In my journey through the eras in my life, I’ve got the opportunity to taste life and how it feels like operating completely in the realm of Peak Performance, then from a place of Spiritual Surrender, and now I’d like to share what I learned from both and what my life and my exploration look like now.
Table of Contents
Let’s start with the world of Peak Performance.
What the world of Peak Performance looks like is bio-hacking, habitifying, automating and optimizing the heck out of our daily schedules to “squeeze every minute out of time” that we have here on the planet.
It is a wonderful World to experience. When you are in this place, you have meaning, purpose, direction and clarity where your life is going. You feel amazing. You stand head above the rest. You want to serve, create impact and in a way help all others who are not in this World just yet to have a glimpse of how amazing life feels like when you are so alive and turned on by your mission.
You have routine-ized your morning, your mid-day, and your evening and night routines. You go on dates with your loved ones by schedule. You spend time with your kids by the allotted 30-minute chunks in your calendar. You cold plunge, you do breathwork, you work your body. Hard. 75-hard.
You wage a war on yourself. Your lazy inner self. And you win. You beat your insides to submission so there is not an ounce of weakness left in your body.
This is a wonderful World to be in. Fighting a good fight because you feel like you’re fighting for good.
You miss meals and you tell the world about it how much you feel alive and in your element.
It feels great. It definitely does. And it creates all of this outside proof and confirmation that this system is working.
But this world of Peak Performance also comes with its darker side.
Because you’re so future focused about bringing your vision to life, you tend to always be rushing to get some place other than now. Here and now.
You endure pain and suffering because you know it’s what is necessary to get to an outcome you’ve planned for in this never-ending future.
You’ve become great at discomfort. You seek it. You crush it along with all of your goals. Upon reaching the summit, you let out a battle cry, claiming your dominion over the conquered lands. And you’re off to the next victim (goal) to bend to your will.
All in the meanwhile you’re constantly playing hide-and-not-seek with the darker side of you, too. You’re constantly worried about this future you’ve planned not turning out the same way as you’ve envisioned.
You optimize, maximize and fit your schedule with well-meaning distractions to keep you away from the darkness of your thoughts hoping they’ll settle when you reach the next summit.
You can’t rest even when you are resting.
You’re freaking out about every little detail, you attempt to control the uncontrollable, and if anything goes off the path you’ve planned your soul is crushed.
If this goal you’ve set for yourself is not working out, if this has become the end-all-meaning of your life, then what the heck does it mean about you when things aren’t working?
Your mind is so tied in with the success of your mission that if your mission fails, your life is over. Because your life is your mission. This is when a successful man with 9 billion to his name quits his life when “his worth” goes down to 8 billion upon opening of the markets.
You intermingle your “net worth” with your “self worth”. You leave your human life’s meaning and exchange it for impact, achievements and accolades.
From this place if your life isn’t moving forward, you’re dying. And dying is a scary thing. It’s a great motivator. Sometimes it gets confused for the surface level motivation you may feel as going after your dreams and reaching your goals.
With the never-ending progress-obsession you’re really never in the moment. You miss the journey. You get to your destination, celebrate it for all of 6 minutes and off to the next race through life never really being there to really feel it.
I use “you” in all of the writing above, but really I meant “me”. It was me. So I know how that feels, intimately. The good and the bad. Only when I was able to see both the good and the bad with my conscious attention was I able to make a difference choice.
Next I chose a life of Spiritual Surrender.
When the world of achievement and form has left me feeling empty even after reaching certain milestones of success, I was lucky enough to both experience and recognize this early on in this lifetime that it wasn’t the answer I was seeking.
I fell off the wheel of performance and in a way my life ground to a halt.
I went into book knowledge, meditation and seeking the deeper meaning in life.
This is how life looks like from the place of Spiritual Surrender.
You’re promised the sweet land of ascension.
You’re living this dirty, low vibe full of suffering human sub-existence. You feel like this is not the planet you belong to. You can’t wait to get off this place and go back home.
You meditate hours upon hours just to let the time pass. You seek to quiet your thoughts. You leave busy hustle and bustle of huge metropolitan mega-cities for the comfort of cozy caverns in nature far away from this crazy humanity who’re in a constant race to nowhere.
You learn that you can’t really control much of anything in your life. You can plan but there are no guarantees how life will turn out.
