Surrender Box

Always say “yes” to the present moment.  Surrender to what it is.  Say “yes” to life – and see how life starts suddenly to start working for you rather than against you.  Eckhart Tolle

This tool ties into my article this week on Checks and Balances.  One of the most helpful ways I have found to keep my level of worry under check, has been to use my Surrender Box.  Many people refer to this as a God Box.  Not being a particularly religious person, I started to think about what the God Box allowed people to achieve.  To me, it signified letting go of things that you were spending a lot of anxious energy on.  Especially things that you can’t really do anything to change at the given time.  You know those things that keep you up in the middle of the night,  planning your next vacation, paying the bills next month, how you will react to the next medication your doctor wants you to try, all of the things you can do nothing about at 3:00 a.m. Those are the things that the box is useful for.  I have a pretty pad of paper beside the box that I write those things down on and put them in the box.  What it signifies to me is that I am surrendering those worries for the time being to a higher source.  That can be whatever you believe in.  A god, the universe, a guardian angel or any other being that you would pray to.  For me, I surrender by worries to the universe.  It helps reduce anxiety for me and allows me to sleep better.  It took some practice and numerous times waking up and telling myself “Go back to sleep.  You already put that in the box.”  After some practice, it usually works now.

Something to note, my husband is a carpenter and when I decided I wanted to find a box for this purpose, the kind man that he is, he went out and made me a wooden box to use.  When he brought it in the house, it was a plain wood box because I wanted to paint it and pretty it up. It had a small slit in the top to slide my note paper with my worries written on it.  The first thing I noticed and said to him was “How do I open it?”  He said to me “You don’t.”  I asked how I was supposed to get into it.  He smartly replied, “Why do you need to?  If you are giving it over and surrendering, you don’t ever need to get it out.”  Good point.

Putting things into the Box does not mean that you are giving up.  It just means that you realize that at this point, there is nothing that you can do about it.  It means you are choosing to release the anxiety that comes from fixating on that particular topic.  I choose to save my energy to fight another battle that I can change.