Happy Anyway: learning the lost art of surrender

by Alan Lowen

A lot of people are so busy with success and winning, that they don’t even notice that they aren’t happy. They are handicapped by the same burden as people who fear death – they don’t know how to let go and lose! In contrast, there are people who have little more than the bare necessities – food, shelter, safety, a few clothes, and a good enough place to sleep – who can be the kind of happy that success-hunters only dream of. What makes the difference?

It isn’t that we can only be happy if we have little or nothing. It is perfectly possible to be rich and happy, as it is to be successful and happy or famous and happy or all of these and happy: if we know how to lose! That’s what poor people are often so much better at. They’ve had a life-training in learning to lose, and they aren’t afraid of it. Even the most successful people can’t be happy unless they are able to lose. Is that easy? When I told a friend that I was calling my new workshop, “Happy Anyway: learning the lost art of surrender”, he said, “Don’t put ‘surrender’ in the title! It will drive away everybody who’s into success.” He is American, and I, an Englishman living both sides of the Atlantic, see what he means and also that Europeans are perhaps more open to meeting their demons. In any case, if surrender is anathema to us, we can’t every be happy.

To be alive is an astonishing gift. Life is beautiful! And it contains its own annihilation. We will all one day die. This could and should be the foundation-stone of our personal education. Life could not give us a clearer message that we need to learn how to lose. Instead, our civilization buries its head in the sand and bombards us with the goodies of life. Its message is succeed, win, get and get more! Not only are we urged to idolize success, but we’re duped from an early age into believing that having and getting will bring us happiness. We learn to confuse gratification with happiness. Not knowing how to find real existential happiness, our culture feeds us the available substitute – the pleasures of life. There isn’t anything wrong with enjoying them either. It’s just that if we believe they make us happy, we are stuck in a blind alley. Plenty of people spend their whole lives there, trying to find happiness in the having and getting. When they lose, they try harder, buy more, or sink into depression.

The drive to succeed, the need to win, the “I’m gonna get it!” syndrome, are all rooted in our fear. Gratification feeds on itself. We always want more, to keep us from meeting our primordial fear of loss, loneliness, abandonment, death. Happiness is not an escape from fear. Happy people have befriended their core fear. They may enjoy life’s pleasures, including success. They are also gracious in accepting defeat and loss. They are happy anyway!

To learn this requires us to be friendly towards all our inner weather. The challenge is to surrender to inner states with which we’re not OK. Making friends with whatever we judge or reject in ourselves dissolves our inner conflicts. All this can sound like so many workshop clichés, but the fact is that when we learn what we didn’t learn in school – to really BE with all that goes on in us as we engage with life here-and-now –it dramatically changes our relationship with everything. It gives us our happiness in being with what is. Then even if we pursue success we do so for the love of it. It isn’t just that we love this particular activity. Fundamentally, I love being with what is because I am, because it is. So if I win, beautiful! If I lose, beautiful too. It’s my friendliness towards whatever I experience that enables me to be happy because then I can keep being here. Being present is the key to being happy, and I can only be fully present if I’ve surrendered fully to myself.

Being drilled in school to be a good loser doesn’t help us learn this. It’s just more words. We have to go where we fear loss, whether it’s loss of life or just loss of face or position. We have to discover what surrender is not as an idea or theory but as it is happening to us. We have to be willing to feel. This in itself is a surrender when we’re facing things we don’t want anything to do with, and this is what we didn’t learn in school. It’s the missing link in what we call our education. The tragi-comedy of our civilization is that it’s also the single element that is necessary to everyone’s personal education. I call it the art of being.

©Alan Lowen 2008