Practicing Surrender: Making the Abstract Real

I know what you're thinking. You've read about surrender. You understand it conceptually. You know you're supposed to let go. But how? What does that actually look like on a Tuesday morning when you're checking their social media for the third time? When you're lying awake at night replaying every conversation, trying to figure out what you did wrong or what you could do differently?

The gap between understanding surrender and living it is where most of us get stuck. It's one thing to read that you should release control. It's another to actually do it when every cell in your body is screaming that if you just try harder, explain better, wait longer, they'll finally see what you see.

As I said in the first part (read that here), surrender is a process. It happens over and over, each time going deeper. But what does that process actually entail? What are the steps we take, day by day, moment by moment?

I can tell you what I've learned about it and ways I have practiced surrender to get me to a place where I am comfortable talking about it. These aren't rules. They're not a checklist you complete and then you're done. They're invitations. Experiments. Ways of training your nervous system to remember that you can let go and thrive.

Some will resonate. Some won't. Take what serves, leave the rest. This is your journey, not mine.

But I want to say something before we begin. Something that I've only recently begun to understand.

These practices are not the destination. They're the staircase. And there comes a point where the staircase leads somewhere the practices themselves can't take you. A place beyond doing. Beyond trying. Beyond even the effort of surrendering.

You don't arrive there by working harder at letting go. You arrive there by surrendering so completely to the journey and the process it's leading you on that you stop needing to arrive anywhere at all.

I'll come back to this. Because it matters more than anything else in this piece. But first, the steps. We can't skip them. We must walk them. Each one matters. And each one, if we let it, carries us closer to that place we can't reach by trying.

Before You Begin: A Word About Time

This takes however long it takes. There's no timeline. No deadline. No point at which you should have mastered this if you were doing it right. Comparing your process to someone else's is just another form of control - measuring yourself against an imagined standard, trying to manage how you're doing on the spiritual path.

Some of these practices you'll come back to dozens of times before they click. That's normal. Expected. The spiral nature of growth means you'll think you've got it, then find yourself right back at the beginning, gripping again. This is how we learn. Each time around the spiral we go deeper, understand more, release more.

Be patient with yourself. You're undoing years, if not lifetimes, of conditioning. You're teaching your nervous system a new way of being in the world. And that doesn't happen overnight.

Practice One: Witnessing the Grip

Before you can open your hand, you have to see that it's clenched. This sounds obvious but most of us are so identified with our controlling behaviours that we don't even recognise them as controlling. We just think that's how life works. That's how you stay safe. That's how things get done.

Start by noticing where you're trying to control. At this point the task is simply to start seeing it. Are you managing how people perceive you? Carefully curating what you say so they'll see you in a particular light? Are you micromanaging your schedule, needing to know exactly what's happening and when? Are you trying to control your twin's thoughts, their feelings, their timeline? Rehearsing conversations before they happen so you can steer them the right direction? This isn't just about the twin. They are simply showing you who you are. This is about your entire world. We are all desperately trying to hold onto everything because our world feels unsafe, insecure, frightening, holding tight is a natural human response.

Write it down. Make a list. Be brutally honest. No one else needs to see this. Where in your life are you holding on? Where are you trying to force an outcome? Where does the thought of letting go make your stomach clench?

The act of naming these things, of bringing them into consciousness, begins to dissolve their power. What runs us from the shadows can only do so because we're not looking at it. Shine a light. See what's there. This is the first step. You can't surrender what you haven't acknowledged you're holding.

Practice Two: Meeting the Fear Beneath

Every controlling behaviour is protecting something. Under the control is fear. And under the fear is usually a wound. A belief formed long ago that if you're not vigilant, if you're not managing everything, something terrible will happen.

Once you've identified where you're gripping, ask yourself: what am I afraid will happen if I let go here? Really sit with this question. Not in your head where you can rationalise and explain it away, but in your body. Feel where the fear lives. Is it in your chest, tight and constricted? Your throat, like you can't breathe? Your belly, churning and uncertain? What's the story at the root of this fear? Where did this attempt to control begin? What experiences have you had that have reinforced it?

