The Greatest Form of Power

The following is an excerpt from the book, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control: a path to peace and power.

Zero-gravity, raw, utterly lost moments beckon for surrender.

Surrender is the ultimate loss of control and the greatest form of power.

Surrendering is not conceding to defeat. Surrendering is conceding to potentialities beyond your imagining.

To surrender is to affirm that you are not alone. When you surrender, you acknowledge that there is a force other than you at work, and because that force exists and you also exist, connecting to that force is possible. To surrender is to invite that connection forward.

The force you connect to doesn’t have to be God or any proxy of God; you don’t even have to name it. It can be whatever makes the sun come up, or the alchemical properties of laughter.

In secular terms, God is wherever you find meaning, and prayer is communing with that meaning. If you find meaning being out on the ocean, then getting on a boat is a form of prayer for you.

Surrender is a prayer that says, “I’m open.” It’s not uncommon to arrive at the point of surrender after being broken open.

It doesn’t matter how you arrive at the point of openness. What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.

Surrendering creates an openness wherein you welcome that which was previously not possible for you to understand, hold, or be.

When you surrender, you’re not asking for anything, you’re affirming connection to that which exists beyond your individual self. When you’re disconnected from anything beyond your individual self, you operate against a panic.

You think it’s all up to you, and in the thick of that impossible pressure, you feel that you must control everything. Because it’s not all up to you and you can’t control everything, you fail.

When you lose control and don’t surrender, what you’re left with is immutable failure. There’s nothing for the failure to transmute itself into because you don’t believe in anything other than your individual self.

When you lose control and do surrender, what you’re left with is possibility. The possibility arises because in the process of surrendering, you let go of the narcissistic notion that you are the all-knowing being who can figure out every answer to every question and thereby control the universe at large.

A 2017 study explored differences in well-being between healthy perfectionists, unhealthy perfectionists, and non-perfectionists. While healthy perfectionists reported the highest levels of meaning in their lives, unhealthy perfectionists reported the highest levels of searching for meaning.

You don’t need to believe in divine providence or anthropomorphic metaphysical labels for your life to have meaning, but you do need to believe in something. Without believing in anything, we can’t produce meaning. Without meaning, we struggle.

So many of us struggle with finding meaning - I wrote about one question to ask yourself if you want a more meaningful life, here.

Katherine Morgan Schafler is an NYC-based psychotherapist, author, and speaker. For more of her work: get her book, follow her on Instagram, subscribe to her newsletter, or visit her site.