The Magic of Surrender: Letting Go, Trusting Life & Finding Freedom

Hey now, all. This is Kelle Sparta, and you are listening to Sh- Spirit Sherpa, the show that helps and encourages you on your journey to unlock your magic mojo. I am here by myself today, and not by myself, actually. I have a great guest. But Jewel is off today, so I'm going to be entering the episode here, and I'm gonna be a little clumsy about it because I'm not used to doing that.

So, hi, guys. It's great to hear from you, great to see you. Uh, m- and I've got a great episode for you today. I'm talking with actually somebody who is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council, which I, I don't know if you guys know this, but I helped form the East Coast regional- Mm ... uh, chapter of the TLC, uh, which is now the, uh, what is it?

Association of Transformational Leaders. The ATL is the sub- subheadings. And, uh, so we, we were just bonding before we got on here about that. And so, uh, the person we've got, his, his name is Cout Blackson, and he is a beloved in- inspirational speaker and a transformational teacher. Uh, he, he speaks at countless events he organizes around the world, as well as at outside events, including A-Fest, YPO, which is the Young Presidents Organization, The Entrepreneurs Orga- Organization, and as I said, he's a membersh- of the Transformational Leadership Council, the TLC.

. Uh, he is the winner of the: 2019

Cout, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for having me. So you and I are gonna be talking today about the magic of surrender. You know, it's, it's so cool because, uh, now I know that's the title of your new book that's coming, that's, that's out right now, right? Um, but the, the topic of surrender is one that's near and dear to my heart, so, uh, we're gonna have a really good conversation today.

So, uh, why don't you go ahead and define for our listeners what you mean by surrender. I think so often surrender has been misunderstood and misinterpreted. Uh, it's gotten a bad rap, and so it's this thing that, well, we know we should do, but we resist and we run away from, like going to the dentist, right?

You know you should go, but you kind of don't want to go, and so there's this internal resistance. And so, um, part of my vision in writing the book was to reframe this concept of surrender so that people could understand that perhaps it's the most important and most powerful thing that we can do in our lifetimes.

That surrender is the key to greatness. It's the key to the great ones. You look at Jesus, you look at Buddha, you look at Gandhi, you look at Mother Teresa, you look at Bruce Lee, you look at Muhammad Ali, you look at Bob Marley, you look at, uh, Martin Luther King, you look at, I mean, m- so many of the great ones.

At some point, they all surrendered themselves to life. They all surrendered themselves to their calling. They all surrendered themselves to their souls. They surrendered themselves to The true essence, you know? And in that surrender, they were able to transcend their human limitations and tap into a dimension of their being.

And in that surrender, life was able to use them and move through them and create through them in ways that far transcended their own human capacity. And so to me, surrender is the key to the next level of manifestation. It's the password for freedom. And so I think in our culture, we have this idea that surrender was weak, that surrender was passive, that surrender means giving up, that surrender means waving the white flag, that if you surrender, you're going to be left behind, that you're going to be a victim, that you're going to be a doormat, that if you surrender, you won't manifest your goals, dreams, and desires, that if you surrender, you're going to get less in life.

But I'm actually saying, no, what if you surrender, truly surrendered, if you understood it, and you didn't get less, but in fact, you got more, more than you could have envisioned and created and strategized with your limited ego's capacity to create? What if you got more, more love, more joy, more abun-- like, more maybe not what you expected or what you thought you wanted, but beyond that.

And so to me, that's the magic of surrender. Magic is that which is beyond what you can even comprehend and visualize and know and expect with your conscious awareness. And so I think we all want magic, but very few of us want to surrender. And the password for, for, for magic is really surrender. And I think the degree of surr- the degree to which we surrender is the degree to which we open ourself to the miracles and the possibilities of life.

years of pandemic, we started: 2020

And so, so much of it is not in our control. A-and so control is the master addiction. Surrender is to stop trying to force and manipulate life to fit our limited idea of how we think it should be and who we think we should be, how we think life should be. And it's t- it's to be available. It's to take the limitations off of life.

In that openness, in that availability, in that surrender, we are open to The infinite possibilities. We're open to life, we're open to the universe, we're open to God, we're open to the, you know, to existence. We're open to-- That's when we're truly open to magic, because when we live in the paradigm of the ego, the perceived sense of who we think ourselves to be based on our past, our history, our conditioning, we're not able to see the total possibilities of an experience, of a situation, of why something is happening.

We're very preset, preconditioned to see things a certain way, so we're not even available. So surrender is availability, it's openness, it's allowing life to lead us. Um, the old paradigm of even in self-help, it's all about know what you want, know what you want, and then go make it happen, and hustle and push and just go create it.

