ARTICLES | CONTACT, SURRENDER AND FLOW


By Swami Chetanananda
(from talks given at the July 2005 Retreat, Portland)

The three essential elements of spiritual practice are contact, surrender and flow. Those three essential elements function in each of the different dimensions of our existence: in our physical existence, in our mental-emotional-interpersonal existence and in the realm of pure spiritual energy. Contact, surrender and flow promote the experience of health in our physical body and well-being throughout the entire energetic field of our life.

In our Physical Existence

In contact, at the most basic level, you are taking your attention to the energetic mechanism which underlies your physical existence. You make contact with one of the energetic junction points within your physical body. You will begin to feel a response in that power point, which, as you sustain that contact, will spread throughout your whole physical body. You’ll feel everything move and shift and flow.

The energy of your attention itself should be enough to wake up your energetic mechanism, to open all of the junction points and to allow within your physical body a complete flow throughout the whole mechanism. This flow in your mechanism supports your physiology and supports the process of removing all the toxins, dissolving all the strain patterns and facilitating within your physical body a complete experience of the three phases of respiration that that we are. Contact on that level brings health to our physical body and clarity to our mind and emotions.

So contact is waking up the energetic mechanism at the core of your individual existence. Actually, that mechanism is never really asleep—if it were, you’d disappear. You just wouldn’t exist. What we’re doing by making contact is bringing more energy to that mechanism and shifting our focus, so that rather than being tangled up in our materiality, we are becoming increasingly aware of the power that fuels all of the chemical reactions underlying our physiology. We become aware of the vibrancy that is the source of the self-recognition capacity that we have. That power is at the core of our nervous system and makes us know and do and perceive everything.

The next step is surrender. I’ve said many, many times that surrender is the key. Surrender is actually a very simple thing. Surrender is suspending your mental activity, suspending your thoughts, suspending your judgments, suspending that part of you that reaches out to anything, suspending your contractions, suspending everything that you repel yourself from, surrendering every mental activity. It is entering into a neutral state. This state of suspending all of your mental activity creates the space in which your physical body and your energetic mechanism can respond to the change of state that contact facilitates. Surrender is just releasing your mind. It’s as simple as can be.

On this level, flow is the movement of the energy in the channels and the change of state that occurs as that movement takes place. When you sit in contact with the dynamic energy of your own fundamental being, having released any kind of mental activity, a shift takes place in the state of your total energy field that allows for a deeper state of health to express itself. That change in state has a beneficial effect on every dimension of you.

In our Interpersonal Existence

On the next level, in the broader arena of our interpersonal life beyond our physical body, contact has to do with the expression of our creative activity in all of the different forms that we engage in. We are just not making contact with our physical body. We are making contact with the entire energy field that we are—because we’re not just this body, we’re the sum total of all of the relationships and all of the activities that we carry on in this world. There is a reciprocal relationship between everything that we are and everything that everybody we’re connected with is, and that’s really what the field of our life is. That’s our life. We’re not separate from that in any way. When that changes, we change. When we change, it changes.

Contact on this level is the awakening of the entire field of creative expression in which we participate. Contact is like a hitting a light switch or putting a wire on a battery. The light comes on in your body, the light comes on in your mind, the light comes on in your awareness. It’s like a power grid coming up at night and the lights in the city coming on. You see it expanding throughout the whole city. In this case, there is an expansion throughout the whole field of your life as you make contact.

On the interpersonal level, surrender means that you are constantly releasing your mind from anything at all that it adheres to. You suspend all judgment and release all desire. You are not embracing or rejecting anything in anybody or in any activity. Another word that we often use is we’re simply open. We are not looking at somebody and saying “I like this” or “I don’t like that.” It doesn’t matter how close or how distant they are from us, we simply accept what we see as it is, free of any judgment or any attraction or any repulsion. We participate because it’s a part of our life. We participate in the flow that exists between us and everything that we are connected to. We have the realization that we are much bigger than we imagine, and that what we think of as our personal boundaries are meaningless. That thinking is what we use to constrain ourselves, and it is that thinking that denies us the opportunity to more fully understand and more fully experience and more completely appreciate the dynamic nature of what we are and what is expressing itself through us.

