Two Ways of Losing Yourself
On desire, preparation, and learning how to meet life with prepared participation.
At the beginning of my spiritual journey, many years ago, I stumbled upon the concept of surrender.
I had just read “The Untethered Soul” and later “The Surrender Experiment” by Michael Singer. Like many people at that stage, I was deeply drawn to the idea of letting go; of trusting life, of surrendering control, of allowing the universe to lead.
Perhaps because I had hit rock bottom and was looking for answers on how to get out of the valley.
Michael Singer’s life story made it sound almost irresistible. When he moved away from wanting from life and towards surrendering to it, life seemed to become more effortless.
More fulfilling and less forced. He described a shift from suppression to surrender, from trying to control life to simply letting it unfold.
At that time, this message landed deeply with me, because I had been living the opposite. I was living a life shaped almost entirely by control.
I lived in my mind, constantly projecting a future I believed would fulfill me. A version of life that would make me feel good, successful, secure, and, if I’m honest, better in comparison to others.
I tried to shape reality toward a “perfect state,” or at least toward something I thought I wanted.
I genuinely didn’t know myself, and I had lost faith in myself to trust that deep inside of me, I already carried what I was looking for.
Instead, I was focused on the external world; on external things and on external people giving me the answers I thought I needed.
Only later did I realize that many of these projections were not coming from clarity, but from wounds. From insecurities, fear, and from false desires rooted in not trusting life, and not trusting myself.
In that sense, Singer’s work helped me immensely as it softened something in me that allowed me to loosen my grip on life.
But it also left me confused, and I don’t think I was alone in that confusion.
Two Ways of Losing Yourself
Destructive control
It’s entirely possible to try to control life completely, as many people do. And by most external standards, many of them succeed. They hold onto power, manage as many variables as they can reach, and shape the world in ways that preserve certainty and predictability.
And for a time, this works.
Control can be an effective force. It can move systems, build companies, even change the course of history. But over time, it demands more and more energy. And more often than not, it isn’t driven by a deep love for life, nature, or the universe, but by something more fragile underneath.
Fear. Anger. Shame. Old wounds that haven’t been looked at. A need to protect a carefully constructed image of how things should be.
Over time, these overlooked wounds get buried under denial, neglect, and ignorance. And with that, you become more and more disconnected from yourself, and gradually, from everyone around you.
You can see it in people who try to control everything and everyone. What begins as decisiveness hardens into rigidity. Certainty that is threatened turns into suspicion. Complexity collapses into zero-sum thinking, where people become obstacles rather than collaborators.
These forces can still produce results. They can still drive change. But rarely the kind that feels genuinely constructive. More often than not, someone else ends up paying the price for that ambition.
At some point, control stops being creative.
It becomes destructive and begins to move against nature rather than with it.
Chaotic surrender
For me, surrender became the reaction to that kind of control.
Somewhere along the way, my understanding of it began to distort. I started to believe that the act of ‘wanting’ itself was the problem, that any desire was simply the ego interfering with life, trying to shape it according to fear and expectation.
In that frame, surrender slowly turned into something else. Into saying yes by default. Into stepping out of the way without really knowing why.
And so that’s what I did.
I stopped checking in with myself. I stopped asking whether something actually felt right, or whether I was quietly betraying something important in the process.
I mistook surrender for compliance.
Nothing collapsed, but something drifted.
Because surrender, practiced without a deep connection to yourself, doesn’t bring clarity, nor truth, but chaos.
Without grounding, without values, principles, or self-trust, surrender turns into self-erasure.
You turn into a rudderless ship in the middle of the ocean, at the mercy of winds and currents.
You say yes without listening, and neglect your own signals. Slowly, you begin serving other people’s wishes, needs, and desires while calling it trust.
This is where the trap appears.
If surrender means abandoning discernment, you have to assume the world is always honest, that people always act from clarity, love, or integrity, which is simply not true.
Many people, often unconsciously, project their own unmet needs, fears, and ambitions onto others. Some manipulate, some push, and some don’t know what they’re doing - but their confusion still has consequences.
Without self-trust, surrender doesn’t free you.
It dissolves you.
In spiritual language, words like trust, flow, and letting go can unintentionally reinforce that pattern when they’re not grounded in something deeper.
Prepared participation
For surrender to be healthy, it has to start somewhere else entirely.
It has to start with a relationship with yourself; with exploring who you are beneath conditioning, remembering your values, and clarifying the principles you’re willing to live by - not as rigid rules, but as an internal compass.
Surrender, in this sense, doesn’t mean becoming passive - it means becoming aligned.
You can’t control outcomes, but you can control:
the work you do to understand yourself
the intentions you set
the decisions you make
the boundaries you hold
the courage to say no, so that your yes actually means something
This kind of surrender isn’t about forcing life to behave a certain way; it’s about meeting life without dragging false desires along with you.
I keep coming back to the Serenity Prayer I’ve heard many times before, not as a belief, but as a reminder for when things feel unclear:
“Dear [Universe/Nature/God/Spaghetti Monster], grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
Surrender requires prepared participation.
Preparation: the active half of surrender
One of the biggest misunderstandings about surrender, and one I carried for a long time, is the belief that surrender means the universe will somehow do the work for you.
I used to think that letting go meant stepping out of responsibility, that trust would make effort unnecessary, that life would simply unfold on my behalf if I got out of the way.
