On Surrender

February 8, 2025

I am sad today. Sad because I am exhausted from only doing a little bit yesterday, sad because I still feel weird pain in my pelvis post-surgery which is concerning because it comes from wounds that I can't see or monitor.

Yesterday, when I was coming into the house, I felt a sudden and sharp pain in my bowels that made me gasp and wince. I immediately thought, "Oh no, did a rough stool break through that thin part of my rectum that is raw from having endometriosis tissue burned off of it? Am I internally bleeding?”

And I just had to sit in the discomfort of not knowing. Either I am internally bleeding, and my body will clot it and I'll be okay, or I am internally bleeding and I'm not okay and eventually my body will communicate that it needs attention, or I'm not bleeding at all and the pain is just because I have internal wounds that are still raw and healing. There was no way for me to know, no way for me to check. I just had to surrender to the uncertainty. I just had to surrender to not knowing. 

Why does it never get easier? The surrendering to not knowing. The surrendering to uncertainty. The giving in to the unknown. I've been practicing this my entire adult life in different contexts and situations, and somehow, every time I find myself in a season of significant uncertainty, here I go again having to learn how to surrender to it. 

It feels like my experience in the float tank last week before my surgery. Peter gifted me my first experience in a sensory deprivation float tank as a way to relax before my surgery. I didn't know what to expect beyond the likely relief I would feel by not having to listen to anything but my own heartbeat for an hour, not having to engage with the outside world for a second. 

We were guided through the orientation by a classmate of mine from undergrad. One of those situations where we both kept staring at each other in that "I feel like I know you but I can't put my finger on how" way. After she showed us the giant black vaults we were supposed to shut ourselves into for a relaxing experience, we finally named it. "Were you a psychology student at UNCA?" "Yes." "Yes." Zoe was her name. Right. 

Peter and I parted ways after wishing each other peace on our journey. I showered and enjoyed the relief of what warm water feels like on my skin at any moment in the middle of January. A break from the seemingly never-ending struggle of my circulation system to provide warm blood to anything more than a foot and a half from my belly button.

I prepared myself mentally for this new experience, I was relaxed, I had showered and sipped my mint tea. I was ready to surrender -- my intention for this hour-long float. 

I opened the door to the tank, a heavy, couple-of-inches-thick beast of a thing. I stepped up and into the tank and slowly eased my body into the foot and a half of water. 

And then, immediate, searing pain.

When my sweet classmate Zoe was walking us through the orientation, she mentioned that there was ointment provided to apply on any sensitive areas or scrapes so that they would not burn in the high concentration of salt in the water. I was thinking obvious, big wounds, actively bleeding, when she said that, and I had none, so I forwent the ointment.

What I did not remember was that I had played ultimate frisbee for two and a half hours that morning in tight leggings. For those of you without vulva, prolonged running in tight pants can often cause chafing in this sensitive area, which I did not consider before submerging my ultimate-frisbee-battered cooch in water that literally 1,000 pounds of epsom salt had been dissolved in. 

Think I surrendered to that? Hell no.

I immediately jumped up and hobbled out and over to the shower, thankfully in the same room, only belonging to me, and I could immediately wash the salt off of me. (Pro tip - if you want to practice walking like Gollum, just walk as if you’re sopping wet and your bits have been singed with the lava of Mount Doom. I bet I was quite the sight). 

Once I rinsed and scrubbed and rinsed again and found relief from the burning, I chuckled to myself about my amateur mistake, and you bet your bottom dollar that I promptly applied copious amounts of A & D ointment to my *sensitive areas* to double make sure that I would not burn the shit out of my nethers when I made my second attempt to enter the float tank. 

Thankfully, the ointment did provide an effective barrier, and I was able to lower myself into the water without pain the second time. 

I slowly relaxed and released the weight of my body into the water, and surely enough, was suddenly floating, weightless, in the water. Now, mind you, all my brain knows before this moment is that every other time in the thousands of times we have entered into water, we (we being my brain and body) must immediately work together to ensure that we stay afloat with constant action, lest we risk sinking and drowning and dying before our genes are passed on. 

Even though I knew rationally that I could fully let myself relax in the float tank and there was no chance my nose and mouth would sink below the surface of the water unless I tried with significant effort, with it being my first float, I could never fully turn off whatever deep, biological part of my reptile brain that remained skeptical and on guard in case somehow Zoe was wrong. 

Therefore, my intention of surrender was not just an initial moment of surrender to the floating experience and then spending an hour in deep, reflective meditation. My experience of surrender is that with almost each new breath, I would have to re-surrender the weight of my body to the water. With each inhale, that skeptical biological part of my brain would show up as tension in the muscles in my neck out of some deep belief that they must remain hypervigilant in case something changed and they could protect my head from going under water. With each exhale, I would have to intentionally relax those muscles and re-surrender the weight of my body–especially my upper body , neck, and head–to the support of this weird, salty water that was in fact strong enough to hold me up. 

On my inhales, I was human and doubted the safety of surrender. Instead there was tension. Resistance. 

On my exhales, I oriented myself toward a new way of being, giving myself over to water over and over again. 

And this is how surrendering to the unknown continues to feel in my life. It doesn't take just one exhale or one intention of living a life of surrendering to what is, whether what is is clear or uncertain. It takes a lifetime of forgetting, tensing our muscles in preparation to fight whatever scary thing might be coming for us out of this uncertain horizon, and then remembering to exhale, to relax, to surrender to the not knowing, to give ourselves over to the never-ending dance with uncertainty. 

And sometimes, even though we set our best intentions toward living a life of surrender, when we enter into that uncertain thing filled with unknowns, we experience immediate searing pain where our biological brain takes over and tells us to get the fuck out of there before we can even process where the threat is coming from or why. And that's okay. That's human too. 

All we can do is shower off, apply some ointment to our sensitive areas to provide a barrier against the harsh environment we find ourselves in, and try to face it again. 

Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.