Like, it's great, and I'm not saying you can't create a very good life based on the ego's motivation and drive. People have, and people will, and people will continue to. You can, but it's limited because the ego's perception is limited. And so many times you get what you thought you wanted, only to realize that what you thought you wanted was just what you thought you wanted, not what you necessarily truly wanted.

It was just what you thought you wanted based on who you thought you were. But if you weren't in touch with who you truly were, then many-- then often, right, your goals will be a projection of who you kind of mistakenly think you are and projection of unmet needs. And then you get what you thought you wanted, you manifested it, then you realize, "Wait a second, this is not making me happy.

This is not making-- fulfilling me. It's-- This is, this is an illusion." And so in surrender, let's call it a new paradigm that I really feel As a humanity, we are being invited into this new way of being. It's happening in front of us. The last two years, previously, you know, maybe all of existence, but a quickening in this new way of living, of surrender.

The last couple of years, we have all, as a humanity, collectively been put into a global seminar, a global seminar of surrender. And, and, and we're being initiated into a new way of living, a way of living that is more about living in harmony with life and the flow and, and the unknown and existence and the mystery, and perhaps questioning- I feel like you're making a list

who, who am I, right? Who am I? And my, and our souls. Right? And, and so I think we're being invited into, as a humanity, a way of living surrender. And so the question in surrender is not so much what do I want? What do you want? What do you want? Great question. Know what you want. But if you don't know who you are, what you want is going to be limited.

And so the question becomes, what is it that life's seeking to express through me? What is it, what is it that the universe, my soul, the divine, this, an infinite intelligence of life, what is it that life is seeking to express through me? And to attune to that, to feel into that, so that we can truly be available to the deepest expression of what this intelligence of life that we are all a part of is seeking to express through us.

And the more we can be available and open to that, then in that surrender We're not limited to our own ego's capacity to manifest. Life starts manifesting and creating and expressing and speaking and moving through us. That's, I think, when the magic happens, and that's what I see with many of the great ones that we all have the potential of.

And so that's the possibility of surrender in a nutshell. So is that what you have done in your life? And if so, then tell us that story. Tell us how that happened for you. Because I can hear my, my listeners, and they're all going, "Well, this is great, but how? But how? But how?" They're all like the about how, right?

Yeah. Look, I'll just start off by st- by, by saying an honest confession is The Magic of Surrender was not the book I thought I was going to write. The, The Magic of Surrender was not the book I wanted to write. I had all of these sexy ideas of the book I thought would sell, the book I thought would make money, the book I thought the audience would want, the book I thought my clients would want, the book I thought my avatar of, you know, potential clients want, the book I thought publishers would want, the book I thought would be a New York Times bestseller.

And, and I brain- I strategized clever ideas of books I thought would sell. I put the all the ideas on a whiteboard on my wall. None of those. None of those. Brilliant ideas, but none of those felt right. None of those felt true. None of those felt authentic. Not one of them. The only word that stood out for me on this board was the word surrender.

And I thought, "Oh, shit." I thought, I, you know, uh, writing about surrender, people, you know, like, ah. But, but if I was honest with myself, it's the only word that felt real and in my integrity. And that alignment is how I knew this, this may not be the book I, in quotation marks, Ku, wants to write, but it's the book that is seeking to be written, and the book has a soul of its own.

And when I, I had to surrender to that, and when I surrendered to, like, this is what's seeking to happen, then the, then I was in service to the book, and the book had a soul of its own. And that's when the book kind of came through me in such a simple and creative way, and that's when I knew this, this was the key.

And so life for me, in some ways, has been a process of that because I think I found through my life when I don't surrender, it's just suffering. When I don't surrender, life is just grueling. When I don't surrender, it's just resistance and suffering and some... And so through maybe a series of suffering experiences and relationships, I've been beaten into submission by life and forced to surrender to realize, wait a second, uh- Ah, there's only so far I can go trying to force life to be what I think it should be.

he book came about because in: 2016

I was told she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, which devastated and broke my heart. Um, a very challenging moment. And so this was, like, the worst year of my life. And so I was in LA. She lives in London. I s- I began to fly back and forth between LA and London every month. I had every intention. I was gonna go back, and I was going to heal my mother.

Green powders, green juices, you know, supplements. I was going to get her well and heal her. This was my intention, no questions asked. And after about three months of trying to force things to be and force her to take her supplements and force all these things, uh, I'll be honest, I soon realized I don't think she's going to make it.

