Surrender to Your Real Needs and Desires
When you first think of the word surrender, you probably associate it with defeat. This is a natural association from the egos viewpoint. In any situation where struggle dominates, no one is acting out of love, and its inevitable that only one side can win.
You only have to remember the last argument you were in to realize that arriving at a place of mutual love was the furthest thing from your mind.
But there is another meaning to surrender, as you can remember from the experience of falling in love. Falling in love allows you to surrender to what you deeply desire, not what someone else is trying to impose.
Spirit has no ulterior motives. It acknowledges the other persons need, but it neither takes responsibility for that need nor opposes it. In this way the other person is seen as real, because whenever you need something, your need is your reality.
A lot of the time we are lost in unreal needs. The absence of ulterior motives is what marks spirit. The neediness of an insecure ego doesnt get disguised by other tactics. When you are in spirit you dont feel the urge to manipulate, cajole, seduce, demand, beg, or insist. You simply allow, and in that you make an open space for love to flow.
Spirit never acts in a fixed way. In general, to hear that someone you love needs you does result in fulfilling the need. There are certain loving instincts that come naturally when you are in touch with spirit:
You dont oppose. You put feelings over results. You want to help. Service gives rise to feelings of joy. You put anothers wishes on the same plane as your own.
These instincts develop and mature through surrender over the years. But these arent learned responses. Love already contains them.
Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997)
