What is surrendering? What does it mean to “let go”? Surrendering is accepting; letting go is releasing. Surrendering is acknowledging the authority of a Higher Power; letting go is trusting His authority.
What do we need to surrender to and let go of? Our past, present, and future. Our anger, resentments, fears, hopes, and dreams. Our failures, successes, hate, love, and desires. We let go of our time frame, our wants, sorrows, and joys. We release our old messages, our new ones, our defects of character, and attributes. We let go of people, things, and sometimes ourselves. We need to let go of changes, changing, and the cyclical nature of love, recovery, and life itself.
We release our guilt and shame over being not good enough, and our desire to be better and healthier. We let go of things that work out and things that don’t, things we’ve done, and things we haven’t done. We let go of our unsuccessful relationships and our healthy relationships. We let go of the good, the bad, the painful, the fun, and the exciting. We surrender to and let go of our needs. Often, a hidden need to be in pain and suffering is underneath our failed relationships, pain, and suffering. We can let go of that too. All of it must go.
Surrendering doesn’t mean we stop desiring the good. It means that after acknowledging our desires, we relinquish them and get peaceful and grateful about circumstances, people, and our lives exactly as they are today.
— Melody Beattie, Beyond Codependency, p. 240