean.
Now new skies call me by name, and suddenly nothing
feels the same. I know the path that must be chosen,
But this is bigger than before. I'm not gonna try
(26:06):
to sing it actually, okay, she says, I know the
path that must be chosen. But this is bigger than before.
Winds have changed, tides turn me far away from shore
what waits for me? Forever? Far from home, from everything
and everyone I've ever known? What lies beyond under skies
I've never seen? Will I lose myself between my home
(26:29):
and what's unknown? If I go beyond? Leaving all I
love behind, with the future of our people still to find?
Can I go beyond? This is destiny in motion, and
it's only just begun. This is the line that I
was talking about. Now, Will this life I've worked so
hard for come undone? They're calling me. I must reply.
(26:52):
But if I leave, how could I ever say goodbye?
What lies beyond on the vast uncharted see? Will I
lose myself between all that we know right here and
what's out there beyond? She says, again, leaving all I
love behind with the future of our people still to find?
Can I go beyond? About her little sister? If I'm
not here to hold her hand? Will she grow to understand?
(27:16):
And then in the song, her grandma's voice says to her,
her grandma who's from the first movie, I'll always be
right beside you, But perhaps you're meant for more. God,
I'm getting emotional reading this. I can't see where your
story leads, but we never stop choosing who we are.
And then Maana says, I'll go beyond and although I
don't know when I will reach these sands again, because
(27:38):
I know who I am, and then she does that
warrior cry, I am Molana. Anyways. Wow, I'm getting emotional
just reading this. It's like surrendering when you really know
what you have to lose is so much bigger than
surrendering when you don't even know yourself. So there's that
(28:01):
kind of youthful surrender that you do when you're quite young,
when you're just like, what do I have to lose?
Let me give this a try. And then there's the
surrender that comes when you're in your second half of
life and you have so much to lose, like everything
you've worked for with this life I've worked so hard
for come undone. And I think that's one of the
reasons I've been drawn back to this book called The
(28:23):
Surrender Experiment now in this part of my life, in
part because life has brought me to this place and
maybe you resonate with this where I don't have any
choice but to surrender. I was talking with a friend
earlier this week about the unique pain of trying to
conceive and wishing to have a baby and not being
able to for one reason or another. And she and
(28:43):
I have a little bit of a different story but
same same essence, which is like I want a baby
and it's not happening for me. And she said something
to me that has really stuck with me, which is
like she just talked about how hard it was for
her to accept that in her case, like every resource
available to her and science is on her side, like
(29:04):
they've done multiple rounds of IBF, and she's like it
makes no sense, Like we have unending resources, we have
science on our side, we have all these IBF tools,
we have you know, like the best medical care in
the world, and yet this is a fact about my
life I still can't change. And because she's so well resourced,
(29:25):
she was saying that resources, you know, have this way
of kind of tricking us into thinking that we have
control over our lives because think of how many things
you can fix with money, like pretty much everything. It's
like I have a problem, you know, I have a headache.
I can pick up this medicine. I have, like a
knee pain, I can get a surgery. There's just so
(29:46):
many things that you can fix with money, Like I
need more time, so I hire someone to do this
job for me. And this is one of those things
that reminds us that we don't have total control. Trying
to conceive and thinking about that poem that I read
on last week's episode about the well of grief, it
(30:06):
takes me back to that idea that we have to
almost be brought to the edge to be reminded. We
have to be brought to the edge of our control
to be reminded of how we truly discover ourselves. It's
like we're being invited into this journey. I had for
a long time, well for I don't know months and months,
I've had this thought like what kind of cruel God
(30:28):
would put this on my heart to want a baby
and then not make it accessible for me to to
actualize that. Like I'm just really struggling, to be honest,
that's just me being really vulnerable. I'm struggling in I
don't even know what my faith structure is now, Like
I've you know, deconstructed out of evangelicalism. I still feel
(30:52):
this strong connection to the person of Jesus. I am
definitely a deeply spiritual person. I see us as all connected.
I believe in a power that is greater than me.
I believe there's something to surrender to. I believe there
is a force of life moving through each of us,
like an energy current that is bigger than any of
(31:14):
us could imagine. I believe that. It's like, I don't
really know what I believe about God and all of that,
but I have been feeling this feeling, uncomfortable feeling of like, Okay,
if there is a God, if there is an energy
that's at work that's you know, bigger than all of us,
then like, why why can't I have a baby? Like
why can't I actualize this dream? And why would there
(31:37):
be this pull in my heart to have another child?
If that's not available to me? That seems cruel, doesn't it.
If God created me and put this desire in my
heart and it's pulling me toward this thing and that's
not achievable, It's like a big trick, is how it feels.
(31:57):
And then I thought, oh, hey, that poem of David White's.
If you didn't hear it, you can go back and
listen to me read it many times on last week's
episode is talking about how sometimes we have to be
pulled to the very edge of ourselves, to the point
where we have no choice but to surrender. We have
to be brought to that edge in order to truly
(32:19):
discover our essence, in order to truly discover who we are,
who we came here to be, how we came here
to express ourselves, what we came here to do. So
maybe the inspiration, the creative draw toward that spark toward
the baby was never about the baby. Maybe it was
(32:40):
about something utterly different. Maybe it was about me. Maybe
it was about me coming online to myself. Maybe it
was about me fully expressing. Maybe it was about helping
me to find hidden bits of grief or rage that
are in my system that need to be felt and
need to be expressed. I don't know. I don't know,
and I think this is one of the beautiful things
about this moment want a Song. It's like, we don't
(33:02):
know what is out there, what lies beyond, and yet
we take the chance to go there. And this is
really what the Surrender experiment is about. There's more to
say about the surrender experiment. There's other parts of it
that are really kind of infuriating and that feel almost
like counterintuitive, or not even counterintuitive, but like counter to
everything I believe to be true. There's a tension between
(33:27):
this concept of surrender. He shares this story, for example,
just share this, shares this story about this woman moving
onto his property. Starts with the tent, and then he
goes away on a trip and comes back and she's
built this structure on his property. And because he is
doing this experiment, the experiment is I'm going to surrender
to the flow of life no matter what happens, regardless
(33:47):
of my preferences. So because he's doing this experiment, he
can't argue with her. He chooses not to listen to
the voice in his head that says, you know, this
is my property, how come you can just you can't
just move on to someone else's property without it asking permission.
