If you've read the book "The Horse Whisperer" you'll be familiar with this scene: it comes at a point where the 'horse whisperer' teaches a traumatized horse that the horse won't die if he's brought to complete submission. It's a tear-jerking scene.

 

As I recall, the 'horse whisperer' lassos the horse's legs together and brings him to his knees...and eventually to his side. All of this is happening inside a ring on a ranch...in front of the horse's rider, a young girl, who is both destraught and crying, begging the 'horse whisperer' not to do it. It just seems too cruel to the girl (and to the reader) because the horse is extremely frightened and fights being brought down, which equals to certain death. The horse is head-strong and is fighting, he thinks, for his life.

 

Eventually the horse is brought down. And once the horse is lying on his side, still very upset, the 'horse whisperer' tells the girl to stand on the horse. Now, this just seems too much to do to this traumatized horse, and the girl finds this extremely cruel and frightening. But she submits. She steps gently up on the horse and eventually stands with her full weight on him, tears streaming down her cheeks. During this process, the horse 'realizes' that he's still alive. And that he survived his instinctual greatest fear, to be brought down. After a short while, she's told to step down and stand off to the side. The girl steps down and then the 'horse whisperer' releases the horse. He's free! Not just of the bindings around his legs, but of the trauma that happened earlier in the book and of the great fear he'd been carrying.

 

Life is like this. This is what it feels like to come to complete spiritual surrender. We so fear the point of surrender, being brought down to our knees, because it means full surrender is near - to prostrate ourselves with arms outstretched. To be completely vulnerable, which is what we believe to mean a certain death. Those of us who are head-strong and willful like the horse fear it perhaps more greatly. But what we find after the experience of surrendering is that we are, indeed, freer than we ever were while carrying the fear. Vulnerability is actually freedom. And we are still alive!