What is Surrendered Leadership

Surrendered Leadership is a practice that grew out of Circling, and is one of many practices that constitute the authentic relating field.

Every person seems to hold the practice in slightly different ways, so this is shining a light on it from my background. My path into this field came through 15 years of mostly solitary exploration of consciousness with psychedelics and Buddhist meditation practices.

I am also very interested in truth and how the world works, and rather sceptical of a lot of things in the "spiritual" field. I don't believe in anything supernatural.

When I call something spiritual, what I mean is that it relates to the quest for greater intimacy with being alive, being in direct contact with the living, breathing world which is not possible to catch in propositions, but is possible to experience directly. This is a nuanced topic which is very hard to talk about.

For me, Surrenderd Leadership is a modern approach to spirituality that is explicitly experiential and has no interest in pushing any propositional beliefs.

I like to divide it into some distinct sub-practices to make it easier to talk about:

• an inner practice:
  waking – opening attention, welcoming everything. This is described in all spiritual traditions, and very hard to teach using just language. I had meditated for 15 years and not quite understood this until I participated in SL. It is a great strength of the practice being so dynamic and interactive that details of experience can be pointed at live and understood experientially.

• a growth practice:
  clear-seeing – noticing more and more about the structure of our awarenesses. This is really an inevitable effect of waking and relating in truth, but initially it can help to purposfully use our intellect a bit. By seeing more and more, you both gain in intimacy and ability to see complexity.

• a spiritual practice:
  surrendering – allowing your naturalness to unfold by relaxing your various coping mechanisms and control patterns, allowing yourself to be who you really are. This is quite scary and vulnerable, but leads to health, joy and much deeper connection.

• a relational practice:
  loving – telling the truth, helping eachother to wake, see and surrender. It's not that we try to force a specific emotion, but that we share freely of who we really are and what we really see. No love is deeper than being together in truth.

It's the relational aspect that sets SL and its siblings apart from classical meditation and it makes it not only more robust (because the practice space is so similar to regular life), but also a lot more fun, and thus more likely to actually be practiced. It also gives relational skills you don't get in regular meditation.

SL is also something you can do all the time, it isn't dependent on other people doing the same, although that really helps when you are learning. When you lead your life from surrender, your freedom increases and your growth accelerates. It's all about not trying to do or change anything, stepping out of the way, and allowing the doing and changing to happen naturally. It can seem slower, but it really isn't.