But he chooses not to listen to that voice in
his head and instead to allow the flow of life
to take him where it's trying to go. So it's
a very extreme experiment, and there's this tension between that
(34:12):
level of surrender and what I also believe to be true,
which is that you have agency. You get to decide
what the dreams and desires that you have that were
put on your heart are absolutely important and they're calling
you somewhere. And like, think of Mawana, Like she has
this dream to go out on the ocean, and her
dad's like, no, it's too dangerous. You can't go out there.
(34:33):
It's scary. You know, something terrible could happen to you.
And she's like, Dad, like, I was born to be
on the ocean. I was born to be a wayfinder.
And she feels that in her soul. So I believe
that to be true. And I think like maybe the
younger Mawana is kind of the story arc that I've
been living in my life, that that first mountain that
(34:54):
we climb in life is more about following your own
desires and chasing your dreams and figuring out like who
you are and what do you love and how do
you want to be in the world. And then I
feel that I'm on this, I'm embarking on this second
journey that maybe is more like momamo Wana to now
by totally surrendering everything, I have a lot to lose.
(35:15):
I mean I did in twenty ten, when I sold
all my stuff and went on this trip. I did
surrender everything I did, and I went on this trip,
and I followed this tiny little spark of a dream
that I had to write a book. I quit my job,
I lost my health insurance, I moved out of my apartment,
I sold all my stuff. I went on this big trip.
(35:36):
I surrendered everything, and it was scary, but it was
also exciting. And this time feels different. This time feels like, hey,
I don't have a choice whether to surrender or not,
which is part of why I picked up this book.
I'm like, Okay, I hate this lesson, but I guess
it's time to learn it, and so I picked up
the book to read it again. So that's part of
(35:58):
why I picked up the book is because I feel like
I have no choice but to surrender. And then part
of why I picked up the book, or part of
why I wanted to talk about this idea of surrender,
is the second half of it, which is beyond having
no choice but to surrender, I also feel like this
is the other half of the coin. These are two
polarities to tensions that pull on one another, that create
(36:19):
a whole that the whole is important. It is both
trust yourself deeply and yes, also surrender, surrender everything that
you have. And I think the older we get, maybe
the more difficult. The more you've achieved, the more you've accomplished,
the more agency you've deployed, the more difficult it gets
to surrender everything, which makes me think, you know, it's
(36:42):
a weird thing about Packing Light, my first book that
came out in twenty thirteen. A really weird thing about
this book is it had an unexpected draw by like
fifty year old men. I knew that my audience would
be mostly younger women, like you know. I I pictured
my one perfect reader being a younger woman, like maybe
(37:04):
college post college, kind of like early twenties ish, maybe
up to about thirty. And I did definitely have a
strong readership in that demographic. And yet there was also
a really strong readership in the like middle aged men demographic,
and that really shocked me. I was like, at first,
maybe I thought, maybe it's just because my dad is like,
(37:25):
you know, promoting it, and so maybe that's kind of why.
But the more that I talked to these readers, the
more I realized it was men who had built a
ton of success and success. And also they had built
these like really strong, sturdy, stable lives in kind of
suburban America, and we're feeling really tied down, and they
(37:50):
loved the idea of selling everything and going on this trip.
To them that was like, oh, like my dream would
be to sell everything I own and to take off
into the great unknown and to go discover myself. And
yet because they had built these strong study lives, the
drawback to that is the drawback to a strong study life,
is you just don't have a lot of freedom and flexibility.
(38:13):
So how do we find some of both? I think
is the question. In order to find our full expression,
there has to be surrender. But can you truly surrender?
Or is surrender really that valuable before you know who
you really are? I think there has to be some
sense of who I am and what I'm capable of
and what I can accomplish on my own, and then
surrender becomes meaningful. Before that, it's like surrender, What am
(38:37):
I surrendering? I don't have anything to surrender. Everything I
have in my life has been gifted to me, you know,
And so you don't understand what it would even mean
to let go and now that I am forty three
years old and I've built this life for myself, I
really do understand what it means to let go. I
really do feel the deep fear, I guess is what
(38:59):
it is is the deep fear of letting go of
all that I've built, of letting go of what I've
created so far. It's like to let go of my
own agency is terrifying, and yet it is the only
thing I believe that will take us beyond ourselves, beyond
what we can build on our own. So there's you know,
(39:19):
is it? David Brooks First Mountain, Second Mountain? He wrote
the book called the Second Mountain. I think it's maybe
I'm wrong about the author, but all in getting the
show notes there's the second mountain, second half of life.
Richard Rohre talks about the second half of life, and
then the other term for it is the second Mountain,
where on that second mountain you really start to think about, like, Okay,
so I've done everything that I can do with my
(39:42):
own kind of strength, and now how am I going
to be of service? How am I going to give back?
How am I going to let go? How am I
gonna You're really starting to think about death too, about
how am I going to exit from this life? How
do I want to go out? Do I want to
go out holding on tightly to everything that I have,
or do I I want to release my tight grip
around my stuff, around my accomplishments, around my sense of self.
(40:07):
And I feel that I'm on that back half of
life journey. I'm being asked to surrender, and there really
is a beauty to it. It's really the more I've
read Surrender Experiment, the more I've meditated on that poem
I read by David White last week, the more I
realize it's the opposite of cruel for a god to
invite you towards something that you can't have. It's actually
it's like, come look over the edge of this, Come
(40:30):
look at what's beautiful over here. Come look at the
full depths of you. Like there's more girl, There's more, sister,
There's more friend. Like come on over here, take a look.
There's way more than you ever thought. There's more that's
possible for you that you could never have visualized or
put on a vision board, or set a goal for
or dreamed up. Last thing I'll share, and then I
(40:53):
know I need to wrap up. My husband came home
from a walk the other day. He goes and does
liked moving meditations almost every morning, is up at five
and out the door and we'll walk for an hour
and then come back. And he came back and oh,
I'm gonna cry. He sat down right across from me
and he just put both of his hands on both
my shoulders and he was just like, I was just
(41:14):
thinking about you on my walk, and he's just like,
how many marathons have you run? And I was like,
well too technically, and he's like, how many half marathons?