And, and something happened. I had to begin surrendering to the possible, the possible... I was open to miracle, but the possible reality that might happen, which she might not make it. And, and when I surrendered and ac- accepted and surrendered that she might die, and no amount of prayer and Reiki and energy work and meditation and green powders and green juices were going to save her, uh, who knew?

That actually freed me up to just be with her. There was no more tomorrow. There was no more future. It just freed me up to just be with my mother fully, that, like, this could be the last conversation. This could be the last cup of tea with her. This could be the last breakfast with her. There was no more, like, hope or po- There was just this moment right now, and every moment became so sacred.

And I remember When the doctors like officially confirmed six months into it, they said, "There's nothing else we can do." Basically, they said, "You're going to die and get your affairs in order because it could be days, weeks, or months, but definitely not years." That's when I knew like, "Oh, shit, this is, this is real."

You know, I'm open to a miracle, but this is it. And, and I looked my mother in the eyes, and this is when I realized the seed of the book was planted as well. I looked my mother in the eyes and I said, "Are you afraid?" And my mother said... This l- my mother's Japanese, little Japanese woman. My mother said, "No, I'm not afraid because I know I'm not this body.

This body is just a temporary vehicle for my soul, that even when this body passes away, what I am w- I'll be here, and I'll be with you guiding you." And I felt such a, you know, transmission of her conviction. Then I looked to her and I said, "Mom, is there anything I can do for you to-- I want to be a good son.

Is there anything I can-- Where do you want to go? What do you want me to buy you? What, what, what, what do you need? What do you want?" And she looked at me with such clarity and she said to me, "There's nothing I want, and there's nothing I need. The only thing I want, the only thing I want is what God wants for my life."

And in that moment, I knew that she was free. In that moment, I felt the transmission of real surrender. People think, "Oh, surrender's for the monks in the Himalayas." Like simple woman in a real life or death situation, I saw that she was surrendered, and this is why she was at peace. She wasn't attached to living.

She wasn't attached to dying. She was op- she was genuinely open to whatever the highest unfolding Of her life was. And that was her freedom. And I saw that this entire year, she wasn't crying, she wasn't resisting. She was just like, "I'm open to the highest." And that was her freedom, and that was the power of surrender.

And so that really inspired me in such a profound way. And so what I will say, and then I'll share a bit more of my story, but what I will say is people often say, "Well, h- how, how do I surrender? Like, how... What, what do I do? What..." People sometimes think that acceptance is surrender, and it's not. First, I had to accept, okay, she might die.

Okay, she's going to die. But many times you hear about books, accept what is, accept... You can be in acceptance but still be subtly resisting. You can be in acceptance and not be surrendered. Surrender is the full open-hearted participation to the process of life. You roll your sleeves up and you're like, you're not just in the rain with an umbrella pissed off and mad, like, "Shit, why is this umbrella?"

And you know, it's like, "I wanted to go snow- uh, swimming in the ocean to the beach, and there's a, there's a damn snowstorm." Surrender is when you say, "You know, okay, there's a snowstorm. I don't freaking want a snowstorm, but how can we use this? How can we use this experience for our highest good? Maybe we go have a family dinner and everyone stays inside.

Maybe we go freaking skiing outside." Like, how do we fully surrender and embrace the experience that's happening for our highest good and, and, and, and, and experience this? To me, that's what surrender is. Between acceptance And surrender. There is a phase in the middle that most people miss, and this is why surrender doesn't happen.

Even many of us in the spiritual self-help field, you know, we miss this phase because we wanna stay in a high vibration, we wanna be positive, and we end up doing a spiritual bypass. Between this acceptance and surrender is a phase. It's grieving. Many people don't allow themselves to fully grieve.

Surrender is a death. Surrender is a kind of death of the ego. It's a death of who you thought you were. It's a death of a dream. It's a death of a phase of one's life, like from, from youth to 20 to 30 to 40 to the idealized version of yourself. Surrender is a death of a relationship. It's a death. And in any death requires us to honor what was so we can truly release the emotions of what was and open ourselves to what can be.

But when we don't fully allow ourselves to grieve-- So I would ask everyone to sit with, what have you not fully grieved? 'Cause when we don't fully allow ourselves to grieve, we suppress that emotion, we suppress that pain. Like my relationship has ended, I don't fully allow myself to grieve, I suppress that feeling, I go into a new relationship.

And how do I surrender to a new relationship fully, even if I'm in it, if I haven't let go of tho- those layers and calluses of hurt and pain and resentment and, and grieving? So surrender requires a grieving. Many times we don't allow ourselves to grieve because we do a spiritual bypass. Wanna stay law of attraction, stay in a low-- high, high vibration, but not realizing all feelings remain present till fully felt.

