How to Surrender

By Deepak Chopra

Whenever you feel yourself having a reaction of judgment, rejection, or resistance, imagine the opposite. Instead of seeing an adversary, view your partner as totally on your side. Don’t focus on what he or she has done to irritate you; reframe it as an act of pure love, brought into being to teach you the perfect lesson you need to learn at just that moment. This isn’t a mind game or a trick: at the level of spirit your beloved acts only from love, holding your highest good at heart.

Resistance is like a wall, holding back the flow of love. Love is the wave that brings forgiveness, kindness, and trust from the level of spirit. You can’t create these things. You can only tune in to them, which is why you need to remake your daily battles into opportunities for spirit. Every sliver of time opens onto the timeless. Can you allow yourself to slip through?

First and foremost, this is about seeing each other in a new light. Needs don’t just go away. On the other hand, projections of blame should go away; there isn’t any reason, except in your perception, to make each other feel wrong. You must stop feeding the monster. This inner being who keeps screaming, ‘What about me?’ is a kind of monster, a distorted outgrowth of your ego.

Imagine the monster. The name of this beast is resistance. Now think of a situation where you absolutely didn’t want to go along with your spouse’s will. See this monster coming forward to defend you by putting up a wall of denial, a thousand reasons why you are right and your partner wrong, a ferocious display of withering disapproval.

How do you feel when this happens? Hard. Angry. Furious. Insecure. Empty. Alone. All are layers of the same response. On the surface the monster of resistance expresses anger and hardness, but this is only to protect the insecurity and loneliness lurking underneath. If you peel away the layers, you find that resistance is actually born of fear, and fear comes from having been deeply hurt in the past.

Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997).

6 Signs of Spiritual Transformations

The six emergent spiritual properties are clarity of awareness, knowingness, reverence for life, absence of violence, fearlessness and wholeness.

1. Clarity means being awake to yourself around the clock, in waking, sleeping and dreaming. Instead of being overshadowed by externals, your awareness is always open to itself. Clarity feels totally alert, and carefree.
2. Knowingness means being in touch with the level of the mind where every question is answered. It is related to genius, although knowingness isn't focused on music, mathematics, or other specific subjects. Your area of knowledge is life itself and the movement of consciousness on every level. Knowingness feels wise, confident, unshakable, and yet humble.
3. Reverence for life means being in touch with the life force. You feel the same power flowing through you as through every living thing; even the dust in a beam of light dances to the same rhythm. Reverence for life feels warm, connected and exhilarating.
4. Non-violence means being in harmony with every action. There is no opposition between what you do and what anyone else does. Your desires do not clash with another person's well-being. When you look around you see conflict in the world at large but not in your world. You emanate peace like a force field that subdues conflict in your surroundings. Non-violence feels peaceful, still and completely without resistance.
5. Fearlessness means total security. Fear is a jolt from the past; it reminds us of the moment when we left a place of belonging and found ourselves in a place of vulnerability. The Bhagavad Gita says that fear is born of separation, implying that the original cause of fear was the loss of unity. Ultimately, that separation is not a fall from grace but a loss of who you really are. To be fearless feels, therefore, like yourself.
6. Wholeness means including everything, leaving nothing out. At present we each experience life sliced up into bits of time, bits of experience, bits of activity. We cling to our limited sense of self to protect the slices from falling apart. But it's impossible to find continuity in this way, hard as the ego tries in its struggle to make life hang together. Wholeness is a state beyond personality. It emerges when "I am" as it applies to you is the same "I am" everywhere. Wholeness feels solid, eternal, without beginning or end.