And I was like, I don't know, like ten. How
many books have you written? I'm like four. He's like,
how many books have you goost written? I'm like ten.
He goes through this whole list of questions just like
he was just like, I want to reflect back to
(41:35):
you how truly accomplished you are, how much you've done,
like what an amazing woman you are, and he goes
I feel like this mold sickness and everything we've been
through in the last seven years has made you forget
who you are, which now that I'm saying this story
out loud, just makes me think of that moment in
(41:55):
the Mahana song. The song's called Beyond. You should go
listen to it, where she's like, I remember who I
am and then she has this war cry like I
am a Wana. It's such a cool moment in the song.
Go take a listen to it so you don't have
to listen to amusing it. He's like, I feel like this,
everything we've been through, has just made you forget who
you are. And he just looked me right, and I'm
just like, I want you to remember you know how
(42:17):
powerful you are. And I'm telling that story because yes,
and also I feel that what I'm being asked and
maybe what you're being asked in this time is to
finally let go of everything that you have created or
could create on your own has been spectacular. And also
(42:38):
you're being invited to the edge of something bigger, and
maybe it's time to surrender to the something bigger. I
feel like I just preached a forty minute sermon to myself,
so that was for me. I hope you got something
from it. I really enjoyed this. I hope you did too.
And I will see you back here next week. I
wanna write your story. Podcast
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The pieces of your life, put them back together with
the words you write. All the beauty and peace and
the magic that you'll start too fun when you write
your story. You got the words and said, don't you
think it's time to let them out and write them
down and cover what it's all about and write, write
(00:30):
your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about surrender and I specifically want
to talk about the role that surrender plays in your creativity.
And again, by creativity, just like I've been talking about,
I don't mean the art that you're making. I mean
the expression that you have with your life, the expression
(00:57):
that you have with yourself, the way that people feel
when you walk in a room, like think of like
how you express uniquely and individually in this world. That's
what I mean when I say creativity. So I don't
necessarily mean something you made, although when you express, you
make things. When you express, you create relationships. When you express,
you create a family, a community, a neighborhood. When you express,
(01:20):
you create a business. When you express, you create a
book or a piece of art or something like that.
So expression includes your art, but isn't necessarily only about
your art. It's like the essence of who you are.
And on last week's episode, I talked about grief and
the role that grief plays in your expression, your creativity,
and I talked about how grief is the opening to
(01:42):
help you discover more deeply who you truly are. If
you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen
to that before you listen to this one, because I
do think that you are deeply connected. Grief is like
this opening to help you uncover or discover more of
who you truly are in your essence. And we tend
to venture away from our essence through the course of
(02:03):
our life because we're exposed to more expectations, to more programming,
to more conditioning. Over the course of our life, we're
responding to the environment around us, and so we're trying to,
like you know, figure out what does this person want
for me? What does this person want for me? What
kind of response do I get when I act this
way in this setting. So over the course of our life,
we sometimes veer away from our truest essence. And this
(02:26):
is why a lot of people will talk about going
back to your childhood, remembering who you were before the
world told you who you were supposed to be, as
a way to reconnect with that true essence. So grief
can help us touch back into that true essence. And
I think surrender plays a really important role here as well.
So that's what I want to talk about on today's episode,
(02:47):
is this element of surrender. What role does surrender play
and how can surrender as an act of faith help
us also to reconnect with our true self. Now. I
picked up the book called The Surrender Experiment a long
time ago. I picked up this book for the first
time in twenty sixteen. I first read The Untethered Soul.
Actually about both of the books together, because they were
(03:09):
recommended to me by someone when I was going through
my divorce. It felt like a perfect time to read
books titled The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, and
they came extremely highly recommended, so I was excited to
order them and read them. I was reading so many
books at that time in my life. I was just
really really hungry to learn and to understand better what
was going on with me? Like? How had I gotten
(03:30):
to this point in my life? How had my life
fallen apart in this unique way? Or not even so unique?
It wasn't like no one else had had their life
fall apart in this way? How had my life fallen
apart in this specific way? Is more of what I meant, Like,
how had this happened? Like this thing a divorce that
had been something I had thought about and tried to
(03:50):
avoid my entire life. How was this a thing that
I was now experiencing? And it got me thinking about
my childhood trauma, It got me thinking about my upbringing,
got me thinking about the environment in which I was raised.
It got me thinking about so many different things. So
I was just really open at that time to learn
and grow and understand better. I was going to yoga
all the time, I was reading any book that anyone
(04:11):
who would recommend to me, and this was one of
the books that was recommended to me. So I picked
up Untethered Soul and Surrender Experiment. They're both written by
Michael Singer, and I had a really hard time with
both of these books when I was reading them during
that time, I first of all am, this is just
an important note to make for you. I'm extremely, extremely
(04:32):
picky when it comes to the writing of a book,
obviously because this is my training, it's my career, it's
my profession. It's just something that I care deeply about,
and so I tend to be really drawn to books
that are like structured very well, where the writing is
nice and tight, where the voice is very clear. I
have a harder time reading a book that isn't as
(04:53):
well written. It's not that I won't do it, and
I think that there is definitely a time and a
place to read a book that doesn't have, you know,
like the top notch, top tier writing style, but it's
definitely something that is an obstacle that will get in
my way as a reader. If a book is not
well written, it's much harder for me to lose myself
in the book. I always know when I lose myself
(05:13):
in a book, Like a book I read recently where
I completely lost myself was Yesteryear. And I know this
book is extremely popular and gets very mixed reviews from people,
but I have to say about the writing of that
book that the writing is so top tier. It is
just so completely top notch that I completely lost myself
in the story of that book. And that's how you
know that the writing has done really, really well. It's
(05:35):
not that the grammar is perfect, you know, although that
is obviously helpful as well. It's more like the structure
is done well, the dialogue has done well, the turn
from sentence to sentence is done well, and just the essence,
the voice of the book comes through so strongly and
clearly that you can lose yourself in the story because
you're not thinking about the structure of the book. So
(05:57):
that's an example of a book that's very well written.
