Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Search Sangha Live

The Power of Surrender

With Deborah Eden Tull recorded on June 18, 2023.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

The spiritual path requires our surrender – again and again. We surrender story, striving, preoccupation, and the illusion of separate self. We surrender all that is not Love.

  • How do we remember the power of surrender alongside resistance?
  • How do we recognize the emergent ground of Trust while navigating the unknown?
  • How can the liminality we face collectively be met with an unguarded heart?

This restorative teaching is inspired by Eden’s newest book Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Meeting the Unknown.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Tags: trust and faith

Discussion

One thought on “The Power of Surrender”

  1. Thanks, this was very inspiring! I have been studying Buddhism for about a year, mostly through reading Pema Chodron, and today was my first time finding this website, as I think I need a Sangha in my life. So it seems I am in the right place, and I very much intend to return! Thanks Deborah, -Alex

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of 22 September, 2025

    We’re grateful to have Nirmala Werner guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May they support and deepen your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Still Heart: Cultivating Equanimity in an Unsteady World

    In a world marked by constant change, uncertainty, and emotional intensity, equanimity can seem like a distant ideal-or even a form of indifference. But in the Buddhist tradition, equanimity (upekkhā) is not cold or passive. It is the spacious, steady heart that knows how to stay open, grounded, and present with whatever life brings.

    In this week we will explore equanimity as a deep source of inner freedom-neither detached nor reactive, but wise, loving, and awake.

    Through daily reflection and embodied practice, we will ask:

    What is true equanimity, and what is it not?

    How can we meet change without losing our ground?

    How do we love and let go-at the same time?

    And how can we live with a still heart in a restless world?

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of July 19, 2021

    This week’s theme is: Identifying the Many Masks of the Inner Critic

    Often we think of the inner critic as the constant nagging inner discourse which dismisses our good qualities, questions our lovability, and our potential for goodness. Being a master/mistress of disguise, the inner critic takes on many forms; it wraps our decision making process in veils of doubt, pushes us into compulsive activity, traps us in paralysis, and distorts our views on others.

    Luckily, the Dharma path offers us tools to meet this painful heart-mind dynamic. This week we will practice summoning qualities like wisdom, kindness, equanimity, concentration, appreciation, compassion and inquiry, in order to meet our inner critic in a skilful way.

    Read More

  • Deborah Eden Tull - Senior Dharma Teacher

    You are Not Alone: Healing the Myth of Separation

    Recorded : March 17, 2019

    The dharma invites us to face ourselves fully. But through fear, we sometimes distract ourselves, over-fill ourselves, and hold onto external attachments, in order to avoid.…what? The illusion that we are separate and isolated manifests in ways conscious and unconscious, but over time practice reveals to us that it is simply the ego that fears…

    Read More

  •

    Illness, death, urgency and love.

    Recorded : February 5, 2017

    Yes, the Buddha repeatedly recommended that each of us contemplate our own aging, illness and death. But what gap do you feel between an abstract contemplation and the actuality of this fragile and limited life? With death rolling in like a mountain, quickly and from all sides, do you feel any samvega, or sense of…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    Understanding and developing Citta (heart-mind)

    Recorded : January 28, 2018

    All schools of Buddhism acknowledge that the development of Citta is an essential aspect of the awakening process. Within classical Mindfulness teachings, it encompasses the entirely of the third foundation of practice. At its core, it encourages us to recognize the presence and absence of greed, hatred and delusion. In its fruition it points to…

    Read More

  •

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Leela Sarti – Week of April 18, 2022

    This week’s theme is “Timeless Presence in Daily Life: Being Yourself, Being at Home”. This week we will be exploring the possibility of being grounded in the depth of timeless presence in the midst of daily life. How to live a full life from silence and emptiness? How can we feel at home in our own skin and in the very circumstances of our life? How can we awaken an awareness and a heart that embraces life, dukkha and beyond? The grace of presence reveals the possibility of settling in reality and living with ease.

    Read More

  •

    The Path of the Bodhisattva: Choosing a Life of Kindness

    Recorded : November 12, 2023

    The path of the Bodhisattva asks us to dedicate ourselves to the well-being of all sentient beings – to show up as best as we can for ourselves, each other, and the natural world with a quality of no-matter-whatness. It’s an impossible though necessary task. Yet the teachings and practices of everyday dharma offer accessible,…

    Read More