The Art of Surrender: A Practical Guide to Enlightened Happiness and Well-Being

by Eiman Al Zaabi, Penny Peirce (Foreword by)

Overview

**Winner of Reader's Favorite Book Award**

**Winner of Book Excellence Award**

**Winner of the Body Mind Spirit Book Award**

For seekers of truth, Al Zaabi is a wise and intrepid guide through the wilderness of the self. In plainspoken and heartfelt language, she shine light on the spiritual path and reveals the beauty and necessity of surrender, which has for too long been misunderstanding in the west.

-Krista Bremer, author of A Tender Struggle

Do you ever wish you could switch off the chatter in your mind? This is what brings many of us to self-help, the fears and worries that go along with being human. It is the reason many of us investigate spirituality: emotions and the thoughts beneath them. Indeed, many approaches to religion and spirituality will tell you that the mind causes your suffering and teach you to quiet your inner voice.

The Art of Surrender stands out among self-help books because it offers a completely new approach to spirituality, health, and healing. You do not have to silence your thoughts. Your brain and mind are a gift; they have a spiritual purpose, which is to seek the truth and establish genuine spirituality. Drawing on her Muslim heritage and her wise and careful exploration of spirituality without religion yet informed by it, Eiman Al Zaabi guides you in the delightful art of spiritual inquiry, investigating ideas for yourself and incorporating only those truths that resonate deeply.

Whether you are taking the first steps on your spiritual journey or have long traveled such a path, The Art of Surrender will transform your relationship with yourself, the Divine, and the world around you. You'll learn the deepest needs of your soul and discover how to meet them. You'll be guided through the four stages of the spiritual journey: finding Source, knowing Source, aligning with Source, and surrendering to Source. With this approach to self-help, anxiety melts away as you develop a spirituality of gratitude and trust. When you read this book, you'll discover the ultimate state of fulfillment and joy: surrender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504345170
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	12/17/2015
Pages:	342
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eiman Al Zaabi is a Muslim spiritual teacher who integrates the principles of harmony, beauty and unity in her teaching. Eiman is also a facilitator, transformational coach who helps individuals transform their lives, heal from past trauma and live authentically.

Read an Excerpt

The Art of Surrender

A Practical Guide to Enlightened Happiness and Well-Being

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By Eiman Al Zaabi

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2015 Eiman Al Zaabi
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-4517-0

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CHAPTER 1

Know Thyself

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As the soul makes its journey through the physical realm, it longs to reconnect to its source: the Divine. Our task as humans is to align ourselves with our true nature and the truth of the universe. Disconnection from the Divine is at the root of all the suffering we experience during our lifetime. By learning to reconnect with and surrender to the Divine, we give ourselves the gift of true happiness and well-being. We begin this journey by skillfully harnessing our innate curiosity in order to understand our individual and collective plight as human selves. In this chapter, we'll explore the nature of the self, the self 's quest for Source, and the importance of truth, consciousness, and self-awareness throughout the journey.

The Human Struggle to Understand the Self

The self is one of the Divine's mysteries. People have spent millennia trying to figure it out. From the time of the great Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato to modern-day psychiatrists and psychologists such as Carl Jung, the self has been a fascinating subject. Such fascination has inspired decades of literature and research on the subject. The effort has been driven by the natural human need to learn and understand, and through that exploration we did indeed learn much about ourselves that we didn't know before.

However, the search has at times been deeply misguided. It has stemmed from the belief that if only we could figure ourselves out, we would be able to control our lives. We tend to feel that once something comes into our awareness and understanding, it is within our power to manipulate and control it. Our hope in understanding the self is that by grasping its boundaries, we will be able to work with it. We will achieve happiness and realize our own heartfelt desires. We may even find peace of mind and live happily ever after.

Truly, though, the self does not need to be defined. It is too vast to be fully defined and understood by any of us, including philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Our duty lies not in controlling our lives but in being able to sit within ourselves and develop a deeper understanding of the self 's desires, its vision, and its ability to create good in the world. There is a future story that wants to be told through your life. This story needs to be listened to, and when you do listen, life takes on a different meaning. You begin to move in unity with your purpose. The one song that you sing touches other lives as they hear its rhythms.

Your role is to be the guide of your own self, to be the one who takes care of yourself and clears the path for your own goodness to be birthed into the world. We all carry good inside of us, but have we actually listened to it? Have we sought to know what it is that we want to express though our uniqueness? It may be something we are already doing, or it may be something we are just discovering about ourselves.

The self is the place where change begins, where you map out your needs and desires and seek to have them manifested. The self has the ability to live a life of peace and harmony. That ability can only be activated once the self has cultivated the conditions that will allow it to thrive. These conditions come from understanding the three primary soul needs: to find and connect to Source, to find ways of being, and to express its uniqueness. When we attend to the soul's needs, we come full circle to a place where we add life to this planet. We become active participants in the overall ecosystem of the universe.

The Peril of Disconnection

Clearly the self, our individuation, is an entity that has certain qualities that make it unique, including curiosity, the tendency to evolve, and the wish to act on its environment. The self is like a wild horse. If you let it run in unfocused directions, it may end up destroying you, yet if you train it to see the path ahead and move in that direction, it can lead you to where you want to go.

