A HUNDRED TINY SURRENDERS
Something has been quietly breaking me open lately.
Or maybe, more precisely, it’s been breaking down the hardened toughness I’ve carried like armor through so much of my life.
That toughness had a purpose.
It kept me focused.
It helped me build.
It allowed me to survive—
To keep going, even when everything inside me was unraveling.
Maybe you know that kind of toughness—the kind that says:
Don’t fall apart now. Keep moving. Keep achieving. No matter what.
But something’s shifting.
That toughness is melting.
And in its place, there’s this strange, almost eerie softness.
It feels like… a return.
A return to a sort of babyhood in my heart.
No one ever told me that surrender wouldn’t come as one grand moment.
Somehow, even through all my years of yoga and meditation,
I had imagined surrender as a singular, cinematic release—
One beautiful, climactic breath that would mark the before and after.
But that’s not how it’s happening.
Here’s the kizuki—my realization:
Surrender isn’t one big moment.
It’s a hundred tiny ones.
Every single day.
It’s the breath I choose before speaking on emotional impulse.
It’s the moment I step back instead of pushing through.
It’s the soft nudge that reminds me I don’t have to brace—
I can trust.
I can open.
And that… that is the quiet kind of courage I’m learning now.
In all those years of hearing phrases like
“Let go into the flow,”
or the yogic idea of Ishvara Pranidhana—
I thought I understood surrender.
But I didn’t know it would feel like this:
Like a hundred paper cuts to the ego that once held me upright.
And simultaneously—
like being soft clay in the hands of something greater.
Honestly, I don’t know exactly where this is leading.
But I do know this:
Yes, I feel broken apart.
But more than that—
I feel softened.
So I can be shaped.
Shaped into a vessel.
For the next expansion of me.
There’s an eerie peace in all of this.
A softness that feels new.
Untouched.
Right.
And I wonder—
What if the moments when we feel weak or alone
aren’t signs of abandonment or failure—
but the exact moments we’re becoming?
What if this quiet breaking is the pathway
to remembering what it means to be held?
I’ve held my babies in their first breaths of life.
And now,
I’m learning to hold myself
through this soft passage.
Because if there’s one thing I know about myself—it’s this:
I’m not a quitter.
I’m a walker.
Through storm.
Through silence.
Through fire.
Through grace.
Through the breaking.
I keep walking.
And something tells me—
you do too.
Through the ache.
Through the stillness.
Through the not-knowing.
You keep walking.
And that?
That is more than enough.
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