The mind is like a sticky monkey, constantly adhering to thoughts and feelings, objects and circumstances, that have really nothing to do with anything, except to clog the channels within ourselves and the channels of our interconnectedness with other people. It slowly constrains the flow that exists between us on every level. Instead of allowing for growth and continuous renewal, it only brings decay. So releasing the mind is really, really, really important.

Now, you may have a sticky release mechanism and you may have to do this in the beginning twenty five or fifty times a day, maybe even twenty five or fifty times an hour. That’s because the mind is hopping around all over the place sticking to everything it touches. That’s a fundamental source of human confusion, because every time the sticky monkey mind touches something, we think we’re it--“Oh, I’m this. Oh, I’m that. Oh, I’m something else. Oh, this is mine. Oh, that’s me,”--every bit of which is nonsense.

Getting the monkey unstuck is what surrender means. Keeping it in its place brings openness through the whole mechanism. In this state of openness, a rhythmic balanced interchange between our mechanism and all of the other energetic sources that exist within the field of our life experience takes place. A balance and a harmony and a flow are established within us and between us and everybody whose life our life touches. Not only that, a rhythmic balanced interchange is established between us and every aspect of our entire environment. In this state, much more subtle information is available to us about who we truly are and what the true nature of this life experience is about.

Then, in flowing in this dimension, we are palpably appreciating the total interconnectedness and are aware of the tensions within those interconnections and consciously sustaining contact so that all obscurations and obstructions can simply dissolve. We might also use the term “love” to talk about flow in this domain.

This flow is not something that we have to make happen. It occurs spontaneously. It is what is occurring all the time, but because our attention is in such a small space, because we have such a short term small time frame, we are not appreciating or consciously participating in this dimension of our experience. So we deny ourselves the opportunity to understand ourselves and our life, even though every minute it is present and trying to explain itself to us.

In this openness in which the awareness of this interchange naturally occurs, we experience a peace and a satisfaction. We find a sense of well-being and a joy that causes us to understand that the power, the abundance that has poured forth as the form of the entire universe, of which our little world just happens to be a miniscule part, is our essence. The experience of the vastness of the essential truth of our life is an experience of relief. It is a joyous occasion that liberates us from all of the conditioning to which we have been exposed.

In our Spiritual Existence

In the highest aspect of pure consciousness, which we understand to be not only the basis of our personal existence, but the basis of everything that is, contact, surrender and flow express themselves as the recognition of pure awareness, without any kind of obstruction, any kind of boundary, any kind of limitation, any kind of condition. To put this into words is difficult, because the experience of it is nearly inexpressible.

In this highest dimension of ourselves, we appreciate the lack of boundaries, the lack of qualifications, the lack of past and present and future as relevant thoughts, the meaninglessness of good things and bad things, the meaningless of positive and negative, the complete irrelevance of the accumulation of good karma or the accumulation of bad karma. All these kind of qualifying terms have no meaning whatsoever in the domain of the ultimate. Even any notion as attaining or not attaining, any idea of achieving or not achieving, gain and loss, all of this has no meaning in the ultimate sphere. Having recognized the state of ultimate openness through complete surrender, we are simply witnesses of the expression of the creative power of the universe. There is nothing but the infinite, spontaneous expression of joy, the essential nature of the highest pure awareness.

Summary

This triad of contact, surrender and flow is the essence of every single sadhana that there is. It is the essence of asana practice. It is the essence of simple and complex meditation practices. It is the essence of every ritual that exists. If you do nothing but practice contact, surrender and flow, in a very short time you can experience a profound realization. You can practice this anytime, any place, and anywhere. Any reason to do it is a good reason—any reason at all.

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