Looking back at the history of humanity, we can see that what we have created in the world around us, the exterior, is a reflection of the undisciplined self, the untamed horse within us. Where we are living, developmentally and evolutionarily as a species, is a natural representation of who we are as modern-day humans. Our world is a reflection of our hopes, dreams, desires, greed, pride, prejudice, and the myriad qualities of the human collective. The world we live in has come into being through our God-given right to choose. We made the decision to land on the moon, and nothing could stop us from achieving it. We decided to launch satellites and space shuttles to explore new depths of the universe, and we were uninhibited.

With our willpower, and by our choosing, we started wars and decimated each other and the planet with nuclear bombs. We are exhausting the Earth's natural resources while literally gushing oil into the oceans and emitting noxious gases into the air.

Without awareness and discipline, the self may drift away from its Source. We slowly come to live in what is essentially a state of disconnection from our natural gifts and curiosities. We miss the opportunity to give a deeper and more real meaning to our lives and our existence on earth as spiritual beings. We live in a state of fundamental denial as technology progresses and our lives become ever more separate from nature, which, we forget, is our biological home. Many people connect and pray to the Divine only at times of crisis; we have taken a path of selective spirituality. Modern life teaches us that such disconnection is normal and expected. Once we are partitioned from the true self, we masterfully learn to hide it.

This is possibly the most consequential human tragedy, that we remain in a state of disconnection. When we are disconnected, we think, There's nothing more to our everyday experiences than what appears on the surface. We think, Who am I to be the one to find answers to life's great mysteries, anyway? I'm no spiritual guru! I'm no scientist! And with that, we let our curious minds go dormant.

A state of disconnection can be brought about by the ego when it is trying to protect itself. The ego is the shadow side of the self, the aspects of the self that accumulate from the mental, physical, and emotional pains of life. If we understand the ego, it unlocks our true potential. Meanwhile, though, the ego doesn't want to challenge or change the status quo, because that's what reinforces its identity and keeps it safe. Disconnection may also be due to the brain's natural gifts being shut down by a mundane lifestyle or by childhood neglect or other abuse. The busy nature of life in the information age tends to bombard the mind with information and stimulation until it is numb to its instinctive search for purpose, destiny, and Source. This combination of distraction and numbness sucks us into a vortex of confusion, worry, and fear over the most trivial things that steers us away from our spiritual path.

Our souls are hungry for sustainable, sacred connection with the Divine. It is the soul's lifeblood to constantly be connected in that way. There is no separation between the present moment we live in and the Divine presence. We live and breathe within that larger spiritual realm of the Divine. Everything you see around you speaks the story of creation, including yourself. Every animal, tree, or planet carries the truth of creation, and so do you.

We are by nature spiritual beings who long to connect with and express our spirituality uniquely in this world. To deny this is to live the life of a disconnected human. We are not machines running in a self-controlled universe, nor are we a mere inexplicable coincidence.

We have proven to ourselves there is no limit to what we can do, and yet we are not able to agree on some of the most important and fundamental aspects of our existence. What we have forgotten is that all the biological and natural resources that surround us — our bodies, our brains, the natural world — contain cues for unasked questions and answers that will lead us to what we are seeking. To see this, we must embrace a different mind-set; we must find the inner road we have lost.

When we decided to be "civilized" and to create industries, high- rises, and roads that take us to where we physically want to go, we neglected to find and follow that inner road, the road that aligns us and leads us to our unceasing desire for spiritual meaning. Most of us live life from the outside in; in other words, we react to what comes to us, rather than acting from what is within us. We have become passive participants and have forgotten that this life and the entire universe are actually here to assist us in our spiritual search.

Life will naturally move us out of disconnection, if we let it. Each one of us is divinely guided in this way. What we require is a leap of faith to the unknown territory of sacred connection. We may not know what it's like or how it can be achieved, but right now, we can start with a genuine commitment to learning the truth and allowing the soul to lead us.

Understanding the Self

The self is a single point of consciousness that exists in space and time. It is the form the soul takes in physical reality. It has the ability to lead a life of fulfillment and happiness. In the body we inhabit, we are given a chance to live and make a difference. The gift of existence is one of the Divine's greatest gifts. In the life we live, we carry dreams, desires, and hopes while we are challenged at some level in our daily lives. Being challenged is an opportunity for growth and evolution that leads to an experienced soul with the skills necessary to live a life of purpose and meaning. Every so-called negative experience we have has the potential to bring us closer to our life's purpose.

Seeing challenges as guides on the path of happiness will transform the way we view our lives. The sun shines after she has learned that the clouds are temporary and that they are there to help her find another way or accept their presence. It is when the self feels fulfilled that we encounter happiness. A fulfilled self means we have gained a state of awareness that helps us understand life, our individual role in it, and what path we need to take in order to be aligned with the truth.