When I picked up Untethered Soul and Surrender Experiment, no
offense to the author, because I think the content of
the book is very important, but the writing style didn't
draw me, and like that, I didn't feel like the
voice came through quite as clearly. There were areas of
the book where I was like arguing with the structure.
As I read, I was just like, oh, I would
have moved this here, I would have started here instead,
And so that was kind of getting in my way.
(06:19):
And I think the other thing that was getting in
my way was just that the content of the book
was something that I wasn't totally ready for, or the
content was such that it was coming into my life
at a point when it isn't exactly what I needed.
So the concept of untethered soul and surrender experiment both
is this idea that when you can let go of
(06:40):
the thoughts in your mind, you can let go of
your personal preferences, you can let go of your feelings
about how things ought to go, you can let go
of your expectations, you can let go of your egos
tight grip on what your life is meant to look like,
how it's supposed to go, what you think should have
or not have, what step comes next in your process,
when you can loosen the grip around those things and
(07:00):
get in the flow of life and just listen to
what life is telling you and take what life offers
you next, that you step in to this energy, this
life force, this inexplicable power that knows what you should
do next, that knows, yeah, I don't know. You step
into this river of life that will take you places
(07:24):
that you could have never dreamed of, or take you
places you could have never visualized, or take you places
that you could have never put on a vision board,
or you could have never set as a goal for yourself.
And I think one of the reasons why this concept
ran so counter to me during that time is because
one of the things that I was learning for the
first time in my life in twenty sixteen, as I
was leaving this really toxic and abusive situation, I was
(07:49):
learning about my own agency. So I think the agency
lesson needed to be learned first before surrender could even
be a topic of conversation, before surrender could even be helpful.
And this is one of the things I want to
talk about as it relates to surrender is I feel
like I grew up learning about surrender. I grew up
(08:09):
in the Christian Church in nineties evangelicalism, and that's kind
of like, you know, a broad umbrella to help you
understand what my upbringing was like, but basic kind of
nineties church stuff as much as you can take yourself
there mentally. So I have learned about surrender. I learned
about surrendering your life to God. I mean that's kind
of like the premise of Christianity from the very beginning
(08:31):
is like, you surrender your life to God, to Jesus,
you follow what Jesus does you do, like what would
Jesus do? That was the big thing of the nineties.
So you think about what Jesus would do in any situation,
and you do it Jesus would do rather than what
you would do. So you're living your life like Jesus.
You're surrendering your life to God. You're praying to God
and asking him like, you know, what should I do next?
(08:52):
Or where do you want to send me? Or who
should I speak to today? And you can maybe hear in
the tone of my voice some of like a slight
hint of sarcasm, because well, I'll get there. There's a
slight hint of sarcasm there, I think, because I think
the way this stuff is taught is incomplete. But there's
(09:12):
also like this full circleness to it now, like you'll
hear me talk about on today's episode. I've come all
the way back to the surrender experiment. I'm rereading it again,
and I think there is something so profound here for
each of us, so profound here for me in my
life where I am right now, and maybe something profound
for you too. And this is where I want to
(09:33):
bring us as to this full circle moment all the
way back to the surrender experiment. So I grew up
with an understanding about what it meant to surrender, and
I grew up with this teaching that the spiritual path
(09:56):
was about surrendering your own preferences, surrendering your own likes
and dislikes, surrendering your own desires in order to follow
something deeper, in order to follow something bigger. And I
will say the first point in my life where I
started to realize that there was another side to this
coin was in my twenties, when I found myself in
(10:21):
a role that just wasn't working for me. So I
had graduated from grad school at that point, I was
working my first big kid job and I was going
to work every day and I would just drive my
car to my job and feel like I'm driving in
the wrong direction. I don't like what I'm doing, I
don't feel like myself doing this. I feel stuck, I
feel trapped. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing.
(10:44):
But this is just definitely not it. I could feel
in my gut, in my system that this was not right,
and I didn't really know what to do about it
at the time, but I just was logging the fact
that this wasn't working for me, and in the meantime,
while I was working this job, I could feel myself
in the after hours feeling passionately engaged and excited about
(11:05):
this idea of writing a book. I had always wanted
to write a book from the time I was very,
very young, and I was inspired by this dream that
my dad had. Actually, this is just coming back to
me right now in this moment. I'd forgotten that this
was the inspiration for the book. But my dad had
had this dream and had recounted the dream to me.
The dream I believe was about me. But when he
recounted the dream to me, I was like, Ooh, that
(11:26):
would be an amazing fiction story. So I took my
knowledge from my English program. I had taken several writing
classes in my English program in undergrad and I started
to apply it to write this fiction book that never
has seen the light of day. But it was something
that I was working on that I was so passionate about.
I was so excited about. I remember I would feel
(11:48):
completely just electrified every time that I would sit down
to work on it, and then I would like begrudgingly
wake up the next morning and go back to my
job that I wasn't enjoying. And it wasn't like I
hated my job because it was bad. I just didn't
feel excited about it. It didn't light me up. It
wasn't I wasn't passionate about it, and yet I was
(12:08):
going through the motions of going and doing the same
thing every day. So fast forward about twelve months. I
met this friend at church at the time, she and
I started talking about how excited we were feeling about
our creative endeavors. Like I was working on this book project.
She was a musician. She was really wanting to start
recording her own music. She was on the worship team
at church. She was singing, she had this beautiful singing voice,
(12:30):
but she also was writing music. And she and I
were both talking about how we were working these jobs
that we didn't really love. We had these lives that
just felt kind of bluff Like it wasn't that they
were bad, they just weren't really lighting us up. They
weren't really getting us that excited. And so we were like,
what would it look like if we just did the
thing that we've been dreaming of doing. So for me,
that was writing a book, and for her was writing
(12:52):
and recording her music. So we started to dream up
this idea of quitting our full time jobs. And the
gimmick this was kind of the gimmicky part, was we
were going to sell everything that we owned. We were
going to pack our stuff into my Super Outback, and
we were going to drive across the country. She could
play shows at coffee shops, or we could busk, you know,
on the sidewalk to make some money, and I could
(13:14):
keep a blog of our travels while we traveled. So
part of this was a genuine leap into the unknown
for us, and part of the gimmicky part was like
selling all of our stuff. The reason we sold all
of our stuff is just so that we wouldn't have
to pay rent in our apartments while we were gone.
