Divine Love

This is what we are surrendering to:

"Divine love, if surrendered to, is incessant and insatiable in its desire for more of itself. It dissolves, shatters, and transforms anything that blocks it’s path toward deeper love. The isolated sense of self that we could call the ego is a by-product of our experience of the lack of love. The ego is an endless chain of habitual activity and reactivity that we mistakenly assume will lead to love. Real love is “beingness” itself. It is the essence of existence." (Patricia Albere, 

Evolutionary Collective)

Living in presence with the emotional pain body

The following quote comes from a talk by Eckhart Tolle titled "Living in presence with the emotional pain body" (www.huffingtonpost.com/eckhart-tolle/living-in-presence-with-y_b_753114.html)

"There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a "painbody," an energy entity consisting of old emotion.

It lives in human beings, and it is the emotional aspect of egoic consciousness. When the ego is amplified by the emotion of the painbody, the ego has enormous strength still -- particularly at those times. It requires very great presence so that you can be there as the space also for your painbody, when it arises." 

I practice surrendering pain by being witness to the painbody when it arises. My consciousness is the space in which the painbody arises.  I am not my pain.  I am the presence.

Surrender means...

Someone or Something Else is in charge.
I don't have to figure anything out.
I do not listen to the chatter in my mind.
There is nothing to judge.
I let things be.
I don't know anything.
I am empty.
I am purified.
I Trust.
I allow something new to come through me.
Life unfolds on its own.
I am free.
I am.

freedom versus preference

So here is Michael's reaction to coming home from a trip to find that his friend was building a house on his property:

"If I had to choose between using this real life situation to to get my way or to free myself from being bound to my way, I would choose freedom every time.  That was the essence of my experiment with life: if it's down to a matter of preference---life wins.  So I went back up the hill, strapped on an apron, and helped them build Sandy's house." (The Surrender Experiment, p. 74)

And later he says "I would never have imagined how many important life experiences of mine would end up being tied to that cabin."  (p. 74)

Life (AKA, God) knows what it is doing. The question is 'Are we willing to get our bloated nothingness out of the way so that we can let it happen?'