And so sometimes we don't allow ourselves to grieve because we think that, "If I feel the feeling, it will never end. If I feel the feeling, I won't be able to cope with it, it'll be too much." And so we suppress it, and we just keep ourselves stuck. All feelings remain present till fully felt, and so I would just invite people, part of surrender is the willingness to acknowledge the grief, to acknowledge those feelings, and to allow yourself to feel those feelings so that you can let those feelings go, let the grief go.

'Cause in the releasing of the grief, in the releasing of that heartbreak, that's when your energy shifts and you're able to open again, open your heart again into a surrender to life and new possibilities and experiences. And so one, one thing that might help people, because sometimes I hear people say, "Khu, but I've been feeling my pain for years and it still doesn't go."

Here's a mistake Many times I see people thinking that they're feeling their grief or their pain, but they're actually thinking about the feeling, not feeling the feeling, and that's what keeps them stuck. And so to actually, I tell people, "Take the label off of the feeling, stop analyzing it, thinking about it, pushing it away, trying to get rid of it, NLP it away.

Just-- And allow yourself to be with the sensation of the grief in your body." I call that sitting in the soup of the emotion. And when you can actually purely, and that's different from wallowing, like, "Ugh," it's, it's, it's being, being with the sensation without resistance or judgment And you be with the sensation in your body as a sensation, you'll find that every sensation and every feeling has a cycle, a natural cycle, that it, it arises and then it completes itself.

And then maybe inside of that grief are several cycles. So you, you have one cycle, and then there's another wave, and there's another wave. And grief doesn't happen all at once necessarily. It might happen in stages. But when we're able to be with that grief sensation, the soup, right, fully, that layer dissolves and a- and then the openness can happen.

And so surrender, I feel, is actually the most natural thing for us. Now, it doesn't seem that way because we're busy resisting from the perspective of the ego. But what I just want to frame is, 'cause we say, "Oh, surrender is so hard." Surrender is but natural. Surrender is actually easy. Surrender is, is, is n- i- if, if you look at a child, a child is surrendered.

They're just being. They're playing. They, they shit when they shit. They, they, they, they laugh when they laugh. They cry when they cry. They'll, they'll hit their head, fall down, cry. It's over, they move on. They're not resisting and thinking about that for another four years. They're just being what they're being in the moment, embracing the moment.

And so as children, I think this might help people too. As children, we're born free. We're, we're living surrender. We are surrender. We are in that essence. We're, we're in touch with our essential nature just being surrendered. But now we incarnate into this human experience. We incarnate into preset pattern of conditioning based on ancestral generational patterns, society, religion, parents.

Now we meet our parents. Our parents are just doing the best that they can do based on their childhood and their dysfunction. And so now we're born into a s- kind of conditioned set of dysfunctions to a degree. Maybe dad is an alcoholic, maybe mom is, you know, crazy. Maybe they're fighting all the time.

There's emotion, heightened emotion. So two things happen. The first thing is we learn to shut down, disconnect, not feel. Suppress feeling, suppress feeling, suppress feeling as a coping mechanism. All of those suppressed feelings begins to cover up our light, our flow. All of those suppressed feelings begin to disconnect us from our true essential nature.

And so now we've contort ourselves and learn all sorts of strategies, mostly unconsciously, in order to protect ourselves to not feel the pain. And so now we erect walls around our heart. We erect all sorts of defense mechanisms to not feel the pain of not having our needs met. Dad is not here. Mom is not here.

They're fighting all the time. And so now we erect walls, and we hold tightly to that, to that way of being, those mechanisms as a way of not feeling the pain, and we now start controlling, and as a result, that control becomes a way of being. Ego was developed as a way to not feel the pain again. So many of the mechanisms that we've l- unconsciously learned to resist life, to resist new experiences, to resist new emotions, to resist the unknown, it's not bad.

It's just survival. It's just ego's defense mechanisms. You know, ego's defense mechanism is not feel pain again, and then we learn a way of being, the sense of like, "Who do I need to be in order to get love and validation and approval? If I'm nice and I'm sweet and I'm kind, and I say yes, and I, th- then Dad loves me, then Mom loves me, then..."

And so we start contorting ourselves again into a certain shape in order to get love, validation, and approval. We kind of adopt a persona and identity that we hold onto very tightly, thinking that that version of ourselves is who we are, not realizing that it's not who we really are. It's just the conditioned program and pattern that we've learned to be to get love, validation, approval, and to avoid pain.

And the more tightly we hold onto that, the less free we are, the more resistant we become, the more we control, the more we identify with that as me, that is ego. And part of the reason why surrender can feel so scary is because the more we're identified as ego, which is ego is not a thing, it's a process of identification.