The body remembers what the mind has rationalised away. Your nervous system has been shaped by every experience you've ever had. If you learned early that love was conditional, that safety couldn't be trusted, that you had to perform to be worthy, your body carries that knowing. It will brace against threat even when the threat is long past.

So feel it. Let yourself feel the fear without trying to fix it or make it go away. What is it trying to protect you from? Rejection? Abandonment? Being seen as a failure? Not being enough?

You might want to write this down too. Or speak it out loud to yourself. "I'm afraid that if I let go of controlling how they see me, they'll see who I really am and leave." "I'm afraid that if I stop managing everything, it will all fall apart." Whatever your fear is, name it. Bring it into the light.

This isn't about making the fear go away, this is simply about meeting it. Acknowledging it. Understanding that it's been trying to keep you safe in the only way it knows how. Thank it for its service. And then gently begin to question whether it's still serving you or whether it's keeping you trapped.

I have a couple of practices that I have used over and over in order to get to the root of these wounds and see how I hold them in my body and the patterns they have initiated in my life. Find them here.

Practice Three: Micro-Surrenders

You can't leap from the bottom of the staircase to the top. The nervous system doesn't work that way. Trust is built incrementally, through repeated experiences of safety and lived evidence that you can let go and survive.

This is where micro-surrenders come in. Start absurdly small. So small it feels almost silly. Let someone else choose where you're going for dinner. Don't check your email first thing in the morning. Go for a walk without deciding beforehand where you're going or how long you'll be. Sit in silence for five minutes without reaching for your phone.

Resist the urge to plan a conversation before it happens. Let someone help you without micromanaging how they do it. Say "I don't know" when you genuinely don't instead of scrambling to have an answer.

These feel trivial but they're not. Each one is revolutionary. Each micro-surrender is evidence accumulating in your body that you can relinquish control and nothing catastrophic happens. The world doesn't end. You don't fall apart. Life continues.

Your nervous system learns through experience, not logic. You can tell yourself a thousand times that it's safe to let go, but until you actually do it and live through it, the body won't believe you. So give it experiences. Small ones at first. Let them build.

Over time you'll find yourself able to surrender bigger things because the foundation of trust has been laid through all these small acts of letting go.

I was given a practice by my spirit guides at the point that I embraced the awareness that this journey was here to teach me and lead me to freedom that encourages micro surrenders in a fun way. Find it detailed in Practice 7.

Practice Four: Cultivating the Witness

Presence is the antidote to the tyranny of past and future. But presence isn't achieved through force, it's revealed when we stop abandoning the now.

Most of us live anywhere but here. We're replaying yesterday's conversation, analysing what we should have said. We're planning tomorrow's interaction, rehearsing how we'll handle it. We're fantasising about a future where everything's resolved or catastrophising about all the ways it could go wrong. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but now.

The practice is simple but not easy. When you notice you've left the present moment, gently return. Just a quiet recognition: "Ah, I'm thinking about what might happen next month. Here is my breath. Here are my hands. Here is this moment, the only one that actually exists."

I find that the best way to do this is to simply take notice of where you are and what is going on in your body. Look around and notice and name some things you can see. What can you hear? Take a sniff. What can you smell? Breathe deep and feel your belly rise. It is so easy to get lost in your head. I found it helpful when practicing this to have something that reminded me to anchor in to the now - a little star drawn on my hand, a note on my phone screen reminding me to breathe. What could you do to prompt yourself to come into the moment?

You'll do this a thousand times a day at first. That's fine. That's the practice. Notice you've wandered. Come back. Notice. Come back. Over and over.

What you're developing is the witness. The part of you that can observe your thoughts and feelings without being completely identified with them. The part that can say, "I'm having the thought that I'm not good enough" rather than "I'm not good enough."

