Last night I watched an episode of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, and whilst it was very amusing — hilariously funny at times, there are also some very interesting bits. I’ve been following the show for a few series now because I find it fascinating to see the development of the participants. Yes they come into it as celebrities, and they all have a worthy cause that they are playing for. But they very quickly adapt to the rigours of the jungle and learn to surrender to their situations. They begin to show the person inside the facade of celebrity. And as one said last night that he was used to gauging how the audience is finding his delivery, but in the jungle he doesn’t know how it is coming across so he just had to be himself and hope that was working. So in effect he was surrendering to the moment because he couldn’t do anything else.
As the author of ‘One Day My Soul Just Opened Up’, Iyanla Vanzant says that surrender is an admission that you can’t make anything happen. And that surrender allows us to face the thing we fear before it becomes a reality.
Another contestant began to complain about the type of food she was getting as a vegetarian, and then she stopped, saying that she’d signed up for this and just had to accept what she was given or get out. She surrendered and ended up with a reasonable meal after all — much better than she anticipated. Vanzant also says that when we surrender, we are going through the thing that we fear, mentally going to the end which effectively releases any fear thoughts from the mind. The contestant was fearful that she wouldn’t get the type of food she enjoyed, but when she gave up that worry it worked out in the end.
How often do we stress over things that we cannot control, worry about them and make ourselves sick? I know I have a lot in the past but I’m practising learning how to surrender because I’ve found it seems to work better when I let go of control. By admitting that we cannot make a particular thing happen, we are surrendering and not letting it upset us.
When I look back at how I handled my grief after Kelly’s death, I see that I was coming from a state of fearfulness. Worrying about what other people were thinking about me, or dwelling on what I could have done to prevent her death and many more insignificant fears. As time went by I can see that I learnt to let those worries go, I surrendered because there was nothing I could do to change what had happened. As they say — hindsight is twenty twenty vision.
Now I accept that I can’t control what others think about me, but if I just do what I feel is the right thing for me and surrender to each moment, then that makes my life much more easy to handle.