And then also we could raise some money so that
we would have some cash in the bank while we traveled.
So no joke, like a married couple, we opened a
(13:34):
joint savings account. We had hosted this huge sale. We
sold basically everything that we owned. We took the money
and put it into the joint account. We packed what
was left into the Super Outback. We rigged it up
so we could put her sound machine in the trunk
of the car. We hung a clothing rack in the
back of the car. We put a cooler back there,
and we made plans to set off and drive through
(13:55):
all fifty states. Our plan was to drive through the
kind of top half of the country in the side
months we left in July, and then the bottom half
of the country in the winter months, so that we
could do some camping. I think we had a lock
box on the top of our car. We packed like
a tent and a bunch of camping gear to women,
just you know, camping by ourselves in the middle of nowhere.
(14:15):
Perfectly good idea. Anyways, we set off on this epic
adventure and it was the first time in my life
where I started to follow my own passion, my own desire.
Because I had been under this teaching about surrender, surrenders, surrenders,
surrender what you want, Surrender what you care about, Surrender
what you're passionate about. To get in this flow of
energy that's so much bigger than you. Okay, I had
(14:38):
never felt or experienced what it might be like to
follow my own heart, to follow my own passion, to
follow my own pleasure, to follow my own desire. And
let me tell you, when I started following my own pleasure,
in my own desire, I lit up from the inside out.
Something changed dramatically in me. I experienced a life life
(15:00):
in a whole new way, and I started to think, Oh,
my gosh, this is actually an experience with God, an
experience with spirit, the flow of life that is bigger
than me is experienced in this following of my own pleasure,
in this accessing a desire that is deep within me
that I genuinely didn't even know was theres Like, I
(15:23):
went from like almost like a low grade depression to like, ugh,
I'm alive, I'm excited. We're doing this thing every day now.
That aliveness and that excitement in full transparency, also showed
up as frustration. It showed up as conflict. It showed
up as I learned so much on that trip with
(15:43):
this friend of mine who is still like a beautiful
friend of mine to this very day. Her name is Sharia.
And this was also the topic of my whole first book.
So if you've never read Packing Light, that's my book
that came out in twenty thirteen, and that book details
the experience of this trip but my friend Scharia and
I we were like a married couple on this trip.
I mean we were living in this small car together. Essentially,
(16:04):
we would eat out of the trunk of the car,
out of the cooler that was back there. We lived
off of the kindness of strangers. We couch served, We
were gifted, you know, hotel points to stay at verious
hotels along the way. We did do a fair bit
of camping, especially during the summer months. And you know,
we were in very close quarters for a long period
of time. We were on the road for six months.
(16:26):
We came back right around Christmas. We took a short
break and think in February we went to Hawaii and
then we booked tickets to Alaska. And I'm trying to
remember what month we went to Alaska, maybe March or April.
So we completed all fifty states in our road trip
without actually driving to Alaska, which would have been quite
the drive. Anyways, all of this to say, I'm sharing
(16:48):
this all to highlight that difference between this life of
surrender that I was taught to the life of like
following my passion, following my desire, following that little spark
of inspiration within me that I've tid talked about so much.
And then the next real turn in the story is
when I went through my divorce. So I'll I'm skipping
(17:09):
over a bunch of years here, because we went on
the road trip in twenty twelve, no sorry, twenty ten,
and then finished in twenty eleven, and then I got
married at the end of twenty eleven and was married
through twenty twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The marriage ended at
the end of twenty fifteen, and in twenty sixteen was
when my divorce was final, and that was when I
was really going through the thick of the divorce stuff. Now,
(17:32):
as I was going through that divorce stuff, I did
pick up the surrender experiment. I did pick up untethered soul,
and I was intrigued by this idea of letting go
of my personal desires. But I feel like I hadn't
really yet scratched the surface of what it would mean
to really listen within, you know, listen within to what
(17:53):
I wanted, to what I truly desired, what mattered to me,
And this had gotten somewhat distorted in the relationship, I
think because there's too much back and forth here to
really share this with any kind of clarity. But essentially,
I think my early programming around surrender what you want,
Surrender what matters to you, surrender your desires, surrender to
(18:14):
something bigger than you was part of what landed me
in a situation where I was willing to totally surrender
what was important to me in order to enter into
this relationship. Because this relationship was with a person who
claimed to be a Christian, who was actually varied about Christian,
who was a pastor at the time, who was in
the middle of planting a church. I opted into this
(18:36):
church plant There was something about this, and I'm sharing
this thinking maybe someone will resonate. There was something about
this that made me feel like this was extra spiritual somehow,
or this was extra holy because I was surrendering what
I really wanted in order to opt in to this
situation that wasn't really what I would have picked. Like
(18:58):
I wanted to be an author. I was really working
on growing my online presence, my platform. I was focused on. Yeah,
I was focused on like growing that part of my
career was top front and center for me at that
moment in my life. And yet in walks this person
who's like, come with me plant this church. We're gonna,
you know, do all this work for God. And that
(19:20):
was really compelling to me because it felt kind of
extra spiritual at the time. So then fast forward to
my divorce, I'm like going back and forth between these two, like, wait,
do I surrender what I want? Or do I follow
my desires? And at that point when I was getting divorced,
I was I had really lost track of myself. I
(19:42):
had really surrendered every aspect of myself to this person,
to what this person wanted me to do, to his dreams,
to his desires. There's so many threads I could follow
in here. I can't possibly go down all these rabbit trails.
But there's like a whole thread of like how women
are indoctrinated, how you know, women are taught to be wives,
(20:03):
how that happens in the church and out of the church,
and all of it. There's so much to unpack, and
I'm not going to get into all of it because
I really want to circle back to the idea of surrender.
