The New Year: Start With Sweet Surrender

The turn of the New Year is naturally a time for reflection -- reflection on the events and choices of the past year, as well as a time for setting intentions for the year ahead. While many people ring in the New Year with wild celebration, I typically spend it in meditation and relative solitude. This quiet hibernation is a time for going within and pondering priorities for the next cycle.

As you reflect on your own resolutions for 2008, I'd like to pose an invitation. Rather than focusing on the mundane -- losing weight, kicking that smoking habit, or getting to the gym more often -- I invite you to be more audacious.

Commit to listening to the voice that stirs your soul.

Commit to living your highest calling.

What will it take? It will take something very simple, yet incredibly difficult. It will take laying down your personal agendas -- surrendering your story line, your illusory sense of control, your limited conceptions of what you should achieve -- and listening alertly to the deeper voice that whispers within you.

Restricted by conceptions and pre-dispositions about what is possible, your ego agendas are simply too small for you. At best, the ego can help you to acquire some expensive toys and moments of pleasure. But, no matter how accomplished you are, your little goals are only a tiny flicker of the divine splendor of your immortal Self. When your personal agendas fall away, the universal can enter.

For me, there is no higher calling than to listen to the deepest impulse stirring one's soul. To tap the inner currents and follow them without reserve or condition. To write a blank check to the Self.

And so I offer my personal meditation, and invite you on a similar journey:

I offer my life to this calling. I commit to it despite the terror. I tremble with the knowing that everything is irrevocably changed by this single commitment. No matter what happens to me - whether I am made to look the fool, whether my path is anonymous and devoid of grandeur, whether I am betrayed in the worst of ways - I serve no other master than this divine voice.

I die to myself. I am attached neither to life in this body nor to any picture of what I will be called to do beyond this moment. And in this moment I listen intently. I merge into the moment and flow with it. My individual identity, my personality, is no match for the consuming currents of the Divine Will. I surrender to that will. I am dissolved into nothing, at once becoming everything. The divine voice has seduced me from my self-imposed limitation, from the narrow sense of my possession of life, into the vastness of all Being. It has annihilated me, and I am free.