Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:04] Welcome to Writing Your Resilience, the podcast for writers who want to write and live the story that sets them free. I’m your host, Lisa Cooper Ellison, a writer, transformational and trauma-informed coach, story alchemist, and fellow traveler on the winding road of healing and creativity. Each week, I’ll share tools, practices, and conversations that will help you let go of what no longer serves you as you create stories that change lives — especially your own. Together, we’ll explore how to trust your creative voice, support your mental health and resilience, work with your nervous system and unique design, and stay connected to your deepest calling as a writer, even when life gets messy. It’s time, my friends, to write and live the story that sets you free. I’m honored to walk that journey alongside you, one story and one episode at a time.
Well, hello everyone. I’m Lisa Cooper Ellison, your resident story alchemist and the host of this show. Every week, we explore the ways you can write and live the story that sets you free. And I’m so grateful to be here with you today as we talk about a very powerful topic — and that topic is surrender. We’re going to look at how you can use surrender to live more authentically and with greater sovereignty. But to begin, let’s talk about what this word means, and, more importantly, how you feel about it. So, let’s do this exercise together. If you are driving, walking down the street, or using heavy machinery, do not close your eyes — just be with the exercise in another way. But if you can, I want you to close your eyes. I want you to say the word “surrender” to yourself. You can say it in your head, say it out loud, or write it down.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:00] As you say this word a few times, I want you to notice what images pop into your head. What emotions do you feel when you say this word? What emotions are tied to it? And what happens in your body when you continue to say this word?
Lisa Cooper Ellison [3:20] I’m going to be honest — for a long time, surrender was my frenemy. It was a really hard word for me, both because of the dictionary definition of surrender and how I’d seen surrender used in various relationships and in religion. If you’re not familiar with the dictionary definition, it’s “to cease resistance to an enemy or to submit to authority.” And it was that submission part that I resisted. I resist the idea that I have to submit to anyone, and that is because I am a Sagittarius rising, and we do not like to be trapped or boxed in. We will not let that happen. So, for a long time, I resisted the idea that I had to give up who I was in order to surrender. That happened to me when I was a kid — I saw people, and I experienced this in my own life, where people with a strong will wanted you to submit to their will, which often meant divorcing myself from my feelings, my thoughts, and who I authentically am and what I authentically want to do. So, I don’t want you to do that, because that is actually unhealthy behavior. I want you to make choices to surrender in a way that feels right for you. And if the word “surrender” feels triggering — because maybe you’ve had religious trauma or encountered it in another way that feels damaging — here are a few other words you can use to help yourself with the concept. You can say “accepting life on life’s terms,” “choosing ease,” or “letting go.”
Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:00] See which one works for you and use that. I personally am going to stick with the word “surrender,” because even though I have a complicated relationship with it, when I say it, I notice that my shoulders roll down, I exhale a little, and I feel a sense of ease in my body. That is probably because I have been working with this word for 25 years now. I probably didn’t feel that before, but I’ve developed my own definition and my own practices in a way that the word works for me — but you choose what works for you.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:41] All right, so I’ve talked a little bit about my resistance to surrender and why some people resist this word, but let’s talk about how you can surrender in a way that is healthy and helps you claim your sovereignty rather than giving it away. Healthy surrender accepts life on life’s terms. It accepts other people’s limitations, it sets boundaries, and it does what is needed to keep you safe. So, here are a couple of examples of what that might look like in relationships. Let’s say that you have a parent who is invalidating. No matter what you tell that person, they are going to put you down in some way. If you share your achievements, they’re going to tell you it’s not good enough. Accepting life on life’s terms means recognizing that that is how that person behaves — that is what they do — and that they’re not going to be able to give you what you need, which is probably to have someone celebrate you and celebrate alongside you all of the accomplishments you have. And you deserve that. So, when you are surrendering to that situation, you’re saying:
Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:52] “If I continue to operate in this way, I’m going to get hurt, and I accept that — therefore I will not share things with that person. I will, however, get my needs met.” This is the healthy part. It’s not just saying “I’m not going to engage in that.” It’s saying, “I will get my needs met in another way,” and that might mean finding people who have that parental energy for you in your life and sharing your victories and accomplishments with them so that they can celebrate you and honor what you have done. Maybe you have another person in your life who acts in a volatile way. Maybe Uncle Joe goes to Thanksgiving every year, has four or five drinks, and then starts shouting at everyone. Accepting life on life’s terms and surrendering is saying, “Once he starts drinking, the belligerence is going to happen, and I accept that this is the pattern that happens in my family.”