But essentially, in twenty sixteen, when I encountered the surrender experiment,
I just was not in a place where I could
fully receive it because I was still trying to capture
(20:23):
the feeling of my own agency, the feeling like I
get to choose what I want my life to look like.
Come to think of it, like the whole Packing Light experience.
Going on that trip was my first go at believing
that I get to follow what matters to me, I
get to choose, like I get to decide what I
want my life to look like. And then when I
(20:46):
came to the end of that experience, that was right
when I met my now ex husband, and so I
think I had like a bit of a like there
was this expansion with Packing Light, and then I was
just like, oh, no, I should probably go back to
serving God because thought was too much for myself. What
I just experienced was too much freedom, is too much excitement.
I don't think I'm allowed to have that. So I'm
(21:07):
going to go back to this thing that feels more
familiar to me. Then I'm going through my divorce and
it's just like, oh, take two on this thing. Do
I get to follow my own heart? Do I get
to think about what I want? Do I get to
follow what matters to me? Do I get to care
about my passions, my desires? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
(21:27):
And it was a reconnection with that or reconnection with
my truest essence with myself, and a trusting myself that
I could trust that I knew the next step to take.
And then fast forward to now when everything that you know,
if you've been around here for a while, you've been
listening to episodes, or even if you go back and
listen to the Grief episode from last week, you know
(21:48):
that I have. I've had years now of following my
creative inspiration of trusting myself, of taking risks on myself,
and the the business venture pinewitzerf Club that I've talked
about ad nauseum is an example of a time where
I really trusted myself. And like I've said many times,
(22:10):
this is the first time where I trusted myself and
in some ways I wasn't met in the same way
that I have been in the past. I trusted myself.
We took this big leap on the fifty state road
trip and it turned out to be this amazing, wonderful
thing and I was completely met and we you know,
had this unreal experience and I got to publish a
(22:30):
book about it, and you know, lots of financial gain
has come to me over that. Then I took the chance,
you know, post divorce, and trusted myself and followed this path.
You can read about that in Indestructible, which is my
second memoir. And that again I was met, I met
my husband, We have these two beautiful kids. We built
this amazing life together. Then I take that same learning,
(22:54):
the same sort of protocol, the same strategy, the same framework,
the same blueprint, and apply it to Pin's our club
and it's like, oh, everything falls apart, everything crumbles. We
lose so much. And so it just has brought me
to this place and then back to back to back
to back pregnancy losses, and it has brought me to
(23:15):
this place where I have no choice but to surrender.
And one of the things that I'm learning during this
time is that surrender doesn't really have a lot of
weight to it. It's not really important until you have
something to surrender. So, in other words, you can't really
teach a child. You can, but you can't if you
(23:38):
teach a child who doesn't really know themselves yet to surrender,
to surrender their personal preferences, to surrender their desires, like
as a blanket statement all the time you say, like,
surrender what matters to you, Surrender what you think, surrender
to the will of God. They don't really know what
they're surrendering yet. But when you know yourself and trust
(23:58):
yourself and believe in yourself and then you're asked to surrender,
then it's like this massive leap of faith. It's like
this insane just well of trust that it requires. You know,
what's coming to mind too, This is a weird, weird
like connection. But what's coming to mind is mo Wana
(24:18):
wanta to. Actually, my kids have been super into ma
Wana too. They've been listening to the soundtrack a lot lately,
so it's top of mind for me. So it's possible.
This is like a bizarre connection. But as I'm talking
about it, I'm going to look up the lyrics to
this song that I've heard so so many times. I've
heard my kids sing it, I've heard it play and
it gets stuck in my head. It's from the song
(24:40):
called Beyond that's in ma Wana too. It's from the
song called Beyond that's in ma Wana too. And she
makes this comment that feels so poignant to me. So
(25:03):
I'm gonna share. I'm gonna share it with you. I'm
gonna read some of these lyrics. Actually, she's talking about
taking this second trip because in Mahana one she's called
to go out and save the heart of Dafeti and
save her village. In Mawana too, she's called to go
out again on another epic adventure. And so the first
(25:23):
time she's called, you know, her biggest obstacle is her dad,
who doesn't want her to go. Oh my gosh, I'm
seeing the parallels in my life right now as I
talk about this. The second time she goes out, her
biggest obstacle is herself, because it's not her dad that
doesn't want her to go the second time, it's herself.
She feels tied at home to her little sister. She wonders,
(25:43):
is her little sister even gonna you know? Will who
will teach her little sister basically if she's not there.
But this song says, I know these stars above the ocean.
Now new skies call me by name, and suddenly nothing
feels the same. I know the path that must be chosen,
But this is bigger than before. I'm not gonna try
(26:06):
to sing it actually, okay, she says, I know the
path that must be chosen. But this is bigger than before.
Winds have changed, tides turn me far away from shore
what waits for me? Forever? Far from home, from everything
and everyone I've ever known? What lies beyond under skies
I've never seen? Will I lose myself between my home
(26:29):
and what's unknown? If I go beyond? Leaving all I
love behind, with the future of our people still to find?
Can I go beyond? This is destiny in motion, and
it's only just begun. This is the line that I
was talking about. Now, Will this life I've worked so
hard for come undone? They're calling me. I must reply.
(26:52):
But if I leave, how could I ever say goodbye?
What lies beyond on the vast uncharted see? Will I
lose myself between all that we know right here and
what's out there beyond? She says, again, leaving all I
love behind with the future of our people still to find?
Can I go beyond? About her little sister? If I'm
not here to hold her hand? Will she grow to understand?
(27:16):
And then in the song, her grandma's voice says to her,
her grandma who's from the first movie, I'll always be
right beside you, But perhaps you're meant for more. God,
I'm getting emotional reading this. I can't see where your
story leads, but we never stop choosing who we are.
And then Maana says, I'll go beyond and although I
don't know when I will reach these sands again, because
(27:38):
I know who I am, and then she does that
warrior cry, I am Molana. Anyways. Wow, I'm getting emotional
just reading this. It's like surrendering when you really know
what you have to lose is so much bigger than
surrendering when you don't even know yourself. So there's that
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kind of youthful surrender that you do when you're quite young,
when you're just like, what do I have to lose?
