Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

One of the fruits of spiritual life is the surrendered heart. I specifically use the word surrendered here because the heart has given up resistance. Although we may associate surrender with a sense of defeat, it doesn’t come with weakness. The heart doesn’t surrender because it lacks strength or integrity, but because it is consumed by love.

This is what every mystic knows: love cooks you until there is nothing left, until you release yourself into the stew, no longer a distinct and separate flavor. Rather than defeat, surrender is really the deepest relaxation. It is the relaxation of no longer trying to hold yourself separate and no longer trying to direct the course of reality. When you surrender, you let things simply be. 

This is quite a contrast with the ego-self, which is always measuring how much it gives and what it is getting back. It is like a shrewd investor trying to get the best return. The surrendered heart has stopped measuring. The surrendered heart says, “Here. Take it all. Let’s close the stall and go dancing.” We get a sense of this in Rumi and Kabir and other mystical poets. 

I look back at my own book of mystical poetry, and one of the most important threads running through it (as well as the whole basis for writing it) is surrender. Surrender through love and surrender to love. This is a theme carried through many of my other books as well. Ultimately it is what the spiritual journey about: letting go into love. 

When we surrender into love, we surrender into our own deeper nature, and this deeper nature ripens us. It saturates us with itself until the whole person is juicy with it. The ripened soul is so ripe and so wet and full that it is dripping. It cannot contain itself any longer. When we have matured this way, we have no choice but to be who and what we are.