Lisa Cooper Ellison [7:54] I surrender to that understanding, and I will make a decision that works for me in terms of whether or not I want to be around that. So, you can surrender and then take action to help protect yourself. That’s what I mean by healthy surrender. As I said earlier, unhealthy surrender is where you divorce yourself from your feelings, you stop caring for yourself, or you allow others to harm you in any way. I want you to let go of that as much as you possibly can — and keep letting go of it throughout your life — because, as we know, it’s a journey, and sometimes we do these things well and sometimes we don’t. I had a really strong pattern in my own life of allowing people to treat me in unkind ways. I knew that they behaved that way — I knew that’s what was going to happen. Maybe they’re friendly and kind for a little bit, but then there’s going to be an explosion. I knew this, and I kept going into that relationship until the explosion happened, and then I felt bad and was treated poorly. Well, I don’t do that anymore, because I’ve learned that part of surrendering is really accepting that that’s just how things are.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:10] And one of the things that helped me with this so much was having the privilege of being in the audience of the Dalai Lama. I saw him in Ithaca, New York in 2008 — this was a lifelong dream. I had learned about the Dalai Lama when I was 17 years old. I knew someone who had seen him, and I just wanted that for myself. So, I was so excited while I was there. I was in the twelfth row with the Dalai Lama, I had my notebook out, and I was just absorbing every single thing he said. There were so many nuggets of wisdom in that conversation. However, the thing that stopped me in my tracks…
Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:00] The thing that stopped me in my tracks was a question that someone else asked. The person asked the Dalai Lama, “What do you do when change isn’t possible?” And the example they gave was the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Many people from Tibet — either those who have left or who live there under Chinese occupation — would like to have sovereignty over their country. They would like the ability to continue with their traditions and their religion, things that are forbidden under Chinese rule. And so, they really want this. The Dalai Lama had to escape, and he almost lost his life in that escape, and he has lived in exile for over 50 years. So, this was a big question for him, and I was very eager to hear what he had to say. The person asked this question, and the Dalai Lama paused for a moment and he swallowed a few times. He looked at his feet, and then he looked up and said, “The first thing that you need to do in any situation is to see if there’s something that you can do. Is there something you can do to change it? And if there is, have the courage to take action.”
Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:16] “However, if no change can happen, the very best thing you can do is accept the situation and then work to not worry about it, because when you worry about a situation that you can’t change, you are caged to that situation.” I had to stop there for a moment, because my first job was to figure out how to let go of something that I couldn’t change — to learn how to accept life on life’s terms. And then that second part was to learn how to not worry about it. I’ll be honest, I am in the middle of that. I can’t say that I have it mastered, because I don’t, but it is something that I try to focus on, and it is part of my surrender practice when I come up against situations where change is not going to occur. And that doesn’t mean that if you encounter something like this, you don’t continue to wish for change. I’m sure the Dalai Lama wishes he could go back to Tibet — that’s his homeland. I’m sure he wishes that. He accepts, though, that at this time it is not possible, and even though life is long and things could change, there is no change in sight. So, he accepts what is and works to have deep compassion for himself and even for the Chinese Communists who are occupying his country.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [12:44] Listeners, I’m pausing this episode for a moment because this is too good not to mention. If you’ve written a memoir, or you’re deep in the middle of the memoir-writing process and something still isn’t working — maybe the story feels scattered or sluggish, or the experiences you’ve had are powerful but, on the page, they’re not landing the way you imagined — you’re not alone. The gap between lived experience and compelling narrative arc is a structure problem most writers face. But here’s the good news: structure is something you can learn. My Jane Friedman webinar, “Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc,” on April 29 will give you the tools to understand the shape of your story, identify what’s creating that sluggish feeling, and revise with real clarity. The registration link is in the show notes. This one is worth clearing your schedule for. And if you can’t make it, fear not — everyone will receive the recording, transcript, slides, and workbook.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:45] Okay, so I’ve talked about something that was really helpful to me when it comes to learning about surrender, but I want to talk now about the types of surrenders we may experience in our lives — and this is the reason Aidan asked this question. When I was talking with Tanya González-Ortega about Family Constellations therapy, we talked about these powerful moments of surrender that we had in our lives, and the way I talked about it, and the way Tanya talked about it, sounded like it was a spontaneous form of surrender. And I will say, in my experience, when I actually surrendered, it was spontaneous. It was like all of a sudden, I realized it was what I had to do, and — boop — I let go. Spontaneous surrender often happens because we have endured incredible pain, and often that pain has been there for a while. It could be that we’ve been carrying the burden of it for years — like boulders on our shoulders. Or it could be that it’s been this wave that kind of comes in and then gets stronger and stronger and stronger until it peaks. And we know we have to do something different. But it’s that pain that causes us to spontaneously let go and surrender.
