My Meditation Mantra: Surrendering to What’s Out of My Control

It was Carl Jung who said, “Who looks outside, dreams; Who looks inside, awakes.” 

I use yoga and meditation as a way to ‘look inside’ so to speak –  to give myself the opportunity to process things going on in my life, take a deeper look at how I’m reacting to things, and to be more mindful and set intentions for myself moving forward.

Recently, I listened to a guided meditation about surrendering to circumstances in your life. It really resonated with me, so I wanted to share these words of wisdom with you today. Here’s my paraphrasing of my favorite part of the meditation:

“Surrendering doesn’t mean accepting everything, it means coming to terms with the circumstances & events over which we have zero control. It means accepting that which we truly can’t change. When faced with something unchangeable – a wall we can’t get passed – resistance simply doesn’t work. It only creates more suffering. When we can’t change our reality, difficult as it may be, we must strive to accept it. Wisdom is knowing when to fight and when to surrender. Surrendering is a journey from outer turmoil to inner peace.”

We are all works in progress, and we all have things that would make our lives easier if we surrendered to them. What do you feel you’d benefit from surrendering to?

As of late, I’ve been working on surrendering to the fact that my baby is an unpredictable, incredibly light sleeper. Some nights she sleeps 10 hours straight, but if she’s teething or going through a leap – which seems to be every other week – she may wake up 5x in a night. Some days she takes two naps; other days she’ll only go for one – and that one may be a struggle that involves me rocking her, then going for a walk, then going for a drive. If I added up all of the time I spend trying to get her to sleep in a week, I’d go mad.

Some naps are long; some naps are short. There’s no rhyme or reason despite me creating the same conditions to keep things consistent for her… and you know what? Part of me surrendering to her unpredictable sleeping is know that there’s only so much I can do. The rest is out of my control.

When sleep isn’t coming easy for her, it can be incredibly frustrating. I’ll make a plan of what I want to accomplish during her naps, and that nap may never come that day. Or I may only get a fraction of what I wanted to get done because she woke up 30 minutes instead of 2 hours later.

It’s a continuous journey practicing acceptance of the unpredictability. Some days I take it in stride; other days I want to pull my hair. Some days I want to scream; and sometimes I actually do! But as the above meditation said, resistance doesn’t work when faced with something out of our control.

Ironically, as I’ve been writing this post, my baby has been resisting her “normal” nap time – or what had been working as of late. Here we go… I feel my jaw clench as the wheels in my brain turn while I think about how she should be sleeping, how she really needs the sleep.

And so, I’m continually working on taking it as it comes… Breathing. Accepting. Surrendering, and then surrendering some more.