Surrender has always seemed to me to be a strange and paradoxical thing, once thought about; yet it is necessary, as necessary as breathing, to our lives. In fact, we have to surrender to the autonomic functions of breathing and heartbeat, to their steady rhythm even when we are asleep. We have to trust the inflow and outflow, the coming and going of the breath, to keep us alive for as long as our life lasts. And it is breath that rests at the centre of practice, all contemplative practice, whether it is the conscious focus of attention, or whether it merely rests in open awareness as the home key, the safe harbour for the drifting mind.

If this is how the mind and body work together, why is it so difficult for us to trust, to surrender to the stream of becoming that time beneath all that is? Birth and death, age and illness are not separate from who we are, and nor are,the accidents of life, the mornings and evenings of our days.

Tara Brach wrote, The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.

The things and beings and events among which we live are not other, not separate, not “over there”: they too are of ourselves. How can they be otherwise, when we it is we who see them, hear of them, are touched by them? We are all of the same stuff, as Spinoza saw so clearly.

To intend to surrender is a kind of paradox. Surrender is the abnegation of intent; and yet we must decide to sit in stillness, even if we do so at the same time each day. Awareness opens onto the ground itself, which is no thing. To choose not to choose the field of awareness is that opening; I don’t know that there is another.