In my case, the surrender was around having Lyme disease and my capacity to control whether or not I got well. By the time I surrendered, I had been sick for four years — a really long time — and I had been in a miserable state. I had extreme pain, depression, anxiety, all of these things happening to me, and yet I looked fine on the outside. People questioned whether I was actually sick, even though my body was breaking down. And a part of me knew I could actually die like this — that it was possible I would not get well. As I walked along a trail I frequented when I would meditate, I looked at a red-winged blackbird, and I realized that I had to be okay with how things were — had to be okay even if I never got well. And in that moment, I surrendered. I surrendered to my experience, and I became okay, and it was a huge relief. But these kinds of surrenders, fortunately, don’t happen often in our lives. Thank goodness we don’t end up in that level of pain all the time, and so we don’t have the drama of that kind of surrender.
But you can look across your life and see if there was a point where you did have that level of pain that led to a surrender. Look at that and ask: What did you do? What led to it, and how did that happen? That might give you some information about what surrender actually is for you, or how surrender has helped you grow. Those are the big ones — and really, in my case, the only reason I was able to do that was not just the pain, but the fact that I had had these little surrender practices that I had done for 15 years. I had been practicing healthy surrender for 15 years. I’m going to share some of the practices that I do, and feel free to take them on or allow yourself to be inspired by something else that comes to mind in relation to your own surrender practice.
One way that we can develop a surrender practice is to surrender to the present moment, and it’s pretty easy to do. Number one: put your phone away. Be fully with the people you’re with or with the experience. If you are watching a sunset, watch the sunset. If you’re watching the waves roll in, watch the waves roll in. If you’re talking with someone, just be with that conversation. And one of the best ways to surrender to the present moment is to laugh — because when you are in deep belly laughter, that is all there is. Think about a time when you had that deep belly laugh, and how good your body felt when you were done. How light, how free. That is the power of positive surrender to the present moment.
Another thing you can do is develop a journaling or meditation practice where you begin to notice the times when you want to control, or when you’re experiencing fear and have a deep desire for certainty. Just begin to notice when those things are happening. That’s the first part of this practice — you don’t even have to do anything else. Just build that awareness: “Oh, I want to control right now. Oh, I really would like certainty. I would like to know the answer.” And if you’re a writer, you can practice this when you send work out for submission. You all know it takes a while to find out the answer. Notice that waiting, and then once you get a handle on it — when you start experiencing that sense of wanting to control, or the need for certainty, or that fear — you can say a mantra. Mantras are just a phrase or a word that you repeat. When you repeat it consistently, it takes that fear out of your brain and begins to re-regulate your nervous system. I’ve had a number of different mantras throughout the years. These are two that I work with regularly. For a long time, I worked with the Serenity Prayer, and if you’re not familiar with it, it’s: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Sounds a lot like what the Dalai Lama said, doesn’t it? I spent years just saying that and then thinking about whether something could be changed, and whether I had the courage to do so. I just sat
Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:00] with that again and again. So that is a great prayer. If you are not Christian, you can still say it in your own way. I happen to be Buddhist — I am not Christian — and I don’t say “God” because that doesn’t resonate for me. You can adapt the wording. I give you permission to do so and to use it in whatever way you like.
