Jane Laurel Carrington:
I can tell you how you don't surrender: you think this is unfair, why is this happening to you, if only it would stop, etc., etc., etc. I had an A&P event at 19 and must have cycled up and down the dukkha nanas for decades before discovering this practice. For me it manifested as low-level depression and anxiety. I coped by going to doctors, taking medication, talking to therapists, and trying to fix myself. It didn't work.
When I started the practice, I got to see a dark night in real time and I expended a lot of energy hating the sensations that were manifesting. This made things worse.
For any sensation, on or off path, the key is to note it, note it, note it. Break it down. Watch it wax and wane, watch it manifest instant by instant, move around, change under observation. Mental sensations manifest as physical sensations. Fear starts as tension in the gut that rises up in the gorge and feels as if it's about to choke you. Watch it then dissolve into sadness, into tenderness, into vulnerability. Watch anger, a fiery fist, break down into the fear response. These things tend to layer over and mask other, deeper emotions. The sequence I observed was anger-> fear-> sadness -> vulnerability. When you get to vulnerability, you're defenseless and have no weapons. You've laid them down.
Yup. What she said.
Same thing said slightly differently: make yourself a slave to the present. Deal with the contents of experience, not insofar as they represent something outside of experience, but simply as they manifest themselves here and now as sensations. You have to have total disregard for the existence or non-existence of something in the world - past, present, or future - corresponding to your sensations. This means that if you have a thought about the future or about the past - "I wish this were different!" - you have to ignore the temporal component and just look at it as a mental occurrence here and now and see it just as it is.
It takes a certain kind of stupidity to do insight practice. You have to flip a switch in your mind and stop representing things and treat things solely as occurrences and nothing else. So what I'm describing here is the definition of "surrender" that makes the most sense in the context of insight practice and thus moving through the ñanas. A different sort of practice may mean something different by "surrender", but what I've described here is the specific sort of surrender to the present moment necessary to clear paths. Generally, the more you resist that, the more fucked you are, though the higher you climb up the paths, the harder it becomes.
(perhaps if I say it enough it'll happen!)
