Surrender is Not Giving Up: The Yoga of Trusting the Process without Shutting Down

There's a space most women know intimately but rarely talk about - the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It's uncomfortable in a quiet, persistent way. Often confusing and conflicting. Sometimes grief tinged. And filled with the urge to control, fix, shut down, gaslight or force your way through it. 

This episode is an invitation to try something different. 

Through the yogic concept of Ishvara Pranidhana - the practice of surrender and trust - we explore what it actually means to accept your reality without giving up on what you want or abandoning your feelings. This isn't about giving up or pretending you're fine, it's about learning to take hold of your life with open hands. To take wise, embodied action while releasing the white-knuckled grip on how it's al supposed to look. 

If you’ve been wrestling with trust, struggling to accept what is, or exhausted from holding others emotions while not tending to your own — this one is for you.

🌿 Free Resources for Women Ready to Grow

•  If you’re ready for a gentle yoga practice that helps you feel at home in yourself and opens you up to feel more present and alive. Get a 10 minute somatic practice here. 
  
  

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Meet Keri Marino 

Keri Marino is a Somatic Yoga Therapist and founder of The Nourished Woman, helping women move beyond overwhelm, anxiety, and self-doubt into embodied confidence and nervous system balance. Through women’s empowerment yoga, somatic healing, and inner work, she guides women to regulate their bodies, break old patterns, and reconnect with their strength, pleasure, and purpose. Her approach blends grounded spirituality with practical tools for real-life transformation.

Connect with her here:

https://www.kerimarino.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_nourished_woman