Unfortunately, so many of us on our journey are deceived by the definition of happiness. We think that happiness is a permanent state, that it is a destination to be found. Some of us can't seem to put our finger on what it means to be happy. Does happiness refer to our current momentary state? Or does it encapsulate our overall state and feeling about life? Is it incidental, based on what our circumstances dictate? Or is it inherent, based on our perceptions and feelings about our circumstances?

Some of us carry the fairy-tale happy-ever-after mentality, longing to be happy and fulfilled at some point in our lives. Meanwhile, we lose sight of the moments during our day when we are happy and expanded. Those tiny, fleeting moments are real and have the potential to fill our hearts with contentment. When we have just witnessed our child's first smile or when we sit looking out at the rain while drinking our favorite tea, those are the moments that make up our lives. The more we cultivate these experiences, the more we bring in joy into our world. The belief that happiness will come to us some day may strand us in a daydream state. If you think of happiness in terms of the future, that's where it will stay: in the future.

To bring the self to fulfillment and a state of happiness, you must accept that the self is going to go through challenges and that happiness constitutes states of being that you cultivate as you come to understand yourself and your desires a little better. You must expect change, expect to be challenged, and expect pain and growth. All of these elements will constitute a holistic awareness of yourself and your life while you allow yourself to recalibrate to the truth within you and around you.

Contentment is a subtler and more sustainable form of happiness. Contentment comes from the realization that your life is divinely guided, and that it's a matter of surrender, the right timing, learning, and active participation in your life that will change things for the better. Habitual dissatisfaction can set you up for unhappiness. To be content is to be satisfied with the way things are. Satisfaction comes from the understanding that where your life is at the moment is the right place for you.

The secret to contentment is embracing what's working and what isn't working in your life. It's in learning that limitation has its own sense of gratification, because in a limited reality, you know that you can still dream. When dreams are a part of your life, you know that life has a sweetness and a looking-forward aspect that will keep you trying for something better. As you learn and master the mind-set and the channels through which dreams come into reality, you will learn that even if you cannot necessarily live all of your dreams, by surrendering your heart you can achieve contentment as a permanent state.

Being grateful for what's good in your life will balance the scale and help you move yourself forward by initiating and embracing change.

Filling your happiness cup can be as simple as giving spiritual, mental, emotional, social, and physical nourishments to yourself. In such practices, you allow the tree of your soul to grow and thrive. You allow the abundant radiance of your self. As your soul flourishes, you become able to focus on the big things in life rather than being triggered by the little things. When all the levels of your well-being are well nourished, your soul begins to shine its light. You give yourself permission to bring forth that which wants to be expressed through you.

Giving ourselves those pleasures — that food for our soul — requires an awareness on our part to be able to recognize that which fills us up inside. Sometimes, we are in the midst of something and we transcend time and become engulfed by the joy of what we are doing. That's a state of being and doing that fills us up. Our well-being is achieved by reaching and maintaining and calibrating to a balance point. At that balance point, we are in the process of understanding the spiritual path that brings us closer to the truth, the emotional states that bring us fulfillment, the mental states that support us, and finally the physical practices we require to care for our bodies. All of these elements rest upon self-awareness that can be achieved only if we choose to cultivate it — to take the extra time to nourish ourselves, to understand that life is a dance between the states of doing and being.

When you go on a journey to find and understand yourself, an amazing thing happens. You uncover the truths that have made everything in this life possible. You encounter the Divine. On the journey to find yourself, you find God, and when you find God, you find yourself. It's an inseparable, infinite relationship. As you study yourself and what makes you who you are, you stumble upon the greatness of the Divine that has brought you into being. Or, if you decide to seek God to connect your soul to the truth, you may end up in a place where you have cultivated more awareness of who you really are. It is a fascinating and fulfilling journey to take.

Reflection: What Is Your Current State of Well-Being?

On a scale of 0 (malnourished) to 10 (very well nourished), what is your current state in each of the following areas? Feel into the answer in your heart and write down the first number that comes to you. Be honest with your answers. This is not so much a mental process as a feeling that your soul will communicate to you.

Physical _______

Emotional _______

Mental _______

Social _______

Spiritual _______

Total Score: _______

Once you have rated each area, add up the numbers. For example, if you scored 2 on physical, 4 on emotional, 6 on mental, 0 on social, and 5 on spiritual, your total would be 17 points. Now find your score in the ranges below.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Art of Surrender by Eiman Al Zaabi. Copyright © 2015 Eiman Al Zaabi. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword, ix,
Acknowledgments, xiii,
Introduction, 1,
Part 1: The Self, 17,
1. Know Thyself, 19,
2. The Soul and Its Journey, 33,
3. Calming the Ego, 51,
4. Where Is the Truth?, 62,
Part 2: The Context, 79,
5. Divine Matters, 81,
6. The Rules of Life, 99,
7. The Inquiring Mind, 114,
8. Finding Your Answers, 142,
Part 3: The Journey, 163,
9. What Is Your Path?, 165,
10. Step One: Find Source, 185,
11. Step Two: Know Source, 197,
12. Step Three: Align to Source, 217,
13. Step Four: Surrender to Source, 242,
14. Surrender As a Way of Life, 263,
Conclusion: The Potentiality of Alignment, 281,
References, 283,