Another mantra I use is from Tosha Silver’s book It’s Not Your Money. There’s a longer prayer, and I actually say the whole prayer every morning. But if I run into a place where I’m experiencing a lot of uncertainty, or that sense of fear — like, “Oh my gosh, am I going in the right direction? Do I even know what I’m doing?” — I will say this: “Let everything that needs to go, go. Let everything that needs to come, come.” I’ll say those two phrases again and again, and it opens me up to possibility. And that’s so important, because when we are stuck and trying to control a situation, we are contracting. Sometimes when we get that tunnel vision, we think we know what we want, but it may not be what we actually need. So, when we can surrender into open possibilities — allowing for what we may want to happen, or something better —
Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:23] we allow for something great to come into our lives, and that is huge. So, I’m going to give you a third mantra that I use. The first two are great with situations, but if you have a person in your life who is tricky — and I will say this was my kryptonite for a long time — I would see not just the best in someone, but the potential that I hoped would happen, maybe because I helped fix them. So, codependency, you were my copilot.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [22:08] That was my copilot for a long time. I had people in my life who were wounded, and I could see the ease and peace they could possibly have if they only followed what I thought was best. Well, here’s the thing: I don’t know what’s best for them, and I’m not in charge of their change — they are. What I have to do instead is listen to what people say and believe them. So, the mantra I use is: “I believe you.” If someone tells me they don’t want to change, or they’re an angry person, or they need to have things in control — whatever they say — in my head I will say, “I believe you. I believe that this is your reality, and I accept that about you.” And I can treat them with compassion, treat them with love, and decide whether or not that works with what I want or what aligns with who I am. I don’t have to be around angry people. So, if someone tells me they’re an angry person, I can say, “I believe you,” and then pause and ask, “Do I want to bring that into my life?” That is a form of surrender. It’s surrendering to the understanding of someone else’s reality and then making a decision to do what’s right for me. I’m surrendering to the fact that I might have to make a difficult decision — a decision I don’t want to make — and yet it might be for the very best, for myself and for that person.
So, what I hope you hear, over and over, is that surrender isn’t passive. Surrender isn’t about just accepting what is and having no boundaries around it. It is very boundaried, and that’s how we have compassion for ourselves and for other people. And again, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and here’s what I can say: the more that I can surrender — by accepting life on life’s terms, by allowing people to be who they are and accepting that and then deciding what I need — my life gets easier. Does this mean I have zero obstacles? No, it does not, because we live on Earth and we will face obstacles. But I can allow those obstacles to be opportunities to grow, even when they hurt and even when they are things I absolutely do not want to happen.
Sometimes, being in my sovereignty and being in compassion with myself and others, that form of surrender is recognizing that I have choices to make, and one of those choices is to allow someone their suffering because they get to make that choice. I may want something different for someone. I may be able to see strategies they could use to grow in certain ways, but ultimately, each person has to decide what they want and how they’re going to go about it. The reality is, I don’t know what lessons they’re here to learn. I don’t know what’s going on inside them, so I cannot make that decision.
So, as we wrap up, I just want to say a few things. What we’ve talked about today is what surrender is, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy surrender — and the fact that healthy surrender has boundaries and is about recognizing what is happening in the world, accepting it, and then taking action to care for yourself. Big surrenders are dramatic. We have them occasionally, or at least we have the opportunity to have them. But you can develop a surrender practice at any point in time, and practicing surrendering to little things — especially little pleasurable things — will allow you more ease and more grace if and when you come to those big surrender points in your life.
I would love to hear from you on this topic. If you have a different definition of surrender, or strategies you’ve used to deal with surrender in your own life that are different from anything I’ve shared, or you want to say, “You know what, I do that too” — please share your comments on YouTube. I would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you, Aidan Chase, for suggesting this topic.
If you’d like to take this a little deeper, grab your notebook and a pen and try this prompt. I want you to think about a time when you were holding on — it could be to an outcome, a relationship, a version of yourself, or a belief about how things should be.
Lisa Cooper Ellison [28:00] What were you afraid would happen if you let go? Write about what it would mean to surrender to one thing right now — not in defeat, but in trust. What might be possible if you stopped resisting?
You can make my day by sharing that insight, a question about this topic, or a topic you’d like me to consider — just like Aidan did. Just make sure you put them in the YouTube comments, and when you do, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I would absolutely love to hear from you, and I would love to have you as part of this community.
