The Risk of Surrender
The risk of surrendering to the mystery
is not that you will lose your way…
but that you will lose the one
who was trying so hard to find it.
Something in you pulls back
right at the edge.
As if letting go, even slightly,
might undo everything.
As if something essential
could be lost.
As if you might slip
into the unknown
and not quite come back
as the one you recognise.
And in a way…
that fear is not wrong.
Because what begins to fall away
is not something false in a trivial sense,
but something deeply familiar.
The one who organises,
who anticipates,
who keeps life within the edges of the known.
The one who has learned
how to move through the world
by holding just enough tension
to feel in control.
Surrender asks for that tension.
Not to be fixed,
not to be understood,
but to be released.
It does not offer reassurance
in the way the mind would like.
It does not promise clarity,
or safety,
or a better version of the same life.
It offers something far less negotiable…
and far more real.
The dissolving of the centre
you took yourself to be.
At first, this can feel like disorientation.
Like standing without ground.
Like something has gone missing.
But look more closely...
What is actually gone?
Not presence.
Not awareness.
Not the simple fact of being.
Only the structure
that claimed to be at the centre of it.
Without that centre,
life does not collapse.
It begins to move.
More freely.
More directly.
Without the constant effort
of someone trying to manage the flow.
That’s the risk.
Not that everything collapses…
but that it doesn’t.
That life keeps moving
without needing you to organise it.
That love will move where it moves.
That truth will reveal what it reveals.
That the next step will arise
without consulting the map you once trusted.
And you will be here for all of it.
Not as the one in control…
but as the space in which it unfolds.
Intimately.
Ordinarily.
Without drama.
The mystery does not take you away from life.
It reveals what was never truly there to begin with.
And what remains
is not a void to fear…
but a quiet, living openness
that has always been here,
waiting beneath the effort
of trying to be someone
who needed to hold it all together.
Join Imogen for Weekly Zoom Groups, Sunday Satsang Gatherings, Retreats and other events. Book a 1-1 Session or explore Imogen’s other offerings at beyondimogen.com.
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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen
Thank you SO so very much Imogen. I let go as I read...and relax.
yesssss