Letting go feels like death to the ego.

The ego thrives off obsession with itself. But when in your life does ego thriving no longer serve you?

That's what we're surrendering. The life of self-identification while maintaining a sense of self.

It's like looking at plants as summer ends - certain ones need to be trimmed back, pruned. The essence of life: you're born, grow, decay, die. Plants work the same way.

But in this lifetime, can you surrender the ego so something realer can operate through you while you're on this planet?

As you let go of self-identification, you'll notice an influx of something new, unnameable. Not in having it, but in learning so it can move through you.

Surrender has a tone of strength. Self-abandonment has a tone of "why me."

Self-abandonment has resistance, pettiness, sadness. Surrender is holistic, considering multiple factors.

Surrender is seeing: "I deeply desire this thing, but me pushing, striving, forcing feels like I'm decaying. So I surrender while still working toward the thing."

But without the headache of attachment to the outcome.

You get to a point where your life isn't just inputs and outputs. There are fundamentals that are foundational. You surrender to God's laws, abandon the ridicule of what you cannot control.

You cannot force another to surrender. You cannot force yourself to surrender.

You have to create a space where you fullheartedly admit to the things you're working toward. There's meaning behind what you're driven to do.

Follow your natural obsessions. All at the same time, surrender to identification with the achievement that may come through your natural obsession. The status, the label, the belt.

My instructor always said: "If you're in this for the belts, you're not gonna do it."

I do jiujitsu because it's fun, because it's healthy. When I get better, I get better. But the more I obsess over identifying with my skill level, the less joy I find in the game.

When I go just to have fun and enjoy it - still paying full attention, not talking during instruction - but not identified with getting better, just going because I love to do it...

Do what you do because you love to do it.

When you're scared to release control, you don't force yourself to let go. If you're holding onto something, you first notice that you're holding on.

Then your hands can open. The muscles can loosen.

Don't jump to conclusions about how to release control. Understand: Why are you scared? What's the root of the fear? Why are you seeking to control this thing?

The fear itself is always connected to something else.

Control is the blossom. Fear is the branch. Self-identification - attachment to what you can't control - is the root.

This is the harder but most freeing part: you begin to dissolve your identity. You still do things, create, show up. But you're not so emotionally hooked. Not so insecure that you need everything to work out the way you prefer.

You learn to let go of preferences because you see the dance between preference, expectation, control, and the creation of fear through that entire mechanism.

Less expectations = less attachment = more energy freed up within your being.

You gotta consider that the entire planet is created via atoms. Something created the atoms, the ocean, the particles of water.

Get granular within your own being. Your psyche, energy, vibration, worldview, identity, beliefs, actions, nutrition, input, the things you don't say, your relationship to external environments, external stimulus, people you interact with.

When you look at your life from that level, everything gets clearer.

But it takes a commitment to God, a commitment to truth, to free up the energy needed to see the world from the granular level.

If you're totally addicted to distraction, you don't look within. If you don't look within, you can't understand.

Start simple. Look at balance, but understand that balance comes in seasons. Winter is balanced in itself - it is the decay. Same with fall.

If we had summer all the time, that would be disgusting.

I was removing vines recently. It's mind-blowing how if you don't prune and take care, how nature will... the vines will kill the trees.

Are the vines bad? No. Maybe they have negative energy - they crawl up trees, strangle the trunk. If they get all the way up top, they drag the tree down.

Like lobsters in a cage - when one's crawling out, others drag them down. Humans work that way too.

The next level of consciousness isn't saying the vines are bad or the people who drag you are bad. It's holistic understanding: How can I be the one for this world that inspires change?

And it can only happen through doing the work within your own self.

No one will ever have the answers to your truth, but the fundamentals will be there. You execute on what I speak about here, and I can guarantee you that as you do this work, you will change.

You will learn. From that change, from that learning, I don't know what will happen. But I can guarantee you'll recognize you're changing and start to see the meaning in the change.

That's my promise to you.

If you would like to work one-on-one, we can get you into great shape while working on emotions, relationships, even your connection in the workplace. Everything to do with your identity - who you see yourself to be and the limitations you may be struggling with.

I will never be able to do the work for you. I will always be able to listen, and through that listening, you may have that same essence strengthened in yourself.

That's really my offer to you. {link}

Justin