Surrendering to the New Year
By Amy RizottoIn years past, come January 1st I would create a list of New Year's resolutions. They all seemed realistic at the time I thoughtfully and meticulously scribbled them down. Inevitably though, I never made it through a list and rarely could I genuinely tick even one of the many lofty boxes. While I do think there’s a place for setting intentions - or in DC-speak, creating SMART goals (I can feel the eye rolls from all those who have had to sit through one of those painful office PowerPoints) - January 1st is not that time for me.Perhaps it’s because yoga is both my livelihood and my chosen lens to view most life experiences, but for me the New Year is a time for surrender - or ishvara pranidhana for all my Yoga Sutra readers out there. Let these words wash over you and you’ll get a sense of the kind of surrender I mean:
“Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled. So wildflowers may come up where you are. You have been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.”- Rumi
Surrender, as it turns out, is hard. We live in a culture of control. Many manifestations of it are self-inflicted, but control is an intoxicating and powerful nonetheless. “Letting go” is a common thread in a yoga practice and perhaps that’s what draws so many of us to our mats time and time again. We want to let go. We crave the ultimate freedom we feel in the moments where we do in fact crumble and feel the firm foundation of our roots. The question becomes: how do we take those fleeting moments and turn them into something more consistent? Surrender comes from cultivating a deep and trusting relationship with forces outside of ourselves or those around us; from making each action an offering to something bigger than us. In the end, all we can do is our best to show up in our lives in an authentic way - however raw that might be. Trusting and being vulnerable for something unseen and unpredictable can be scary though.For me the only way to make BIG ideas like surrender and the anonymous offerings less daunting is to break them down into stepping stones. In my own mind, I turn those stones into a meandering, well-worn path rather than striving for a bow-and-arrow meets bullseye kind of thing. I’ve learned with time that I can’t will wildflowers to bloom. I have to let my stone turn to sand.So as of lately, every year around this time rather than proclaiming a resolution (or list of them) I set the intention to surrender - as much as I can, for as long as I can, over and over again. The way I see it, it’s a lifelong commitment to the efforts rather than a pre-determination that I’ll ever truly achieve what some call freedom or Yogis call bliss. I find that when I take the “end goal” off the table, my offerings are far more genuine and much less laden with pressure or expectation. In return, I am much more content with the progress I make and that positive self-affirmation fosters a fierce and mighty inertia, bounding me towards how I want to feel - body, mind and spirit - this and every New Year.
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