This witness becomes your ground. And from ground, surrender is possible. Because you're no longer swept away by every fear, every fantasy, every what-if. You can see them for what they are - movements of mind - and choose whether to engage or let them pass.

Start with the breath. It's always here. When you're lost in past or future, feeling into your breath brings you back.

Practice Five: Gathering Evidence of Love

You cannot surrender to what you don't trust. And you cannot trust a universe you believe wants to harm you or doesn't care whether you exist.

This is where the wound of unworthiness becomes crucial. If you believe at your core that you're not loveable, that you're not worthy of support, that you're fundamentally alone in a hostile or indifferent universe, then surrender feels like throwing yourself off a cliff into nothing.

So you need to gather evidence that contradicts this belief. Not the big, dramatic, life-changing miracles - though those are lovely when they come. The small things. The everyday proof that you are held, that you are supported, that the universe is not your enemy.

Keep a list. Write it down. Your mind will want to dismiss these as coincidence, as nothing special, as things that would have happened anyway. Your work is to let them accumulate until the weight of evidence begins to shift the narrative.

What goes on the list? The stranger who smiled at you when you needed it. The friend who texted just as you were thinking of them. The way your body heals a cut without any conscious effort on your part. The synchronicity that arrived exactly when you needed it - the song on the radio, the book that fell off the shelf, the conversation you overheard. The parking space that opened up. The email that came through at just the right time...

These aren't trivial. They're The Universe speaking to you in the language of the everyday. Showing you, over and over, that you are not alone. That you are supported. That there is an intelligence at work beyond your small self's ability to orchestrate.

The Universe has been supporting you all along. You just couldn't see it through the lens of unworthiness, through the belief that you have to do everything yourself or it won't get done.

Collecting this evidence isn't about positive thinking or spiritual bypassing. It's about training yourself to see what's actually there. What's always been there. The love. The support. The care.

I have a couple of stories of events that happened to evidence this for myself. I recorded them to remind me how magical The Universe can be when we put ourselves in its hands and trust that what is happening is always happening for us. We are always held. Read them here:

A Magic Moment On The Twin Flame Journey

A Magical Story - penned in 2019

Practice Six: Embodying Self-Love as Practice

Surrender requires that you trust you are loveable because love is your nature, the essence of your being. But this can't remain conceptual. It has to be lived. So what does it look like to treat yourself as someone inherently worthy of love?

Start with how you speak to yourself. Would you talk to someone you cherish the way you talk to yourself? When you make a mistake, do you meet it with compassion or harsh criticism? When you're struggling, do you offer yourself kindness or demand that you should be further along by now?

Practice speaking to yourself as you would to a beloved friend or a child. When the inner critic starts, pause. Notice. Then choose different words, genuine care. "This is hard. I'm doing the best I can. It's okay to struggle."

Set boundaries because you matter - it's okay to say no! Rest without having to justify it or earn it through productivity first. Let yourself take up space. Have preferences.

This might feel false at first, like you're pretending, but do it anyway. The body and mind learns through repetition. You're teaching your nervous system a new pattern.

You are worthy of care.

Your needs matter.

You don't have to perform or achieve or be perfect to deserve kindness.

Feed yourself food that nourishes you. Move your body in ways that feel good. Wear clothes that make you feel comfortable in your skin. Create space and beauty around you. Treat yourself as someone who deserves to be cared for.

Small acts. Daily. Over time they add up to a fundamental shift in how you relate to yourself. And when you genuinely believe you are worthy of love, surrender becomes possible. Because you know that whatever happens, you will not abandon yourself.

Practice Seven: Letting The Universe Lead

One of the most powerful practices I discovered came to me from spirit when I committed to learning what I needed to on the journey and learned to listen.

I started taking what could be called "surrender days." When I had a free day (usually when my kids were at their Dad's for the weekend) I'd wake up and ask The Universe (or God, or your higher self, whatever language feels right to you) to take me on an adventure and give me what I needed. Then I'd follow my intuition. And just listen to the thoughts that appeared in my mind - the little inner prompts it's so easy to talk ourselves out of.