You surrender to the flow of life.
Still not quite fully satisfied, longing for something, but now at least you’ve stopped fighting and learned to just endure the suffering.
You cultivate faith and trust for some good future that will be more bright than your days seem right now. You say you are in the moment but really you do everything to quiet your mind and escape your dark thoughts for the fear of their manifestation.
You stop feeling sad because you have accepted your fate. You are in love and light, constantly. You put a smile on your face. You show up in complete control of your emotions in public.
You stop the Earth-shattering downs of the emotional rollercoaster and you stop doing anything that would cause you to feel low-vibe energy like other people, cities or jobs you hate doing.
Your new guidance system is the complete opposite of beating yourself into submission of discomfort and instead focus only on what makes you feel good.
Life indeed becomes more peaceful. You’ve gotten rid of anything that would disturb your peace. If anything does show up that may trigger your insides, you call them out and you go places where they can no longer reach you.
In a way the control through discomfort and fighting has switched into control through cleansing and ridding.
You load up on sage, crystals, singing bowls and candles. You high-vibe the place ridding it of all negativity.
Negativity has become the bane of your existence.
So you Surrender and Trust that things will work out for the best in the future.
Here’s where living from Spiritual Surrender has not met me at 100%
The World of Spiritual Surrender definitely has all of its benefits. It is a great place to be in as well. I mean, look at your peace, love and surrender that you’ve surrounded yourself with.
But now you’re fighting against the system. The dirty cities that are destroying nature. The consumerism that keeps pumping out “stuff” hurting your Mother Nature you care so much for.
You’re constantly fighting negativity, even if you don’t recognize it as such. They’re too low-vibe for me you tell yourself and get yourself out of the situation.
You say you surrender but this surrender has gotten its control over you. You fall too much back down even to the level of “victim” that there’s “some system out there” that’s destroying the planet and polluting the skies.
You again can’t sleep because your thoughts are back on when you get off your meditation cushion and step off the yoga mat.
You know you can’t go back to the old ways of achievement and fighting. But you also can feel deep down in your soul that this Spiritual Surrender isn’t working fully either.
There’s gotta be another way.
But what the heck is it now that you’ve explored it all?
The journey of tripping around the Sun
The main reason of this article is for me to explore my own thoughts. I was planning to write this in a journal but I’m learning to express myself so I wanted to make this “thinking” public. Not teaching, not telling, but really exploring.
What the heck is the difference between Peak Performance and Spiritual Surrender?!
I’ve tried living both ways. None of them worked fully.
We’re not just these meat-suits running around destroying the planet with our existence.
And we’re not just these souls who’ve been sold into having this miserable human existence with hopes to at some point ascend the heck out of here.
So where is the truth here?
What I’ve found so far with all of this exploration is that whatever your stand is in this world, it appears as absolute truth to you.
I’m using the word “truth” with intention here as the actual meaning of it is “the opinion of what is True to you”.
That’s why when they say in court “I swear to tell the truth” is not hurting your karma because you’re really just sharing “your opinion of what you believe is True”.
With having said that, I don’t know what the real True is. I just know that my truth keeps on changing every time I question my thoughts, my feelings and my perspective.
How does my life look like now?
It looks like I’m a soul and not this body. This I can attest to and lead my clients through completely logical exercises to help you experience this as well.
Yes, I have this body to feel pain here. That much is true. But I’m not here to suffer. Not any longer.
There’s that famous equation that Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
Human life includes pain. It’s part of the design. It’s part of the whole spectrum of emotion that we’re meant to feel and experience.
But suffering only comes with resistance.
What I’ve come to discover is that Resistance was present for me in both the Peak Performance world and the world of Spiritual Surrender. I was resisting the miserable experience as a high performer wanting, no, needing to change my circumstance because of my resistance to it. And I was resisting all negativity in the world, including my own “negative emotions” in my search for higher love and well-being.
You remove Resistance and the Suffering disappears.
This includes your in-laws. Your partners annoyance. The garbage in the oceans. The chem-trails up in the sky. The politicians. The wars. The crimes. World hunger.
This includes anger, disappointment, hopelessness. Addictions, frustrations and triggers.
This includes dirty dishes, dirty socks, dirty laundry. Even taxes, bills, mortgages, jobs.
