Personal Will vs Divine Will: Turning Willpower Into Surrender (EP52, 2/2)

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Surrender is not passive. It is not floppy, weak, or giving up. Surrender is one of the most active, courageous things you will ever do — and your personal will is the very thing that gets you there.

In this second half of our two-part series on personal will and divine will (go back to episode 51 if you haven't heard part one), we go deep into what it actually looks like to keep showing up, keep trying, keep praying, keep doing the healing work — while still trusting that God's hand has the final say.

We talk about the two forces inside all of us: the part that wants union, alignment, and truth, and the part still caught in wounding, grasping, and aversion. And we talk about what happens when your faith tips past 51% — how your personal will stops fueling your ego and starts becoming a rerouting force, a spiritual warrior, taking you out of polarity and into surrender.

This episode will change how you think about willpower, effort, and what it really means to trust the unknown. Your personal will was never meant to be dampened. It was meant to bring you home.

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This podcast show is for people dedicated to spiritual awakening, spiritual practice, psychology, healing work, collective healing and awakening, and global positive social change. 

For free meditations, private sessions, and the Ground of Love Healing School, see www.thegroundoflove.com

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This podcast show explores meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, spiritual awakening, and spiritual growth, with a strong focus on personal healing, trauma healing, emotional healing, and somatic healing. We dive into nonduality, embodied spirituality, the true self, life purpose, and spiritual practice, while also addressing shadow and integration themes like spiritual bypass, ego-death, root causes, and holistic healing. 

