The Journey of Surrender: Achieving a Flow State of Being
Letting go of control to find balance
Like many type A personalities, I tend to push projects forward, focusing intensely on work and long lists of goals. Yet the most significant moments in my life have come when everything clicks into place without effort. Time loosens its grip, the chatter of the mind softens, and I move with an ease that feels both natural and extraordinary. This is flow. It cannot be forced. In fact, it comes most readily when I let go, when I surrender.
Surrender is often misunderstood as giving up or losing ground. For me, it has become the opposite: a doorway into presence, an act of trust in something larger than my own willpower. When I surrender, I stop pushing against the current and allow myself to be carried by it. The energy shifts from striving to aligning.
Much of my journey has been about finding balance. Life humbles us, reminding us that flow is not about controlling life but about participating in it. Flow happens when I release the illusion that I’m directing every detail and instead become a partner in the unfolding. It feels like a conversation with life itself: I offer presence, openness, and willingness, and life responds with grace, synchronicity, and moments beyond what I could have planned.
Flow is less about mastering a technique than cultivating openness. It requires stillness to notice when the body wants to move, when the breath wants to deepen, when the spirit longs to expand. It asks for trust, that even if I do not know the “how,” I can lean into the unfolding moment.
I have found that practices inviting altered states of awareness greatly expand this capacity for surrender. At the Cuyamungue Institute, our Ritual Postures and trance experiences have become, for me, gateways into flow. When I take on a posture, close my eyes, and step into that timeless field, something shifts. Effort dissolves, and what remains is pure being, fluid, alive, connected.
In those moments, surrender is no longer an idea but a lived experience, embodied and undeniable. From there, life itself becomes a dance, guided by currents far wiser than my own plans.
To surrender is not to lose, but to soften into the river of life. Flow reminds us we were never meant to control the current, only to journey with it, open-hearted, fully awake, and free.
“Surrender is not an idea. It is a lived experience, embodied and undeniable.”
The name “CUYA” carries with it both history and vision. Rooted in our origins as the Cuyamungue Institute, it now also serves as an acronym — C.U.Y.A. — a guiding symbol that unites our mission:
C — Consciousness: The field of shared awareness that arises in Collective Presence, where the “We” awakens beyond the “I” – moving from the “Me to the We.”
U — Unity: Our alignment with the Cycles of Nature and the rhythms of the cosmos, reminding us that we are woven into a greater fabric of reality. This sense of unity reminds us that our awareness is the shared consciousness that connects all living beings.
Y — Your Awakening: The inner journey of Embodiment and Wisdom, where through direct experience the body remembers. At the CUYA Institute, this awakening is nurtured through Ritual Body Postures and ecstatic trance, where the body itself becomes the doorway to wisdom, presence, and transformation.
A — Ancestral Wisdom: Roots. Our connection to Sacred Lineage, honoring those who walked before us and rooting us in belonging and continuity. Our founder, anthropologist Felicitas D. Goodman looked to some of the oldest, most authentic ancestral records we have — the world’s collection of early and indigenous art — and decoded selected artifacts as embodied “ritual instructions.”