Giving up the need to know why something has happened to you will definitely count among the most rigorous personal challenges of your life. Everything about human nature craves an explanation for why events occur as they do. Our sense of reason is more than just an attribute of the mind; it is akin to an archetypal power that governs our capacity to ground our lives and balance the forces of chaos in the world. The power of reason connects us to the rule of law and justice, directing human behavior on that tenuous path of right and wrong.

Surrendering the need to know “why” represents the release of an entire inner archetypal map, one that the ego relies on for its strategies of survival in a world we perceive as heavily influenced by the polarities of right and wrong, good and evil. To surrender runs counter to all your instincts of protection, grounded as they are in your need for personal safety. Your unconscious fear is that to surrender is to release the force of evil in your life without the rule of good to counteract it.

We tend to believe, even unconsciously, that if we do good, bad things won’t happen to us. We not only believe that principle, but we also honor and live by it. Yet healing requires you to relinquish your need for an explanation—why, for instance, you experienced a brutal betrayal, or why you must take on the arduous challenge of healing an illness or assisting a loved one who is ill. Understandably, everyone asks, “How? How am I supposed to let go of this need for reasonable explanations?”

Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation. What you are releasing is your need for God or the heavens or the Divine to explain the events of your life in a rational way, as if the heavens operated according to the laws of our land and the rules of human interaction. Surrender represents a course correction of our belief that others are responsible for our life and, more to the point, for our pain and failures. It also represents a supreme act of faith that states, “With you, God, all things are possible, including my healing.” In saying that prayer, however, you leave it to God to chart the course of possibilities for your healing. As the saying goes, all our prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no.