Let me give this a try. And then there's the
surrender that comes when you're in your second half of
life and you have so much to lose, like everything
you've worked for with this life I've worked so hard
for come undone. And I think that's one of the
reasons I've been drawn back to this book called The
(28:23):
Surrender Experiment now in this part of my life, in
part because life has brought me to this place and
maybe you resonate with this where I don't have any
choice but to surrender. I was talking with a friend
earlier this week about the unique pain of trying to
conceive and wishing to have a baby and not being
able to for one reason or another. And she and
(28:43):
I have a little bit of a different story but
same same essence, which is like I want a baby
and it's not happening for me. And she said something
to me that has really stuck with me, which is
like she just talked about how hard it was for
her to accept that in her case, like every resource
available to her and science is on her side, like
(29:04):
they've done multiple rounds of IBF, and she's like it
makes no sense, Like we have unending resources, we have
science on our side, we have all these IBF tools,
we have you know, like the best medical care in
the world, and yet this is a fact about my
life I still can't change. And because she's so well resourced,
(29:25):
she was saying that resources, you know, have this way
of kind of tricking us into thinking that we have
control over our lives because think of how many things
you can fix with money, like pretty much everything. It's
like I have a problem, you know, I have a headache.
I can pick up this medicine. I have, like a
knee pain, I can get a surgery. There's just so
(29:46):
many things that you can fix with money, Like I
need more time, so I hire someone to do this
job for me. And this is one of those things
that reminds us that we don't have total control. Trying
to conceive and thinking about that poem that I read
on last week's episode about the well of grief, it
(30:06):
takes me back to that idea that we have to
almost be brought to the edge to be reminded. We
have to be brought to the edge of our control
to be reminded of how we truly discover ourselves. It's
like we're being invited into this journey. I had for
a long time, well for I don't know months and months,
I've had this thought like what kind of cruel God
(30:28):
would put this on my heart to want a baby
and then not make it accessible for me to to
actualize that. Like I'm just really struggling, to be honest,
that's just me being really vulnerable. I'm struggling in I
don't even know what my faith structure is now, Like
I've you know, deconstructed out of evangelicalism. I still feel
(30:52):
this strong connection to the person of Jesus. I am
definitely a deeply spiritual person. I see us as all connected.
I believe in a power that is greater than me.
I believe there's something to surrender to. I believe there
is a force of life moving through each of us,
like an energy current that is bigger than any of
(31:14):
us could imagine. I believe that. It's like, I don't
really know what I believe about God and all of that,
but I have been feeling this feeling, uncomfortable feeling of like, Okay,
if there is a God, if there is an energy
that's at work that's you know, bigger than all of us,
then like, why why can't I have a baby? Like
why can't I actualize this dream? And why would there
(31:37):
be this pull in my heart to have another child?
If that's not available to me? That seems cruel, doesn't it.
If God created me and put this desire in my
heart and it's pulling me toward this thing and that's
not achievable, It's like a big trick, is how it feels.
(31:57):
And then I thought, oh, hey, that poem of David White's.
If you didn't hear it, you can go back and
listen to me read it many times on last week's
episode is talking about how sometimes we have to be
pulled to the very edge of ourselves, to the point
where we have no choice but to surrender. We have
to be brought to that edge in order to truly
(32:19):
discover our essence, in order to truly discover who we are,
who we came here to be, how we came here
to express ourselves, what we came here to do. So
maybe the inspiration, the creative draw toward that spark toward
the baby was never about the baby. Maybe it was
(32:40):
about something utterly different. Maybe it was about me. Maybe
it was about me coming online to myself. Maybe it
was about me fully expressing. Maybe it was about helping
me to find hidden bits of grief or rage that
are in my system that need to be felt and
need to be expressed. I don't know. I don't know,
and I think this is one of the beautiful things
about this moment want a Song. It's like, we don't
(33:02):
know what is out there, what lies beyond, and yet
we take the chance to go there. And this is
really what the Surrender experiment is about. There's more to
say about the surrender experiment. There's other parts of it
that are really kind of infuriating and that feel almost
like counterintuitive, or not even counterintuitive, but like counter to
everything I believe to be true. There's a tension between
(33:27):
this concept of surrender. He shares this story, for example,
just share this, shares this story about this woman moving
onto his property. Starts with the tent, and then he
goes away on a trip and comes back and she's
built this structure on his property. And because he is
doing this experiment, the experiment is I'm going to surrender
to the flow of life no matter what happens, regardless
(33:47):
of my preferences. So because he's doing this experiment, he
can't argue with her. He chooses not to listen to
the voice in his head that says, you know, this
is my property, how come you can just you can't
just move on to someone else's property without it asking permission.
But he chooses not to listen to that voice in
his head and instead to allow the flow of life
to take him where it's trying to go. So it's
a very extreme experiment, and there's this tension between that
(34:12):
level of surrender and what I also believe to be true,
which is that you have agency. You get to decide
what the dreams and desires that you have that were
put on your heart are absolutely important and they're calling
you somewhere. And like, think of Mawana, Like she has
this dream to go out on the ocean, and her
dad's like, no, it's too dangerous. You can't go out there.
(34:33):
It's scary. You know, something terrible could happen to you.
And she's like, Dad, like, I was born to be
on the ocean. I was born to be a wayfinder.
And she feels that in her soul. So I believe
that to be true. And I think like maybe the
younger Mawana is kind of the story arc that I've
been living in my life, that that first mountain that
(34:54):
we climb in life is more about following your own
desires and chasing your dreams and figuring out like who
you are and what do you love and how do
you want to be in the world. And then I
feel that I'm on this, I'm embarking on this second
journey that maybe is more like momamo Wana to now
by totally surrendering everything, I have a lot to lose.
(35:15):
I mean I did in twenty ten, when I sold
all my stuff and went on this trip. I did
surrender everything I did, and I went on this trip,
and I followed this tiny little spark of a dream
that I had to write a book. I quit my job,
I lost my health insurance, I moved out of my apartment,
I sold all my stuff. I went on this big trip.