"Go left here." Even if left makes no logical sense. "Walk into that shop." Even if you weren't planning to. "Take the longer route." Even if it's getting late.

No plan. No destination. Just listening and following.

Here's what I learned: The Universe has a wicked sense of humour and a deep commitment to teaching through experience. Almost every single one of these days involved some kind of challenge. A rainstorm when I hadn't brought a coat. A dead end that meant retracing my steps for miles. Getting lost just as darkness was starting to fall.

Each time, the fear would rise. The voice that says, "See? This is why you need to be in control. This is what happens when you let go."

And each time I was tested, I had to choose. Trust that I was held, or panic and try to force my way out.

I never failed to find my way back. Sometimes I'd retrace my steps till I was back on a familiar path. Sometimes I'd break through the fear and discover a shortcut I'd never have found if I'd stuck to the plan. Sometimes a stranger would appear with exactly the help I needed at exactly the right moment.

Every single day ended well. Far better than I could have orchestrated myself. And I'd arrive home - drenched, exhausted, exhilarated - in gratitude. In awe. In the visceral knowing that I am supported.

This practice taught me what a hundred books couldn't: The Universe has your back. Not in some abstract, spiritual-bypassing way. In a real, tangible, "you will not be abandoned in the dark" way.

You don't have to do full days. Start with an afternoon. An hour even. Ask to be shown what you need. Then follow the prompts. Trust the detours. Meet the challenges as invitations rather than evidence that you're doing it wrong.

The point isn't to have a perfect experience. The point is to accumulate evidence in your body that you can let go and survive. That you can trust and be met. And discover that when you stop trying to control everything, life becomes a magical adventure rather than a battle.

Practice Eight: Somatic Release

Your body holds everything. The tension in your shoulders from years of carrying responsibility. The tightness in your jaw from all the things you haven't said. The shallow breathing from constantly bracing for impact.

Surrender has to happen in the body, not just the mind. You can understand surrender intellectually and still be physically armoured against it. Your nervous system, shaped by every experience of threat or rejection or abandonment, will keep you in a state of vigilance until it learns - through felt experience - that it's safe to soften.

So practice releasing somatically. This doesn't have to be complicated. Start with your breath. Most of us breathe shallow, high in the chest, the breath of someone constantly on alert. Practice breathing low into your belly. Make the exhale longer than the inhale, this activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the one that says "you're safe, you can rest."

Scan your body. Where are you holding tension? Your shoulders? Your neck? Your belly? Breathe into those places to bring awareness. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes the body needs permission to let go, and attention is that permission.

Move. Shake. Dance. Let your body discharge the energy it's been holding. Put on music and allow your body to move as it wishes, without trying to look good or do it right. Just let your body move however it wants to. This is ancient wisdom - cultures across time have known that the body needs to move to release what it's carrying. Learning to trust in the wisdom of your body is another act of surrender. Trust your body knows what to do and let it - without interfering.

Place your hand on your heart. Feel the warmth. Speak kindly to yourself while you do it. This simple gesture - self-touch combined with compassion - tells your nervous system you're not alone. You're not under threat. You're being cared for.

The body learns safety through repetition. Through experiences of softening and discovering nothing terrible happens. Through moments of release followed by the recognition that you're still here, still okay, still held.

There's some inner child work that sits alongside this practice. The child in you didn't feel safe for a myriad of reasons, from the tiny to the hugely traumatic. Google "inner child" and let The Universe guide you to what you need. This is another way to practice surrender - to trust that you are always being guided and the answers you need will be brought to you - all you have to do is ask the question and let your intuition lead you.

Practice Nine: Working with Thoughts

Your thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts. But when we're identified with them, when we believe every thought that crosses our mind is truth, we're trapped.

There is a simple but profound method of inquiry that can help here. When you notice a thought that's causing you suffering - "They should want to be with me," "I'll never be happy without them," "I'm not enough" - stop and ask:

Is it true? Can you absolutely know it's true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?

