On Surrendering Control: Force, Trust, and the Sacred Spiral

What I'm learning inside one of the deepest initiations of my life — and why I believe you're feeling it too.

I've been sitting with what to write. Circling it. Setting it down and picking it up again. What I kept arriving at — the thing I most resisted naming — is this: I am in the middle of something. Something deep, disorienting, and unmistakably alive.

Patterns are surfacing. Fears I thought I'd metabolized. Places I self-abandon, over-give, shrink. All of it rising into the light — not to punish me, but to be seen and released. So I can finally, fully, step into who I'm here to be.

As a mentor, I hold space for clients in exactly these moments. I feel no fear for them — only a quiet, certain excitement — because I know that when someone is inside the discomfort, the shift is already happening. I'm learning to offer that same trust to myself.

The most vulnerable moments are the most transformational. If we are willing to lean in.

Force vs flow

Doubt has a particular way of moving through the body. For me, it arrives as urgency — a convincing whisper that I should be doing more, moving faster, producing something. And so I push. I force.

Force mimics momentum. It looks like discipline from the outside. But it comes from fear — and fear is always hungry. It will never tell you that you have done enough, because that is not what it is designed to say.

Trying vs trusting

The more I try, the more I tire. That is the paradox of fear-driven effort: it multiplies the very depletion it is trying to outrun.

When I trust, something different becomes available. I still act — but the action is aligned, not frantic. Precise, not desperate. Anchored in trust, I move from a place of knowing rather than doubting, and I show up with more presence, more power, more of myself fully in the room.

Trying is fear wearing a work ethic. Trusting is faith in motion.

Controlling vs surrendering

I know, in my bones, that everything unfolds in divine timing. I have lived this truth. I have witnessed it in the women I work with. And yet — inside real discomfort, the kind that makes your skin crawl — I find myself reaching for control. Bargaining. Gripping.

Surrender is not giving up. It is not passivity or defeat. It is, I believe, the most courageous act available to us: the choice to trust what is unfolding even when we cannot see where it leads. When I finally release the grip — even for a moment — something in me softens. My breath returns. There is a relief in surrender that control can never offer, because it is real.

Remember the magic

Magic doesn't leave when things get hard. It gets quieter as the noise gets louder — and we, consumed by the trying and the fearing and the forcing, stop being able to hear it.

We have to choose it. Again and again, in the middle of the doubt. Not because it requires us to pretend everything is fine, but because choosing to look for beauty is itself an act of resistance. When we look for the magic, we see it. It was always there.

The sacred spiral

Growth is not linear. We spiral — returning to familiar themes at deeper layers, each time invited a little further in. The same fears, the same patterns, the same questions — but from a higher altitude, with more capacity to meet them.

We are not behind. We are not broken. We are not failing some test we weren't told we were taking. We are in the spiral, and the spiral is sacred. We are exactly where we are meant to be. And when we eventually look back, we will see how perfectly this moment — even this one — was catalyzing the next iteration of our becoming.

You are not alone in this. I am not writing from the other side of it, tidied up and resolved. I am right here, in the middle of it alongside you.