Learning To Surrender

I had never really heard the word spirituality before. I definitely didn’t know what it meant or that the concept of spirituality would change my life in such a profound way. I don’t think the life that I was living could have been any further away from what I now understand a spiritual life to be.

My first introduction to the topic was in my first week in treatment when I started to read The Surrender Experiment written by Michael Singer. I got introduced to this book through a post on X where someone said that “this book taught me how to quiet the noises in my head.” At the time I saw this post, the voices in my head were running rampant. My inner critic was loud; telling me how horrible of a person I was, how nobody liked me, how I was a failure and so on. After seeing this post, I thought this book would be perfect for me.

I went to treatment in a city called Ocala. Ocala is located in north central Florida. I had never heard of this place before I got here. Within the first 50 pages of the book, Michael Singer introduces himself as having grown up in Ocala, Florida. Immediately, I went to one of my friends in treatment and said “What are the chances that he is from the city that we are in right now." Immediately, I saw this as a sign.

The book goes on to talk about how Michael Singer committed to the idea of surrendering to the flow of life, taking his preferences out of his decisions and simply following whatever the universe provided for him. I was intrigued by this idea. Up to this point, my life was basically the exact opposite of the life that Michael Singer set out to live. This way of living landed me with a drug addiction, torn apart relationships and now a 3 month stay in a treatment centre.

I thought to myself, wow, I could use some of this surrender and spirituality. Little did I know the true effect that this word spirituality and surrender would have on me in the next 21+ months.

While this was my introduction to spirituality, I continued to explore the topic throughout my sobriety journey. I truly believe that this concept has been the main contributor to my growth and what has allowed me to stay sober throughout this time. While I will try to explain what the word means to me, I do not think that words can do it justice. It is a feeling that I feel deep down within my soul, an energy. I once heard that in Judaism, throughout the Torah, the word God is written with the letters Yod Hei because it cannot be put into words what this power truly means. That is how I feel about my relationship with God and about spirituality. I wish everyone could feel what spirituality has given me, because the words that I will try to put to it will never do it justice.

If I had to define spirituality, I would say that it is a way of living. It means quieting the voice inside my head and recognizing that I am not that voice. It means recognizing that I am the consciousness who hears that voice. I am the one who experiences the things that I see, hear, feel, taste, smell and so on.

This detachment from the things I feel throughout the day allows me to tone down the intensity on the things that I do come into my senses, recognizing that they are not me. This, paired with the lesson of letting go of things that are not in my control has led me toward acceptance. Acceptance of the world for the way it is, acceptance of things that I do not have control over, acceptance over things that are none of my business.

I learned that as long as I argue with the reality of what my consciousness experiences and what is going on in the world, then I will not be okay on the inside. There is a line in a different book that says “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.” For me, that rings so true. What causes disequilibrium in my psyche is when I think things should be a certain way when in reality, they are not.

This acceptance is made stronger through an idea that there is a power greater than myself that is in control all that is happening around me. Growing up going to Jewish day school my whole life, the idea of God was constantly being pushed on me. As a result, I didn’t believe in any of it. I considered myself atheist. When I was in treatment, someone said to me that if there was no power greater than us, then that would mean that everything that happens in the world around us falls on our shoulders. To me, that seemed overwhelming and so I agreed that I would be willing to believe in something greater than myself, I just didn’t believe it yet.

As time went on, life kept offering me signs that no longer allowed me to deny the fact that there was something there. I went from a full blown drug addict that could not go seconds without thinking about cocaine to being more than 21 months sober. The obsession was fully lifted from me. How does that make any sense? I choose to call this power greater than myself God for simplicity purposes. The God that I believe in may not be the same God that you believe in. The God that I believe in saved my life. The God that I believe in has guided me through the last 21 months of sobriety. The God that I believe in has put certain people in my life at different times to teach me different lessons and show me different things. The God that I believe in has put me through hard times in my life knowing that I would come out on the other side stronger.

With acceptance and a newfound belief in a God of my understanding, I am now able to see that everything that happens in life happens for a reason. Whether it’s a good reason or a bad reason is up for interpretation and takes into account our preferences, which I stated before does not have a place in my spiritual living. I can’t say whether I am better off or worse off with the things that happened in my life. What I can say that is every experience that I’ve ever had has offered me lessons, whether I choose to see it or not, whether I choose to learn from it or not.

My addiction journey along with my mother's death has led me here to writing these blogs and hopefully to one day being able to help others who are going through it. Not only that, but it also gave me an opportunity to heal. My misery did not start with the loss of my mom. It started way before that. I am so grateful for drugs and alcohol because they gave me the gift of desperation to seek help and to put action into my life to come out on the other side. Without it, I would have been left sitting in my misery until things finally got bad enough to make a change.

Looking back, there were so many God acts in my life. Most of the time, I did not see the lesson or the reason in them. Upon reflection it became more clear to me. One such example is in my last semester of my engineering degree, I failed a class. I thought that there could not be any worse thing that possibly could’ve happened to me. It was a domino effect that ended up with me losing my post-grad job that I had lined up as a project manager for a general contractor in Chicago. I was devastated. Looking back though, these two events played a large role in me still being alive today, in me still being sober today. Because I lost my job, I was able to stay in treatment for longer. I was also able to recognize that I no longer wanted to be an engineer. I still went back to school to finish off the engineering class that I failed in order to get my degree, but because I only had one class, it gave me the opportunity to take psychology classes. This allowed me to recognize my passion for the field. This was not the end of my life, like I thought, this was really the start of my life.

It’s not that God disappeared from my life, it’s simply that I didn’t want to know Him. I didn’t let Him in. Now that I have cleared my head, gotten honest with myself and healed my wounds, I am able to let this great power into my life and watch the miracles continue to happen.

This idea of spirituality is a practice. It is not something that I have perfect. It is something that I continue to work on daily.