Most of our suffering comes from believing thoughts that may or may not be true. When you question them, when you create space between you and the thought, something shifts. You're no longer the thought. You're the awareness witnessing the thought.

Another practice: write down your controlling thoughts. All the ways you think things should be. How they should act. What should happen. When it should happen. Get it all out on paper. Then burn it. Literally. The ritual matters. You're releasing these thoughts back to The Universe. You're saying, "I don't know what's best here. I'm willing to be shown."

Or try this: at the end of each day, write one line. "Today the universe supported me by..." Even on the hard days, find something. The body that kept breathing without you having to think about it. The sun that rose. The water that came out of the tap. The person who let you merge in traffic.

You're training your mind to look for support instead of threat. To notice what's working instead of what's wrong.

There's more on this in this essay, along with some more specific practices about working to change your mind:

Twin Flame Journey Truths

Practice Ten: Sitting with Mystery

Most of us are terrified of not knowing. We'd rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all. At least then we can plan. Prepare. Control.

But surrender requires that we make peace with Mystery. With the fundamental uncertainty of existence. With not knowing how things will unfold, when they'll happen, if they'll happen the way we hope.

Practice sitting with this. In meditation if that works for you, but it doesn't have to be formal. Just moments throughout the day where you consciously choose not to know. Where you resist the urge to figure it out, work it out, plan it out.

Ask the question:

"What's going to happen with this connection?"

"How do I make them see?"

"When will this pain end?"

and then don't scramble for answers. Sit in the question. Let it be unanswered.

Say out loud, "I don't know what's best here. Show me." And then wait. Active waiting. Attentive. Open.

This is perhaps the hardest practice for those of us who've learned that if we don't have all the answers, we're not safe. But Mystery isn't the enemy. Mystery is where the divine lives. Where miracles happen. Where things unfold in ways we never could have orchestrated.

Jung taught active imagination - dialoguing with the parts of yourself you don't understand. The wounded part. The controlling part. The part that's terrified. Sit with a journal and ask them questions. Let them answer. You might be surprised what emerges when you stop trying to already know.

The goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty. It's to stop fighting it. To learn you can live in the questions and not need answers.

When Practices Become Performance

Here's the trap: you can turn these practices into another way to prove your worth. Another thing to get right. Another measure of whether you're doing this journey correctly.

If you find yourself checking off practices like a to-do list, if you're comparing your progress to others, if you're judging yourself for not surrendering fast enough or well enough, you've missed the point. You've turned surrender into another form of control.

The practices aren't about achievement. They're not about becoming someone else or reaching some spiritual destination. They're about coming home to yourself. Remembering what you've always been beneath the armour and the wounds and the controlling behaviours.

Some days you'll practice. Some days you won't. Some days you'll feel like you're making progress. Some days you'll feel like you're right back at the beginning. All of this is normal. Expected. Part of the process.

Be gentle with yourself. You're not broken. You're not doing it wrong. You're exactly where you need to be on this staircase. Each step matters. Each stumble teaches. Each time you grip again after letting go is just another opportunity to practice surrender.

The point isn't perfection. It's direction. Are you moving, however slowly, towards trust? Towards softening? Towards the recognition that you are held?

That's enough.

Where the Practices Lead

And now I want to come back to what I said at the beginning. Because this is where it all lives.

These practices - all ten of them - are the staircase. They matter. They're not optional. You can't skip them and leap to what I'm about to describe. The nervous system needs its evidence. The body needs its safety. The mind needs its gradual loosening of grip. Each practice is a step, and each step is necessary.

But the staircase leads somewhere.

And where it leads is not another practice. It's not something you do. You can't work towards it. You can't even recognise it's happening until after the fact, because the "you" that would recognise it is precisely the thing that dissolves.

Here's what I mean.

Every time you surrender something loosens. A belief. A story. A grip on how things should be. And each loosening carries you a little further down the spiral. Each one strips away a little more of what isn't yours.