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Transcript

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This is like a little math equation. When your faith is at least 51% of you and your wounding is 49% that's when your personal will now has the capacity to prioritize Surrender because it trusts God enough where in a moment when we don't feel faith faith is still somewhere in our back pocket. Welcome to the Ground of Love. I'm your host, Olivia Frazao. This is a podcast for people who are deeply dedicated to the spiritual journey. You are here for self-growth care, for others, and being of service to the world. This podcast is in service to you to help you remember who you are and why you are here, you will receive inspiration, clarity, and no BS Love. We are walking each other home. Let's begin. This is part two of a two-episode series on personal will and divine will. If you haven't yet, please go back to part one, that is episode number fifty-one, And here we are continuing that conversation. So now we're going to pick up where we left off. Here we go. So we don't force life in a certain direction, and as I said, we don't resist life where it takes us either. But then what does this mean? Does this mean that we're just passive? Are we just floppy, or is there a place for effort? As I said, I, I never said don't try. I never said don't give it your all. I never said don't pray, don't do healing work, don't do what you c-can do to try to help a situation. I didn't say any of that So what am I saying? Yes, do your work. Pray for what feels right and good and important to you. Do the healing work. Do the visualizations. Do your very best to help yourself and others. That is our responsibility to show up as creators for that which we offer to God as our petition for, hey, I really want this to physically manifest. If it's in the highest and best for all beings, please, I beg of you, I give my all. I give all of my, myself to this great focus and great intention and great heart emanation and capacity of creatorship so that this can happen. We are showing up. Surrender has nothing to do with passivity. It is very active But it's active in alignment with God, not in opposition. That's the difference We know that we are doing everything that we do under the big boss, under and within God's grace. We're doing everything within the great embrace of God's grace, and it's God's great hand that will either receive our request with a yes or a no, and we trust the outcome. We trust what God has decided. Again, I know I'm personifying here, but I'm really trying to make a point, and I hope it's landing. So now we are actually prioritizing divine will. We are making effort, but we're doing so wanting to make sure that it's in alignment with ultimately not just what we want in the moment or what we want based on the small amount of data that we're actually privy to or what we want because we think it'll be good for us, but we don't actually know. Now we want whatever we do and whatever happens to be truly in alignment So this is where personal will now has a new job. Because first personal will could have battled with divine will. I don't want this to happen. I'm in opposition to it. I'm gonna fight it. I'm gonna victimize myself around it, and I'm gonna be angry at God because something happened that's different from what I wanted. I'm gonna feel betrayed by God. I'm gonna be bitter towards life. That's what happens when personal will fights divine will whereas in the scenario that we just talked about, we are hoping for what we want and we are giving our all to making that happen. We are giving our all and we are ultimately leaving it in God's hands. Meaning we are putting in our very best and ultimately we trust that what happens is correct, even if it's different from what we expected or wanted, even if it's different from what we gave our all to. Ultimately, God's hand is the final say and we trust that. We've done our best. We've done our part. And ultimately it's in God's hands and we can rest in that, not as passivity, but as a trust while we are being active. So we have talked about these scenarios regarding outer life circumstances like a divorce happening or someone dying, right? With my examples before. Now let's look at our inner world, not just the outer world, okay? This is where personal will has the new job that I said that it has because our inner world includes parts of us that are still disconnected from alignment.. Our inner world still includes self-sabotage from our highest growth. Our inner world still includes distraction from the spiritual path, selfishness, violence even So now we can notice, let's say, two impulses or two intentions within ourselves. Okay, one of them is the part of us that does want alignment with God's will, that wants to be in the flow of the river, that trusts where the river takes us. That's the part of us that has faith. That's the part of us that wants union with God. That's the part of us that is full on, I'm a yes to my highest spiritual path. I'm a yes to trusting that life is always an invitation to my self-realization, and I'm a yes to ultimately awakening and enlightenment and union with God with all that is. The other side, the other part of us is, of course, the part of us that's still wanting to do things our way, that is still stuck in samsara. Okay, this is the egoic self, all the parts of our egoic self that are still kind of wrapped up in the, its own illusions. So this is the part of us that wants to fall into the collapses of our psychological wounds, that wants to relive one more time the, all those grooves of our triggers and our reactivity. This is the part of us that is living all those reactivities on autopilot in a way that's not healthy for us, that doesn't serve us. This is the part of us that wants to turn away from love, from truth, from connection. This is the part of us that doesn't trust, that doesn't have faith, that thinks that it needs to go it alone because it thinks that it is alone. And so it's gonna effort and over-effort and try to force life to be the way I want it. That part of us still exists. It doesn't magically disappear when our faith deepens. It just becomes smaller. It becomes less than the fifty percent of us, right? The ratio has shifted, and our faith is greater than our personal desires and aversions, but th- that