What’s the Difference Between Complacency and Surrendering?

Here I am in a coffee shop, thinking about what has been buzzing around in my busy mind the past few weeks. I’ve been having a lot of dreams telling me to chill and surrender. But my brain constantly rebuts — well how do I surrender and not be lazy?

I’ve talked about the term surrender before, probably because for my Mars dominant chart, the idea of surrender is incredibly foreign to me. To me, when I think surrender, I think giving up, I think spiritual bypassing, I think taking the easy way out. The whole idea of letting go and letting God has been lost on me in the past, because what is the difference between surrender and spiritual bypassing?

Surrendering can sometimes feel like you’re missing an opportunity, being lazy, or even ignoring your daily chores. It can feel like giving up. It wears a mask of failure sometimes. That is because it is so polar opposite to everything we have been taught in our society — go, go, go, and when you’re tired, go some more. Hustle, hustle, hustle.

Well, here’s the thing. Nothing in nature hustles all the time. I know you’ve heard this before, but  I think it goes even beyond the earth and into the cosmos. Hear me out.

The intense dread we feel when we hear a planet is about to turn its energy inward, is a direct reflection of how we see the art of surrendering. These reactions highlight our wounding. Retrogrades are very yin, they change up the energy to an inward experience versus outward. Anything “re” is embraced — revamping, reworking, revisiting, rethinking. In a world where all we want to do is produce, can we do as the cosmos do and take a necessary turn inward? We are made of stardust, after all.

This turning inward is an act of surrender. Surrender is not throwing your hands up and saying fuck it — that’s giving up. Surrender is accepting the fact that we are not always in full control, and we need to return home to ourselves for some TLC, nourishment, and take some space to find the next step and follow the breadcrumb trail  of our path after we set something out. Whether it is a project, an intention, or a new habit, we have to surrender because we need to let it marinate and become solid, strong, and steady to us. And we do that through making room for divine intervention.

Surrender then becomes an action in itself. It is not passive, it is a state of consciousness. It is a lens. It is an invitation to let the divine come in and help out, give us direction, and bring about a solid path. It is our job to pay attention and take action and follow the clues. So surrender isn’t bypassing, it is not being complacent, it is actually a natural retrograde of a new beginning.

So be easy. Be gentle. And acknowledge all the hard work you do. Sometimes surrendering is the hardest part of our work. It involves faith, trust, awareness, and going into the unknown. It’s vulnerable. It’s scary. And as always, it’s incredibly magic. Not too lazy at all, is it?