The more we identify as ego, the more surrender can feel scary because it feels like it's a death. Ego's job is to reinforce its existence. Ego's job is to protect us from getting hurt again. And so surrender now is like surrender to the unknown, surrender to the new, surrender to new possibilities. The ego's like, "No."

And that feels terrifying for our perceived sense of self because it feels like death to who we believe ourselves to be. And so when we start understanding that we are not ego, that ego is not what we truly are, that what we are is so much more, that shifts our relationship. And so I think when we can really understand that the ego's drive is not bad, it's just trying to protect us, and we realize we're not the ego, then we can kind of hold the pattern of fear and ego with love.

And so sometimes the deeper surrender is surrendering to the fact that we may not be surrendered right now, and meeting ourselves with a moment of love and compassion so that we can hold that fear that is resisting surrendering with love and compassion. And then that resistance can begin to melt, and we can deal with that.

This, this concept of grief, uh, as part of surrender is ... I'm, I'm sitting here, I'm chewing on it because I haven't heard that before, and I think it's brilliant. Um, I think that there's a, um, there's a way in which, uh, well, surrender is simply about letting go in faith that everything will be okay, that you are exactly where you're meant to be, that the universe is gonna take care of you, that you're gonna be aligned with wherever you're going next, that, you know, to let the flow of energy come through you.

That's surrender. But the idea of, uh, of a grief process makes perfect sense because the more attached you are to the things that you are holding onto, the more the grief will have to be walked through in order to get to the other side of it. And I, uh, yeah, it's, that's brilliant. I've, you know, I've been studying for 45 years.

I have never heard that before, so that is, that is saying something. So- And some, and some- and sometimes, you know, um, the grief is so subtle. It's so subtle. And, and, and here's the thing. Sometimes we don't realize that there's grief present. We're not even conscious that there's grief. For instance, a friend of mine Is single.

She wants to f- meet the love of her life, wants to meet the love of her life, wants to meet the love of her life. Finally meets the love of her life. She's happy, about to get married. Something doesn't feel... She doesn't realize that she has grief, grief of, of letting go of her singleness, grief of letting go of an old identity, grief of letting go.

And not acknowledging that grief because she doesn't wanna feel grief. She should feel happy. Not e- not even being aware that there's grief in letting that go is part of what prevents her from being able to fully open her heart even more to her new relationship. And so in so many ways, we don't realize we're grieving.

Like even in: 2020

And then we wonder, "Why am I not excited? Why do I feel jaded? Why am I not excited?" Because that, that layer of grief is just languishing in the depth of our psyche that we haven't truly let go of. Yeah. So I think for people to sit with, "What have I not truly grieved?" And to give yourself permission to grieve.

Really give yourself permission to grieve. Many times I see people ending a relationship, jumping into a new relationship. Now, okay, they, first they had 100% of their heart available. End that relationship, now let's say, hmm, don't really deal with it, so you jump into a new relationship and now only 70% of your heart is fully available 'cause 30% of, of, of grief is back there.

So now you're not fully available in the next relationship. That obviously doesn't really work out too well. Then that ends, then you jump into a new relationship and now only 40% of your heart is available, and the cycle continues. And so I think it's so important that w- we give ourself the, the compassion to grief I, I absolutely.

th that, and that was back in: 2020

So if you're looking for it, it's back then at that time. Um, Kut, this has been amazing. So how do people get a copy of this book? Yeah, quite simple. Uh, it's available on Amazon. Go to Amazon, uh, The Magic of Solinda. Get the copy there. Um, if people want to know more about my, my, yeah, my, my work- I was just gonna ask that.

Um- How do they find you? Uh, kutblackson.com. Couple of ways. My website, kutblackson.com, K-U-T blackson.com. Instagram, Facebook, my name, Kut Blackson. Twice a year, I do a, a very special, uh, immersive event, uh, in Bali. It's called Boundless Bliss, www.boundlessblissbali.com. Awesome, and all of those links will also be in the show notes, so if you're driving, don't panic.

All right. So thank you so much for being on the show. This has been amazing. It is rare that somebody tells me something new. I, I truly appreciate it. Um, and you d- you know, as per your, uh, bio at the beginning, you are, you are the man. So. Great. Thank you. All right. So that's all we have for this week.

Please join us next week as we add another chapter into your guide to energy, magic, and the spirit world. I'm Kelle Sparta here with Kut Blackson, and you have been listening to Spirit Sherpa. So long, everyone.

Share Episode

Shownotes

What You'll Learn

References Mentioned

Transcripts

Follow

Links

Chapters

Video

More from YouTube