stuff is still there. We're not enlightened. We're just on a spiritual path. We're someone with deep faith, thank God. And yet all this stuff remains. All of our grasping and aversion, not all of it, but a good chunk of it is still there. It's, it's at this point, let's say, less than fifty percent though. So the tables have turned, but we need to understand that within ourselves are different forces still. So now that we do have this greater faith, now that our faith is more than 50%, now we have choice. We can use our personal will to feed that part of us that is going into our wounding and that is perpetuating the egoic self and all of the desires and fears and grasping and aversion, right? That the personal will can still work for that part of us, or we can use our personal will to reroute us towards God. Our personal will has a new job. It is now rerouting us towards faith, towards trust, towards self-realization, towards surrender to the divine So look at that. We are using effort to point us towards surrender. Isn't that cool? So before, let's go over this again. Before our personal will used to link with our egoic self, the part of us that feels alone, that needs to control the whole universe in order to be safe, that wants what it wants because it wants it, all that. Our personal will used to fuel that egoic self to take unhealthy or unhelpful action Now, our personal will doesn't work for our egoic self anymore. Our personal will now works for the big boss. Our personal will is now a rerouting machine. Our personal will now sees any time we've fallen into the traps of our wounding and reroutes us to look for resource, to look for health, to look for truth that will get us out of illusion, so that we don't just keep falling further and further into the wounding and all the traps. Our personal will has the capacity to fight, has the capacity to be a fighter, but th- not against God this time, but for God. So our personal will is now the spiritual warrior. That's the archetype. Not a warrior that fights within the realms of polarity, but that fights to get us out of polarity. That's what the spiritual warrior does. It's the one that fights us not within polarity, but to get us out of polarity, to get us to, let's say, the quote unquote, "third thing," which is God, God, God absolute. Not the good, bad, right, wrong, you, me, us, them, all the horizontal separation-based polarities, but instead imagine a triangle. Instead of just two points, right, and then there's fighting between those two points. That's just a fighter. Now we're talking the spiritual warrior. The spiritual warrior has the vertical line upwards from those two points towards the top point of the triangle, and that's what we're calling God. That's what we're calling God as God's will, and that's what we're calling God as our own God nature. So our personal will becomes that force that's able to take us out of getting stuck in polarity and into unity, into God, into that which is greater, into the greater order of things, into God's will. So this isn't a warrior that even fights against anything This is a spiritual warrior that fights for something. Our focus is not against, it's for. Our focus is on finding, loving, and reaching for that which is most true, offering ourselves to that which is most true Which is love, which is God, which is unity, which is oneness. That's what our personal will is now working for, is now routing us towards. Our personal will is fuel. It's a full gas tank that cranks up the engine and lets us move in the direction that we want. Our personal will is the life force that can be used for our highest good. Our personal will is not something to dampen into passivity. Our personal will is energy to use for our highest and best when it's working for the big boss, God, rather than for the little boss, the egoic self. So the question is, who is your personal will working for? Because when it works for God, it's working for you, the real you, the you that you actually are. It's working for your highest and best. This isn't like a, "Oh, bummer, it doesn't work for me anymore. I have to give that up." No, this is you. This is the real you, the you that wants and deserves to feel good, not from a momentary pleasure that might have an unforeseen kickback, but a real feeling good, the, the feeling good that comes from truth and true nature and true love and everything that comes with self-realization, with a direct experience of non-duality. When you come out, out of polarity and into non-duality So this isn't like, "Oh, I don't get to do fun things anymore." You know, "Oh, this is so much discipline." This is the-- We're going towards the real feeling good, not the momentary high that, you know, you get, uh, hung, hungover from or that has all these weird side things. This isn't, this isn't losing anything. This is gaining everything. This is saying yes to life force, to love, to fulfillment, to self-realization. That's what our personal will is routing us towards. Our personal will is routing us ultimately towards all that is good, all that is good for us and for everyone So another way you could think about it is that you are actually working for yourself now rather than for your wounding. If you wanna say you in terms of like your personal will. You in your personal will are working for yourself. You're actually tending to yourself. You're actually doing what's good for you truly, not what feels good for all of your conditioning and wounding and trauma responses and reactivities and triggers So your personal will is now capable of directing you out of your wounding and into surrender, which is where you're gonna land into that which is best for you. Your personal will is gonna reroute you out of your grasping and aversion, which are the places where you're still fighting God's will and into surrender You're experiencing grasping and aversion? Uh-oh, I'm fighting life. I feel alone. I have forgotten oneness. I have forgotten that I'm held by something greater than me. All of that. I'm experiencing pain. I'm in fear. I'm gr- I'm grasping. I'm running away. I'm doing all the things. I'm doing the fight, flight, freeze response. Ah, okay, mindfulness. Figured that one out. Yep, I notice where I am. This is what's happening. Good. I have a mindful witness on it. That's step one. Step two, okay, personal will, we got this. Let's