Over time, I realized how misleading that idea was.
Surrender doesn’t mean the universe clears the path ahead of you. It doesn’t remove obstacles or spare you from difficult choices.
What it does, at least this is how I’ve come to understand it, is create conditions - and those conditions still require you to meet them.
That meeting takes work, awareness, discipline, and courage.
It takes preparation.
Over time, I’ve come to see surrender less as passivity and more as participation, an active relationship with whatever life is offering in that moment.
The image that keeps returning for me is sailing.
You still have to decide to leave the harbor. You still have to read the water and the sky. You still have to open the sails and keep adjusting them, again and again, so the wind can carry you.
None of this is easy.
Sometimes the wind takes you somewhere very different from where you had imagined. Sometimes the waters are calm and generous. And sometimes they are chaotic and unforgiving.
That, too, is part of the practice.
Preparation, in this sense, doesn’t mean trying to control the direction. It means staying responsive without hardening. It means constant readjustment, while not losing the joy in the movement itself.
It means trusting yourself.
Because surrender doesn’t promise a life of constant ease or happiness.
It asks whether you are willing to prepare yourself for whatever the universe has in store, and to meet it, as honestly as you can, with grace, with joy when possible, and with gratitude even when it’s difficult.
And yes, sometimes surrender also means suffering.
It means going through difficult seasons and facing failure. Staying present when things don’t make sense and when clarity doesn’t arrive on time.
That doesn’t mean something went wrong, but it usually means something real is happening.
When 'wanting' changes its nature
Something subtle begins to shift once you start trusting yourself again.
Wanting no longer feels like projection, no longer like a mental image of how life should look, or a future you need to arrive at to feel whole.
Instead, it takes on a different quality; quieter and less demanding.
It starts to feel more like remembering than desiring.
Not a detailed plan, and not a fixed destination either, but a sense of direction. A willingness to listen. A readiness to move when something feels true, without needing to know exactly where it will lead.
A readiness to be seen as unreasonable, irrational, chaotic, and hard to understand.
There is less grasping in it, and less expectation, yet more curiosity and more responsiveness.
You begin to pay attention to subtler signals; to how your body reacts in certain situations, to what feels expansive or contracting, to what gives energy rather than drains it.
Decisions become less about optimization and more about resonance.
Life, at that point, stops feeling like something to control and starts to feel more like a conversation, and more like a dance than a conquest. Not because you know where it leads, but because staying still would mean not being honest anymore.
As Alan Watts said: “Life is not a journey, but a song, and we were meant to dance”.
The music has been playing all along, and surrender, in this sense, is learning to listen. And desire, when it’s real, is choosing to move.
Alan Watts & David Lindberg - Why Your Life Is Not A Journey
What surrender makes possible
The beauty of surrendering, when it’s grounded, when it’s paired with responsibility, is not that you stop wanting or give up direction.
It’s when you begin to understand what is actually yours to control.
Your preparation.
Your inner alignment.
Your willingness to act when the moment calls for it.
And when that preparation meets the conditions life presents, something begins to shift.
Aliveness unlocks.
Not because you forced an outcome, but because you were ready when the invitation arrived.
What begins to change, I’ve noticed, isn’t just what you do, but the place you act from.
When action comes from trust & love rather than fear, from openness rather than defense, something in life starts to feel different.
Not necessarily easier, but more alive, more spacious, and more surprising. And over time, you begin to sense that you’re not acting for yourself alone, that you’re participating in something larger, something that only works because we depend on one another.
You are in communion, not just with the universe in some abstract sense, but with other people, with circumstances, with timing itself.
And sometimes, life takes you to places you could never have planned for. Not as a reward for control, but as a response to presence.
To end this year in reflection
One year ago, I was the founder and CEO of a small startup, and I could never have imagined how the next twelve months would unfold.
We had to close the company. We had to kill the product. And with it, a dream we once shared.
At the time, it felt like failure, but looking back now, I see it differently.
That startup was a beautiful head fake.
It was never meant to succeed in the way I thought success looked; in reach, in scale, or in money. It existed for something else entirely, as it forced me to grow, to mature, and to wake up in areas that were still drowned in illusion.
It confronted me with the ways I avoided difficult decisions, with places where I wasn’t fully honest with myself, and with responsibilities I hadn’t yet learned how to carry.
As painful as that ending was, it prepared me for what came next.
Because sometimes things are not what we think they are, and their ending is not a failure but a redirection.
Like a pause before a new song begins.
By November 2025, I found myself founding a new startup, something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams a year earlier. And who knows what 2026 has in store.
But what I do know is this: I will continue to do my part.
I will take responsibility for the things I can control: my decisions, my behavior, my integrity. I will keep working with my shadows instead of pretending they aren’t there.
I will become more aware of my flaws, not as something to fix, but as something to hold honestly. I will stay present for the people I love, and I will keep moving forward even when the path isn’t clear.
And above all, I will keep trying to help others remember why they are here: to create purpose, connection, and a sense of belonging in a world that desperately needs more humanity than ever before.
This, for now, is the work - to a new dance, with a new rhythm, and a willingness to meet whatever comes next with presence, courage, and care.
Happy New Year, everybody. <3
Sounds like you learnt so much from the start up you shut down and I’m excited for you to see where the next one leads you. Wishing you a great year of growth! 🫶
Such a beautiful article ❤️