This includes millionaires, homeless, bums, and even the fact that “buying politicians via legal campaign financing contributions is legal.”
If any of this boils your blood. It adds to your resistance and hence suffering.
My current truth is that if you’re in any sense participating in “activism” that affects you emotionally and you can’t stand the pain of seeing another in pain – your true power of being effective in such an honorable activity is sapped by your own black hole of resistance.
As long as you “need” anything “out there” for you to be OK, that is my definition of resistance and at the same time attachment to that thing.
Money is such a form of attachment. Success and achievement are as well.
Surrender, peace, love when used as a form of addiction and attachment to escape pain, humiliation, rejection, abandonment, conflict are also power-zappers that rob you of your God-given life force energy that stands strong even in court.
In a way this is MY WHY behind this entire Flow Habit project. Flow is part of surrender but also Flow State is part of Peak Performance. Habit on the other hand may at first feel restrictive for the world of Spiritual Surrender but in fact it could also be said as the masculine energy needed to set boundaries to hold the feminine flow in place. Free to dance, to live, to experiment.
When you live from this new world of creating a habit of living in flow, you’re in this constant lookout for any and all attachments, needs, resistance and judgement that may be fogging your view of self and the world.
When you’re non-resisting and non-attaching to specific results, you’re no longer chained to your mission. You can take breaks whenever you’d like. You’re no longer crushed when things don’t go according to plan.
You’re also not a victim to some concept of “government”, system, or even your negative thoughts and feelings. You accept it all.
You know that the past was none of your doing but your conditioning that came from before you could even speak as a little meat-sack of slobber and wet pampers.
And you also know that the future is only dictated by the conditioning you’re just learning about today.
If something doesn’t work out, you take a look why.
If somebody is dropping your energy, you take a look why.
You don’t run from a hard conversation. No. You welcome it. In a way you’re back into loving discomfort. But from such a more empowered place.
You’re no longer diving into discomfort to try and secure yourself or hide behind your achievements. You’re diving into discomfort to learn more about how this human system functions that you’ve leased for a few decades or so.
You’re no longer waiting to spend the current moment in hopes that the next, better, more pleasant moment will come soon. You’re fully in the present.
You know that there is no other “higher potential” for you at some point in the future. Your highest potential is in this very moment. Because admit it, even though you may think you’re all limitless and you’re not this human body, can you really fly right now?
Possibly humans will fly at some point in the future. Some other moment than today. But what now, does that mean that you’re going to throw out the rest of your life waiting for that moment at some point in the imagined future that will never arrive, all so that you could experience flying like you have in your dreams?
This moment. Right here and now. Is Your Highest Potential Right Now.
That’s all you got. And if you feel like shit. Feel it. Be with it. That means you’re meant to be in it. You won’t have it for long. It’s what makes the great tear-jerker movies great.
You say you want certainty but the moment you know how things work, they become boring for you.
It’s about learning to love uncertainty. The human mind was never designed to see the future. Yet it is also this human mind, oh so wishes, to have an ability it never had.
When you’re no longer resisting, needing, running, surrendering is the moment when anything becomes possible. When you’re no longer dependent on the other to show up a certain way is when they all-of-a-sudden show up how you prefer them to. And even if they still show up as their old annoying selves, you’re no longer needing them to be another way.
Your business begins to just hum along. Or you start a business. Or you get a job. An activity that makes you come alive just for the sheer doing of it with no expectation, attachment or needing a certain outcome to result.
You’re no longer disappointed in wasting hours in meetings, calls when your project fails because you weren’t doing it for the outcome. You were doing it for the curiosity of exploration of this human existence. Learning and observing your conditioning. Changing, upgrading, shifting, improving and elevating this same conditioning at the same time to always have a different experience the next time around.
You stop seeking. You stop. You simply stop.
And you start. And you can no longer ever stop. Because now you’re fully in the moment. Always. Even when you’re not.
This is the Flow Habit. Developing the habit to be in flow in each moment.
I’ll continue to expand and explore upon this. And I would love to hear any feedback you have on this piece. Any questions. Yea ifs and buts.
All the best to you on this freaking amazing journey that feels like death, and then feels like you’re the most alive as ever. You weird soul who chose this weird human experience thinking it would be “fun”. You’ve got this. 馃挭