And at some point you surrender not just to the outcome, not just to the timeline, not just to the pain. You surrender to the journey itself. To the process. To whatever intelligence is moving through your life, dismantling and rebuilding you.

You stop asking "why is this happening to me?" You stop trying to make it mean something. You stop needing to understand where it's going or what it's for. You simply... let it move you.

And something extraordinary happens in that letting. The stories begin to fall away on their own. You stopped needing them. The twin flame story. The story of who you are. The story of what you're supposed to become.

This isn't something I can give you a practice for. Because a practice implies effort. Implies a "you" doing something. And this place - this surrender beneath surrender - is precisely where the doing falls away.

It's where you stop trying to surrender and simply find yourself surrendered. You know there's more to surrender. There's always more. But you're surrendered to that. It's why we're here.

The question "how do I let go?" dissolves, because there's no one left to hold on.

The practices carry you there. The spiral carries you there. Each layer of surrender, each loop around the wound, each time you release what no longer serves - all of it is the journey leading you to a place beyond the journey itself.

You can't aim for it. In fact, aiming for it is the surest way to miss it. It arrives when you stop trying.

There's more of that in this:

The Surrender Beneath Surrender: Waking Up From the Twin Flame Dream

A Final Practice: Letting Go For Now

This might be the most important practice for the twin flame journey specifically. Which is why it's in this essay as well as this one. It bears repeating.

Letting go doesn't have to mean forever. It can mean for now.

For now, this isn't working out the way you want it to. For now, they're not available. For now, pursuing this is causing you more pain than peace. For now, you need to live your life without this connection being the centre of it.

That "for now" makes all the difference. Because it doesn't ask you to deny what you know. It doesn't demand you stop believing in the connection or pretend it wasn't real. It just asks you to stop living your entire life in waiting mode. To stop putting everything on hold for a future that may or may not arrive on your timeline.

This is the practice: Accept that right now, in this moment, this isn't working out as you desire. They've chosen someone else. They've asked for space. They don't see what you see. Whatever the specific circumstances, the reality is that union isn't happening right now.

So let go for now.

Stop checking their social media. For now. Stop reaching out hoping this time will be different. For now. Stop making decisions based on "but what if they come back." For now.

Let your life unfold without needing to know if they'll be in it or not. Make choices based on what feels right for you today, not on positioning yourself for a reunion that might be years away or might never come in the form you're imagining.

If it's meant to be, it will be when the timing is right. But you can't live your entire life in the gap between now and then. You can't put your happiness, your growth, your actual lived experience on hold waiting for someone who isn't available.

Find gratitude for what you have now. Not what you wish you had. Not what you believe you should have. What you actually have. Your health. Your home. The people who are present and available. The opportunities in front of you.

Stop trying to force your current reality into being something it clearly isn't. You're not in union. You're not in relationship. You might not even be in contact. Accept that. Feel the grief of it. And then turn your attention to what is actually here.

This doesn't mean you stop believing in the connection. It doesn't mean you've given up or failed. It means you're surrendering the timeline. The how. The when. The if it will look the way you think it should.

For now, you live. You let life happen. You stop trying to control how it unfolds or who you're meant to spend it with. You trust that if this connection is meant to manifest in the 3D, it will happen in its own time and that time is not controlled by your vigilance or your waiting.

And here's what often happens: when you truly let go for now, when you stop making them the centre of your world and start actually living, space opens up. Not because you've played a game or used reverse psychology. But because you've stopped blocking your own life with your attachment to a specific outcome.

Maybe they come back. Maybe they don't. Maybe something even better unfolds that you couldn't have imagined because you were so fixated on this one person, this one path.

Free Twin Flame Resources

If you'd like to explore this journey more deeply, I’ve written a series of essays to help you navigate the big questions that arise - and to support you as you begin the inner work this path asks of you. They ALL encourage you to remember that you are the expert on you and you have everything you need within to walk this path with grace and to a successful destination.

Twin Flame Q&A's | Conversations

Find out more about me and support I can offer here.