I find surrender a difficult thing to write about, even really to think about if it comes to that. To attempt to understand this call to relinquish will and intention in, and through, practice is to attempt to grasp what is, by definition, ungraspable. All we can do, it seems, is – as always – to sit still.

Just sitting in open awareness begins with breathing, obviously. And breathing, in itself, involves surrender. Unless we are deliberately choosing to breathe in and out, as an act of will, then it just happens. Sitting still, we watch it happen. It always does, just as it does when we are asleep – unless perchance we have died. And that, in an odd sense, is just the risk of surrender. We have to surrender to the autonomic function of breathing, to its steady beat 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.

In just this way the coming to be and the ceasing of things continues: night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. They are just phases of the one way, two sides of the one, and to accord with the way is just to remain quiet and watch. Everything that comes to be rests in the ground of its becoming, but only when we let it be can we see this, can we ourselves rest in peace, in the ground of our own being at last.