Have you ever surrendered? I mean, complete and total surrender. Normally, I think we view this (and experience this) with the feeling of defeat. I give up. You win. But I am talking about something different. I am talking about surrendering to something you fear, but doing so with full, conscious, joyful consent.

I recently quit my job of 14 years. I had no clear path laid out before me and no concrete idea of what I wanted to pursue… only the knowledge deep inside, that I could not continue on my current path because it lacked the one thing I knew I needed: inspiration.

I had reached a point where there was only one option… surrender. Surrender to some vague but very real intuition that if I follow my heart, even though what I was following was incredibly unclear, I will be taken care of. I have had times in my life where I have had to let go and accept the circumstances at hand, but this was a thoughtful, premeditated decision to put myself in a position where I was forced to let go by handing over control to some unseen force. Cognitively, I have always believed that we are constantly being taken care of and given exactly what we need, even (especially) when we don’t understand it. It was now time to consciously put all of my faith in this idea and with no perceived security in sight, surrender myself into the care of a higher process. And it’s been profound.

So much beauty has bubbled to the surface during this letting go… and it’s only just begun. I am being shown appreciation in ways I haven’t seen or felt in years. This in and of itself is lovely, but better still, is the feeling it is motivating inside me to put that appreciation back out in the world. The people who have surfaced, the encouragement, the ideas, these are flowing too… a support system that I didn’t even realize I had. The energy coming in is so beautiful and powerful that it makes me want to give it all back. And the gratitude I feel for all this? It is overwhelming.

There is clear differentiation between intellectualizing surrender and feeling it… cognitive thought that I believe in the perfection of the universe versus actually feeling that perfection in the fibers of my being. Gratitude, I believe, is the bridge between the head and the heart. It is so easy to take things in stride, to ignore the depth of the gifts being given, or for that matter, to even see the gifts at all. But when you choose to be grateful for each and every offering, the offerings themselves bloom bigger and stronger. The Universe, I have realized, gives us an endless supply of seeds. The gratitude we choose to embody, is the sun, soil and water.

This decision to leave my comfort zone, to surrender what I know in my head to what I know in the depth of my heart, has swelled the gratitude I feel for everything in my life exponentially. But only now am I starting to realize, it is the gratitude itself that is perpetuating all this goodness.