The Art of Surrender

The Art of Surrender, by Michael Singer she said. That's the one I'd recommend. This was a few years ago, pre-covid. I was catching up with a group of friends at the Opera Bar and ended up talking to a complete stranger at the next table. We started talking about books, and which one she'd recommend the most - and that when she recommended the Art of Surrender.

It was my a late Friday night. I'd finished the work week with a need for a strong drink, and I'd allowed myself a glass of something with my friends before heading back home.

That was the whole conversation. Ten minutes, maybe. She told me about the book, I told her nothing useful about myself. I did not get her name, or if I did I did not keep it. I remember she was Australian, she worked in something to do with hospitals, and she said the book had come to her at a time when she needed it, and she thought I looked like I might too.

I wasn't sure what that meant. I bought the book anyway.

The Surrender Experiment sat on my shelf for about six months before I opened it.

When I did open it, I read it over two evenings, and then I read it again the following week. I have not read a book twice in a row like that since I was a student.

Michael Singer is not a spiritual writer in the way that phrase usually implies. He was a Princeton-trained economist who decided, in his twenties, to try a small experiment: instead of running his life based on what he wanted or feared, he would say yes to whatever life put in front of him, whether he liked it or not, and see where that took him. He is not a saint. He is not a guru. He is a slightly awkward man who tried something most of us never try and wrote down what happened.

What happened was that he kept ending up in rooms he would never have walked into voluntarily. Someone asked him to teach a yoga class, he hated teaching yoga, he said yes. Someone asked him to build a piece of software, he had no interest in building software, he said yes. That software became one of the first electronic medical records systems in the United States and eventually a billion-dollar company. He did not plan any of it. He just stopped saying no to what arrived.

What shifted in me was smaller than any of that. It was a sentence early in the book where he describes the voice in his head, the one that narrates everything, the one that is always worrying or planning or rehearsing the next conversation. He pointed out that this voice is not actually me; it is just a voice. I have been listening to it my whole life as if its opinions were my opinions. But if I can notice it, there must be something doing the noticing, and that something is quieter.

It is embarrassing to write down, because it sounds like nothing when you write it down. But there is a difference between understanding an idea and having an idea arrive. This one arrived. For a few days after I finished the book I walked around feeling like someone had opened a window in a room I had been living in for forty years without realising it had a window.

The real test came five years later.

My mother died in April 2020, in Kerala, during the first hard lockdown. I was in Sydney. The airports were shut, the borders were shut, and for the first week of her illness I could not go.

I am not going to write much about what that felt like, or what those days looked like. Some things do not belong on the page, and grief is allergic to prose that works too hard.

What I will say is this. There is a version of those three weeks where I would have spent every one of them fighting what was happening. Arguing with officials, writing angry emails, running scenarios in which I got there earlier and saved her, rehearsing blame for everyone who had kept me out, building an elaborate internal case against the universe. I know that version because I could feel it ready to happen. Most of my life, that is the version that would have happened.

Instead, and I still do not entirely understand how, something quieter was available. Not calm. Not peace. Not any of the words that people who have not been through it reach for. But there was a small distance between the situation and me, half a step of distance, that I had not had before. The voice in my head was doing all its usual things, and I could hear it, and I did not have to obey it. I could make the phone calls that needed making, and I could sit with my sister on the phone when there was nothing to say, and I could get through the day without tearing myself up emotionally over the guilt and the pain.

This is not a technique. I want to be honest about that. I had been meditating, but I was not an expert. I had read a book five years earlier, and for reasons I cannot fully account for, something the book had pointed at was there when I needed it.

Singer calls this surrender. I am not sure surrender is the right word in English, because the word in English carries connotations of defeat, of lying down, of giving up the fight. What Singer means is closer to stopping the fight you were never going to win, so that you can be present for the fight you are actually in. My mother had passed awar, and my fighting the lockdown was not bringing her back. What my fighting was doing was making me unavailable to everyone around me, and to myself.

Once I stopped fighting the thing I could not fight, I could be in the thing I was actually in.

I think of this now as the only useful definition of surrender I have. It is not passivity, it is not spiritual bypassing, it is not letting go in the way wellness culture means letting go. It is the specific act of noticing what part of your suffering is the situation and what part is your argument with the situation, and putting the argument down.

The argument is heavy. The situation is usually lighter than the argument.

I still do this badly. I lose it for weeks at a time. I get an email that makes me furious, and the voice in my head runs elaborate internal courtrooms for three days, and it takes me that long to notice I am in one. But the window the book opened has not closed. I know it is there. I know the quieter thing is still available. I know that most of what I experience as unbearable is the argument, not the thing.

If you are carrying something hard right now, I am not going to tell you to let go of it. That advice has always annoyed me. What I will say is that the argument you are having with the thing is doing more of your damage than the thing is. Put down the argument. The thing is still there; you can now be with it.

The woman at Opera Bar was right. She could not have known why, and she did not need to. She just saw someone who looked like he could use the book, and she said so. That is the whole of the debt I owe her, and I cannot pay it back because I do not know her name. I can only pass it on.

So: the book is The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer, and if you have the sense I had that night on the wharf that someone ought to be handing you this, consider this the handing.

A note for the curious

The book. Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection (Harmony, 2015). If you only read one, read this one. It is short and it is not what you expect a "spiritual" book to be; it reads more like a memoir of a confused man who keeps saying yes. That is its power.

The companion book. Singer's earlier The Untethered Soul (2007) is where the "voice in your head is not you" work sits. If The Surrender Experiment is the practice, The Untethered Soul is the mechanics underneath it. I'd recommend reading them in that order, despite the chronology. The practice is easier to come to first.

On the circumstance-versus-response distinction. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946). The one line that carries the whole book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." Frankl earned that sentence in conditions none of us will ever face. It is worth reading him to understand the weight it carries.

On grief specifically. If you are reading this because something is happening in your life right now rather than because you are curious, the book I would hand you is not a spiritual one. It is C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed (1961), written in the months after his wife's death. Lewis is unsparing about how useless his own theology felt in the middle of it, and that honesty is the point. Grief is not a problem to be solved, and most of the books about it are worse than useless. This one is not.

On the broader traditions the piece leans against. The Buddhist teaching that resistance to reality creates the second arrow of suffering (the first arrow being the pain itself) is the closest non-Western frame for what Singer is pointing at. Access to Insight has the primary texts. Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now covers similar ground in more accessible language; Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance adds the clinical-psychological layer. I have not leaned on any of these in this piece, but if Singer lands for you, they are the adjacent shelves.

I owe the woman at Opera Bar more than a footnote. But a footnote is what I can give her, and she is the first name in it.