(35:36):
I surrendered everything, and it was scary, but it was
also exciting. And this time feels different. This time feels like, hey,
I don't have a choice whether to surrender or not,
which is part of why I picked up this book.
I'm like, Okay, I hate this lesson, but I guess
it's time to learn it, and so I picked up
the book to read it again. So that's part of
(35:58):
why I picked up the book is because I feel like
I have no choice but to surrender. And then part
of why I picked up the book, or part of
why I wanted to talk about this idea of surrender,
is the second half of it, which is beyond having
no choice but to surrender, I also feel like this
is the other half of the coin. These are two
polarities to tensions that pull on one another, that create
(36:19):
a whole that the whole is important. It is both
trust yourself deeply and yes, also surrender, surrender everything that
you have. And I think the older we get, maybe
the more difficult. The more you've achieved, the more you've accomplished,
the more agency you've deployed, the more difficult it gets
to surrender everything, which makes me think, you know, it's
(36:42):
a weird thing about Packing Light, my first book that
came out in twenty thirteen. A really weird thing about
this book is it had an unexpected draw by like
fifty year old men. I knew that my audience would
be mostly younger women, like you know. I I pictured
my one perfect reader being a younger woman, like maybe
(37:04):
college post college, kind of like early twenties ish, maybe
up to about thirty. And I did definitely have a
strong readership in that demographic. And yet there was also
a really strong readership in the like middle aged men demographic,
and that really shocked me. I was like, at first,
maybe I thought, maybe it's just because my dad is like,
(37:25):
you know, promoting it, and so maybe that's kind of why.
But the more that I talked to these readers, the
more I realized it was men who had built a
ton of success and success. And also they had built
these like really strong, sturdy, stable lives in kind of
suburban America, and we're feeling really tied down, and they
(37:50):
loved the idea of selling everything and going on this trip.
To them that was like, oh, like my dream would
be to sell everything I own and to take off
into the great unknown and to go discover myself. And
yet because they had built these strong study lives, the
drawback to that is the drawback to a strong study life,
is you just don't have a lot of freedom and flexibility.
(38:13):
So how do we find some of both? I think
is the question. In order to find our full expression,
there has to be surrender. But can you truly surrender?
Or is surrender really that valuable before you know who
you really are? I think there has to be some
sense of who I am and what I'm capable of
and what I can accomplish on my own, and then
surrender becomes meaningful. Before that, it's like surrender, What am
(38:37):
I surrendering? I don't have anything to surrender. Everything I
have in my life has been gifted to me, you know,
And so you don't understand what it would even mean
to let go and now that I am forty three
years old and I've built this life for myself, I
really do understand what it means to let go. I
really do feel the deep fear, I guess is what
(38:59):
it is is the deep fear of letting go of
all that I've built, of letting go of what I've
created so far. It's like to let go of my
own agency is terrifying, and yet it is the only
thing I believe that will take us beyond ourselves, beyond
what we can build on our own. So there's you know,
(39:19):
is it? David Brooks First Mountain, Second Mountain? He wrote
the book called the Second Mountain. I think it's maybe
I'm wrong about the author, but all in getting the
show notes there's the second mountain, second half of life.
Richard Rohre talks about the second half of life, and
then the other term for it is the second Mountain,
where on that second mountain you really start to think about, like, Okay,
so I've done everything that I can do with my
(39:42):
own kind of strength, and now how am I going
to be of service? How am I going to give back?
How am I going to let go? How am I
gonna You're really starting to think about death too, about
how am I going to exit from this life? How
do I want to go out? Do I want to
go out holding on tightly to everything that I have,
or do I I want to release my tight grip
around my stuff, around my accomplishments, around my sense of self.
(40:07):
And I feel that I'm on that back half of
life journey. I'm being asked to surrender, and there really
is a beauty to it. It's really the more I've
read Surrender Experiment, the more I've meditated on that poem
I read by David White last week, the more I
realize it's the opposite of cruel for a god to
invite you towards something that you can't have. It's actually
it's like, come look over the edge of this, Come
(40:30):
look at what's beautiful over here. Come look at the
full depths of you. Like there's more girl, There's more, sister,
There's more friend. Like come on over here, take a look.
There's way more than you ever thought. There's more that's
possible for you that you could never have visualized or
put on a vision board, or set a goal for
or dreamed up. Last thing I'll share, and then I
(40:53):
know I need to wrap up. My husband came home
from a walk the other day. He goes and does
liked moving meditations almost every morning, is up at five
and out the door and we'll walk for an hour
and then come back. And he came back and oh,
I'm gonna cry. He sat down right across from me
and he just put both of his hands on both
my shoulders and he was just like, I was just
(41:14):
thinking about you on my walk, and he's just like,
how many marathons have you run? And I was like,
well too technically, and he's like, how many half marathons?
And I was like, I don't know, like ten. How
many books have you written? I'm like four. He's like,
how many books have you goost written? I'm like ten.
He goes through this whole list of questions just like
he was just like, I want to reflect back to
(41:35):
you how truly accomplished you are, how much you've done,
like what an amazing woman you are, and he goes
I feel like this mold sickness and everything we've been
through in the last seven years has made you forget
who you are, which now that I'm saying this story
out loud, just makes me think of that moment in
(41:55):
the Mahana song. The song's called Beyond. You should go
listen to it, where she's like, I remember who I
am and then she has this war cry like I
am a Wana. It's such a cool moment in the song.
Go take a listen to it so you don't have
to listen to amusing it. He's like, I feel like this,
everything we've been through, has just made you forget who
you are. And he just looked me right, and I'm
just like, I want you to remember you know how
(42:17):
powerful you are. And I'm telling that story because yes,
and also I feel that what I'm being asked and
maybe what you're being asked in this time is to
finally let go of everything that you have created or
could create on your own has been spectacular. And also
(42:38):
you're being invited to the edge of something bigger, and
maybe it's time to surrender to the something bigger. I
feel like I just preached a forty minute sermon to myself,
so that was for me. I hope you got something
from it. I really enjoyed this. I hope you did too.
And I will see you back here next week. I
wanna write your story. Podcast
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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