By Gurudevi Nirmalananda

Yoga teaches surrender. This is how you get enlightened. It is also how you fall in love.

Surrender is how you experience God, whether you’re looking outward or inward. This is why we formally teach the art of yogic surrender in every Svaroopa^® yoga class – twice.

In English, the word surrender means you have lost the battle. As the loser, you now stand to suffer even more. Sanskrit has words that mean this but yoga doesn’t use them. Yoga’s texts use different Sanskrit words:

avasrj — to let off, let loose, let go, send, dismiss, abandon…

tyaj — to get rid of, free oneself from…

da — to give, grant, bestow, offer, to hand or deliver over…

parida — to surrender through devotion, to deliver up, to entrust…

sharana — to take refuge, to get help, shelter or sanctuary…

Some of these terms point to becoming free, a central theme of my young adulthood. Others mean bestowing or granting something precious to the care of another. The terms for taking refuge, shelter, sanctuary and protection are also paired with devotion.

King Vatsaraja described this in 1000 BCE in the Kamasiddhistuti:

I seek refuge (sharana) with the glorious Goddess Sundari, the benefactress of prosperity, the secret heart, whose heart is soaked with compassion. She is blazing with an utmost tenacity steeped in joy, and consequently beaming with plenteous light that shimmers spontaneously.

What a Divine surrender! Yet you must go through stages in learning how to give over. Few are able to begin with being wonderfully overwhelmed by the glorious Goddess Sundari. Most start simpler. Bottom line, it is the experience of surrender that yoga values — not to whom you are surrendering. Why? Because each time you surrender…