Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's

episode we're going to talk about surrender and expansion. More to come on that

in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'm going to share a simple equation. It says pain plus surrender equals

expansion. Pain plus surrender equals expansion. This isn't an equation you're

going to find in a math book. It's one that has come from my own experience of

working with internal, just comfort, and what happens when I resist and what

happens when I let go. When we experience pain, the usual tendency is to resist

suppress and brace. I think there's a time and place for this in the sense that

sometimes it is just a very normal, necessary part of our journey. We need to fight

before we can release. But this has a primary strategy. It reinforces

patterns of internal tension, and it also strengthens our ego's resolve to

stay in control. When you meet your pain with soft awareness, however, you

invite your ego to surrender, which creates acceptance, trust, space, and

expansion. Real peace, deep peace, does not come from the ego staying in control.

It only comes from this deeper surrender, because the reality is that nothing is

fully in control, and then the ego will just exhaust itself, trying to piece

eat everything together in every moment. And so pain actually becomes an

interesting doorway where we realize I can't hold all of this together. I can

try, I can fight, I can resist. And this is where I say sometimes that is part

of the journey, a necessary part, until we exhaust ourselves to the point of letting

...