https://youtube.com/@thenourishedwoman

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Transcript

Welcome And Intentions

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to the Nourished Woman Podcast, a space for women who've been doing the work to grow and heal and are ready to feel good again, body, mind, and soul. I'm your host, Carrie Marino, somatic yoga therapist of over 16 years, mentor and mama of three. I help women like you fall in love with how yoga makes you feel. Alchemize the hard things you've been through and experience more pleasure and aliveness in your body and relationships. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dive in. I just know I can't survive. Without mystery. If you ever find yourself feeling really stressed about something or feeling really alone in whatever it is that you're navigating and you're holding in your life, then this conversation is for you. And it could be that as you're chiming in, tuning into this podcast today, you're not experiencing this in a large way in your life right now, but maybe there's micro ways that it are showing up. And I want you to know that this episode is for you too. It's for all of us because the reality of being a person, of being a woman living in this world, is that life is complex and it can have these really tender, raw parts of it. And I'm not one of those yoga folks who are gonna walk into a room with you or share a yoga practice with you through my sanctuary or through my YouTube channel. I'm not gonna pretend that you're not going through hard things sometimes, or that you don't have tender emotional things coming up, or that you don't have some stuff going on in your life that's stretchy for you, because that would literally be the performative aspect of practicing yoga. If we just pretend that we're supposed to be peaceful all the time, that's a performance because real people, real women like you, like me, living real lives are navigating the complexities. And this is part of what I love about Buddhist philosophy is it really recognizes that suffering is part of being alive and that there's different types of suffering. There's the suffering that is true suffering, like true pain that we experience, and it could be emotional pain or physical pain or relational pain or otherwise. And then there's this concept of the second arrow, and it's basically the pain that we inflict upon ourselves. And if we tie this into yogic philosophy, that pain, that second arrow that you inflict upon yourself, that stress or that lonely feeling or that heaviness, or even the feeling that you should not be feeling a certain way, or that you won't be loved or accepted, like the shame aspect of navigating the complexities of life, everything in that second arrow really ties us back to this concept of Ishvara Pranidana. And so Ishvara Pranidana is this yogic philosophy that asks us to practice acceptance and surrender to something greater than us. And so when we accept something, it does not mean that you feel okay about everything that is happening in your life or the circumstances that you're walking through. For example, if you've been following along the podcast, you know that we adopted a rescue golden doodle named Loki about a month and a half ago. And we, around the three, like the fourth week of his time, the end of the third week, the fourth week of his time with us, he started becoming aggressive with my toddler and other young children and like growling and lunging and you know, nipping at my toddler. And so I had to re-home him. And so I just re-homed him yesterday. My heart is really tender, and I don't feel okay about what happened. And I also accept that Loki is not a dog that does well around small children, and that I have small children, and that I have had to surrender that there's a reason for this. There's a reason that we were called to open our hearts and homes up to a beautiful dog named Loki, and that he can't actually be our long-term companion. And so this is just one microcosm of an example. I was just sharing in a class that I'm teaching right now at my local yoga studio, Greenville Yoga. I'm teaching a morning medicine, semantic yoga for the soul class. And I was teaching on Ishvara Pranidana in the class, and one woman shared that she sees herself in this because she's planning a trip with her kids, and she has three, and one of the kids is not able to participate because of financial reasons. And so there's this grief for her around the vision, the dream that she had for her kids coming together and making these memories and spending quality time and then the actual reality of where they are. And she also said something really insightful that I just want to speak to here. And she said that before she viewed acceptance as something that you just kind of like you just make yourself okay with. And you're really not taking action anymore. It's like, okay, it just kind of is what it is. I accept what it is. I'm gonna almost freeze in a way that she had thought of the yoga philosophy in that way, but that it didn't really resonate. And I think what I love about Ishwara Pranidana is that it is about accepting and surrendering to a force greater than you, God, goddess, the divine, the universe, whatever you want to call it, but it's not about a freeze response. It's not immobilizing yourself. You can accept something and still take action. You can accept something and surrender to trusting the process and the journey that is unfolding for you. And you can also still move yourself forward on a daily basis. Because the reality is, love, that there are likely many different situations in which you're having some sort of suffering or stress or a loss of something, like a loss of a dream, the loss of a vision, maybe the loss of a pet, maybe literally someone died. Maybe you're going through a healing journey. And as you're peeling back layers and you're sorting through past trauma, you're seeing the grief of having not received the kind of mothering or parenting that you needed or the kind of support that you needed. There's all these different ways in which we can have suffering come up, and it can be related to the past and it can be related to the present. And if we're being really honest, it can also be suffering about the future, about what we're worried about. And it's so easy to get tangled up in that and to replay the stories in your head, or almost like you're watching a movie of your life on repeat, or to think about it constantly. Or it's also really easy just to kind of move on with it. Really not process it and just like keep going, but in a way that's really avoidant. We can shut down, we can hold ourselves off and build up a wall. There's so many ways that this suffering can actually manifest in our lives. I don't know about you, but I think I do have a guess about you because you're listening to this particular podcast. I think you want a different option for yourself. And I definitely want, I definitely want a different option for myself. I want to be