reroute. Let's choose something different. Let's go towards resource. Let's go towards the heart. Let's go towards faith. We're gonna let go of all this grasping and aversion, and we're gonna reroute ourselves, and we're gonna focus where it's most true and most good for us. That's what personal will is capable of. And as I said, it's only capable of that when we actually have faith that this stuff works, when we actually have faith that what we're routing ourselves towards is something that's gonna be better for us, even though it's unknown, even though it's the great mystery, even though what we're really doing is simply giving ourselves in this huge trust fall every time towards that which we can't see. Because if we could see it, we wouldn't be in grasping and aversion in the first place. We only found ourselves in grasping and aversion because there's some part of us that's experiencing a blind spot that's like, "No, no, no, this is really bad," or, "No, no, no, I really am alone right now," or, "No, no, no, I really have to hold the whole universe together or else it's gonna blow up and everything's gonna be terrible." That's why we're in grasping and aversion, because that part of us in that place is not experiencing faith and trust and direct experience of what truly is. Maybe the rest of us, or at least a good chunk of us, not this one, but some other part of us really does have faith and trust, as I said, is already past that fifty percent point. Thank God. But not this part. But because the rest of us does have faith, we can petition our personal will to be like, "Hey, personal will, we need you right now. This is what it's for. Please reroute me. I'm ready to have courage. I'm ready to have a focus that's directed in a place that's actually helpful to me. Let's get out of here and redirect." That's the power of the personal will when it actually works for you and not for your wounding, when it works for God, for your own God nature, for your own God realization, and not for your wounding That's pretty amazing. It's really powerful. It's a grace that we have. The personal will within the egoic self that knows that it wants something beyond itself can be of highest service to our awakening So all of this is, as I said, only possible because the trust and faith is there, at least in the majority of ourselves. As I said, not in that particular moment where we found ourselves stuck, but it's what allows us to get out of it. So the fact that our trust and faith is more than, let's say, fifty percent of us, as I've been saying, that makes the grasping and aversion less than fifty percent. So those are the two things that we're looking at. If we wanna make a ratio, what are on... what's on each side of the scale? On one side, you have trust and faith. On the other side, you have the result of the lack of trust and faith, which is our actions of grasping and aversion. And when I say actions, it could be even thoughts. It doesn't have to be, like, physical behaviors. So ultimately, the work here is to increase our faith Because our faith in God's will needs to be bigger than our grasping or aversion. When that is the case, your personal will will route you towards God's will rather than towards your personal desires, aka your grasping and aversion in this case. So I'm going to say that again. This is like a little math equation. When your faith is at least 51% of you and your wounding is 49%, which is going to lead to all the grasping and aversion, that's when your personal will now has the capacity to prioritize Surrender because it trusts God enough where in a moment when we don't feel faith faith is still somewhere in our back pocket. Faith is still speaking to us and into that part of us that doesn't know it yet, and our personal will is like, "Yes, we're doing this. Yes, we're rerouting. Yes, we're choosing what might be hard to feel in the moment, but what we know is ultimately true. We're going with courage, and we're gonna go find what's true. We're gonna get out of here." And we're gonna surrender this grasping. We're gonna surrender this need for control. We're gonna surrender this fear right now. We've been here before. We're gonna do it again. We can do it. That's the power of personal will. That's the power of the spiritual warrior. That's the power of willpower itself. It's a force. It's the, it's anything but passive. It's extremely active and powerful. So personal will, it's not something to devalue. It's not something to dampen It's a power. Our willpower is power. S- And we get to direct that power in whatever direction we direct it. And that power will either fuel our resistance to life or it'll fuel our intimacy with life. That's the choice. The difference will depend on your level of trust and faith And as you've seen here, as we've talked about, trust and faith is anything but passive. It's courageous. Personal will is life force energy. We can direct our life force energy as courage into the unknown. We can will ourselves towards surrender. Isn't that wild? We are willing ourselves towards surrender. It is willpower directed towards surrendering itself. It's not willpower versus surrender. I am with my willpower taking myself to surrender. I am with my willpower making myself surrender. So this is courage. This is self-discipline. This is self-trust. This is the capacity to reroute our focus and our impulses and our intention and what we are reaching towards, what we're saying yes to Through looking for that which we know is awaiting us when we remember to give ourselves to it. Personal will can keep us on the straight road, straight and narrow. Personal will can bring us to God. thank you for being with me in The Ground of Love. You can follow this podcast to receive the next episodes, and who is it that comes to mind to share this episode with? Please go ahead and pass this along to them and go ahead and leave a review or a rating if you wish. I thank you for that. For one-on-one healing sessions and a group membership. you can go to www.thegroundoflove.com Blessings to you. May you be protected, held, regenerated centered. And taken forward with all light, love, truth and highest and best health and wellbeing on all levels and taken forward to make the greatest, most beautiful impact doing exactly what you're here to do. God bless you. Protection, grace, protection, grace. So it is.