Get ready to explore a deeper reality, daring to view your life through loving eyes of Source and opening yourself up in my book, Everything is Here For You: A Loving Guide to Your Soul’s Evolution.

Whether in the aftermath of loss or at the brink of personal despair, a readiness to surrender occurs through moments of “I don’t know.”

It doesn’t mean we walk around refusing to understand, shirking our responsibilities, or pushing away the pearls of insight that come to us. It is more an ease of serenity in which we can be honest about our pain while remaining open to a process that goes far beyond beliefs of fairness or right and wrong.

To prepare for the five stages of surrender, please consider the wisdom of the following questions as a way of embracing the beauty of “I don’t know.”

• Why do I need to know what I don’t right now?
• What if having a deeper knowing won’t change how I feel?
• What if everything comes to mind at the exact moment it is meant to be known?
• Am I willing to trust more of what I don’t know than the things I insist to be true?
• What would this moment be like if I allowed myself to be open with nothing more in need of being known, resolved, or clarified?

Whether you feel an openness and relaxation in response to each question or you get triggered emotionally, embracing the beauty of “I don’t know” offers an initial step out of the prison cell of personal belief.

Here are the 5 Stages of Surrender:

Stage 1 - The End of Personal Abandonment

While some of our deepest wounds come from feeling abandoned by others, it is surprising to see how often we abandon ourselves through the way we view life.

It’s natural to perceive through a lens of blame at the moment of emotional impact, but each stage of surrender offers us time and space to regroup and open our viewpoints for our highest evolutionary benefit.

 It’s okay to feel wronged by people or traumatized by circumstances. This reveals anger as a faithful guardian reminding us how overwhelmed we are by the outcomes at hand.

Throughout the first stage of surrender, we respect the gravity of our feelings, acknowledge each thought, belief, or conclusion as having a right to exist, and welcome each experience—no matter how surreal, one-sided, or distasteful it seems.

This occurs by relinquishing any tendency of personal abandonment by focusing on whether we are helping or hurting our experience by the way we view it.

The more willing we are to show ourselves unwavering emotional support, the less likely we are to make the actions of others the reason for our pain.

Stage 2 – Dissolving Attachment

Surrender is a willingness to become unstuck. All too often, the barrier to such clarity, peace, and freedom is an attachment to things looking or acting in a specific way.

While it is wonderful when the inevitabilities of life match our deepest desires, we are not meeting each moment in freedom when we need it to exist solely on our personal terms and conditions.

When we are attached to an outcome, understanding becomes argumentative, communication creates conflict, and benevolence turns to blame.

As attachments dissolve, we are able to wholeheartedly embrace the depths of our own experience, while honoring the truth of others, no matter how drastically it differs from ours.

As a way of dissolving our attachments to symbols—so we can meet reality as it is—we set aside the tendency to tell ourselves what things mean: We can dare to experience each moment without drawing conclusions.

Stage 3 – Moving Beyond Limiting Beliefs

As part of the five stages of surrender, the Golden Question asks: What if the worst things that ever happened to me were the greatest opportunities I have ever been given?

Such a huge shift in perspective allows enough space for our experiences to breathe, instead of being stifled by the symbols projected upon them.

Each time it’s considered, the Golden Question helps us face life without a need to confine it as an image, or wedge it into a frame of thought.

As we become more aligned with Source, what may have been true before doesn’t have to be true now, since reality takes shape and form on a path of ever-growing expansion.

Whichever version or timeline we encounter is solely dependent upon how much ego has dissolved and how profoundly our soul can expand.

In order to reap the most rewards from each encounter without denying the importance of our deepest feelings, we dare to see through the imprinting of our most limiting beliefs.

Stage 4 – The Grace of Devastation

Even when the circumstances of reality seem to be imploding with magnificent precision, trust offers opportunities to explore our deepest surrender through greater leaps of faith.

In order to allow the grace of our most devastating hardships to bring us into communion with Source energy, instead of confirming our most limiting beliefs, we should ask:

Am I willing to be devastated in order to reveal the deepest truth within me?

While it’s natural to desire something new, it’s a far grittier undertaking to allow the old to be dismantled as a way of creating fresh space.

Each and every time the grace of devastation enters our reality, we have an equal opportunity to either cement the falsehood of limiting beliefs or to allow limiting beliefs to melt away by walking through the fire of our most epic disaster.

Stage 5 – Embracing Adversity

When everything is here to help you, despite how callous, unbearable, and insufferable life seems, the most unwavering faith to our deepest truth always leads us home, no matter how displaced we may be for any amount of time.

From the viewpoint of ego, the plight of adversity confirms that since things don’t seem okay, they can only continue to not be okay. Only the ego says no to the pain and despair of unavoidable loss.

With the soul’s perspective, nothing is required to feel or be in any other way than how it unfolds.

This is because the soul is the inherent trust existing within the oneness of Source energy that becomes more of an instinctive experience as your journey of surrender deepens.

Once the ego is dissolved by the unavoidable winds of change, a renewed space welcomes into our reality fresh experiences and greater perspective.

To step forward into the forefront of the soul’s journey, it can be accessed by considering the following question:

How can I view adversity in a way that is more loving, supportive, and wise?

From this space, the inner phoenix of our true angelic potential can triumphantly ascend from its ashes.

As we end the plight of personal abandonment and allow the grip of attachment to dissolve, we dare to meet each moment beyond the framework of limiting beliefs, no matter how much devastation or adversity we are meant to face.

Whether we are feeling more relief, inner peace, and harmony than ever before, or still making our way through the integration of each stage, it is our willingness to surrender to life on its precise terms and conditions that manifests the beauty, power, and perfection of our highest potential.

Take a journey with my book by reminding yourself that Everything Is Here to Help You. With Love leading the way, the ecstasy of venturing beyond all boundaries and barriers becomes less overwhelming, less exhausting, and more exciting and instinctive.