able to use these different experiences that really feel tender and hurt your heart as opportunities to meet myself more in the present moment and to build the kind of self-connection and resiliency and even tenderness to meet life exactly as it is and to rise to the different stretchy moments that come up for you and for me so that we can navigate them in a way that feels really spiritually and energetically aligned. I know that grief, for example, is one of those subjects that I feel like most women don't really understand how much grief is actually a part of your journey. It's literally a part of our day-to-day lives. It's something that we're constantly in relationship to. So, for example, a lot of times in my one-to-one practice, as I'm sitting with women mentoring them, and we're doing spada yoga therapy together, things in their romantic relationships will come up. And these can be kind of tricky, right? Let's be honest. Like romantic relationships will really show you your shit. And being a mother will show you your shit too, right? And so these complexities can come up in relationships. And then we just get bogged down in all the ways that we think somebody is going to respond, or all the ways that we think it gets to be, or it has to be, or how it has been in the past. And we're missing the opportunity to just accept and come into the present moment, not forming all your thoughts based on past experiences, not forming all your emotional responses based on projecting those past experiences into the future, but actually meeting yourself and meeting the situation that you're in and meeting the person or the dog or the job change or whatever it is, like just meeting it with a sense of I am fully present and I am here and I am paying attention and I accept, I accept that this is where we are, and I accept it in an active way. I accept that this is where things are without resisting that, without fighting against that, without trying to control everything. And this acceptance piece is not about pretending that you do not have feelings because you need to have that kind of relationship with yourself where you can be honest. So part of that acceptance is like, I feel this way about that situation. Like I feel deeply sad about having to re-home my dog Loki. I love him so very much. And I feel an immense amount of sadness about losing the future that we had together and not seeing him when I come in the door in a few minutes and not being greeted by him. Like it's I accept that that is there too. And it doesn't just apply to pet relationships, obviously. I'm just using this as an example. It applies to any situation. Like you can accept it, you can accept yourself in the process, you can accept the way it makes you think, you can accept the way your body responds to it, you can accept the way it makes you feel, you can accept another person in the same way, you can accept the situation for what it is. And then you can also practice this surrender because at the end of the day, Ishwara Pradidhana is a practice of soulful surrendering. It is saying, I know that I am not alone in this lifetime and that I am held by something greater than me. I'm held by something divine and something infinite. I am spiritually contained by this bigger thing, whatever you want to call it, that's up to you to decide. I can surrender to this process. I can trust in the journey. I can allow myself to be held, supported, and guided. I can let go of the need to control. I can allow myself to soften. I can allow myself to open up and receive. I can allow myself to know that there is a bigger picture here that I don't actually have to have every single answer for or full understanding of. I can simply allow myself to exhale and know and to practice surrender because surrender is not about giving up. It is not about saying, like, I'm just, I give up. Like I really hate the statement, I'm just done, like I'm done. Because I don't know that as long as you're living, if you just get to be done, obviously can you can be no longer participating in a situation. But oftentimes when people say that statement, they're like, I'm done with this. They're talking about a certain area of suffering that they're shutting down around. And so this is not you saying, like, I shut down, or I numb out, or I freeze now, or I fight and flee now. This is about you coming into the nervous system state of being able to let go and soften and trust in the process and trust in yourself to receive something greater. And I really resonate with this idea that we're all moving in the direction of something that God has ordained for us. And I'm, you know, approaching this from my own mindset, but keeping you in mind too that, you know, you may have a certain religious frame that you put on this. For me, I come to it from more of a yogic philosophy and more of a spiritually open-minded point of view about many roads leading the same direction. But it's this idea that we let ourselves be held and supported. If this resonates with you, take some time to think on areas of your life where you notice this second arrow of stress and suffering in your life and how you might practice being present and accepting and applying this concept of surrendering to the process, surrendering to something greater than you, surrendering to the divine holding you through it. And then notice how that feels for you. Like really and truly notice does your body respond in any way to you making that decision? Do you feel a part of you open up? Do you feel lightning? Do you feel a softness? Do you feel something completely different? These are just possibilities. And then explore it. And I do want to say that practicing this Ishwara Pranidana is not something that you just like choose one time. You're not like, okay, I did it. I chose it once and I'm done. It's something that we return to again and again because the reality of being a human living in the world, and this is true for me, this is true for you, this is true for everyone everywhere, is that we are constantly in this beautiful dance of forgetting that at the core we're a soul. Like we get tangled up in our humanness and then remembering that we're a soul, and then forgetting that you're a soul, and then remembering that you're a soul. And so just expect it to be a process. I like to think it more of as a devotional practice of you returning again and again to this knowing that you can accept and be present and that you can surrender and that you can trust. All right, I'll see you in the next episode. Much love. Thank you so much for listening to the Nourished Woman podcast. I would love to hear what resonated with you and what you're carrying with you out into your life. Send me a message on Instagram at theNourished Woman or even in my email. Your messages really mean the world to me, so don't be shy. The beautiful music that you're hearing is by Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band. You can find them on all streaming platforms. I'll see you next week for another episode.