God-Surrendered Leadership
God-Surrendered Leadership
Giving my life over to God...
Dear Family,
A lot is coming through right now. I’m excited to share.
We emerged from the jungle about 18 days ago. We were in there for 18 days doing some deep medicine work + facilitating two retreats — Tanja’s ‘Women Rising’ retreat and my ‘Presence of God’ retreat.
Both retreats were truly powerful and felt like a huge shift for everyone involved and a full-on rebirth for a couple people, myself included. (I’ll share more on this + a few quotes and video interviews with some of the guests in an upcoming post, for those curious.)
Those 18 days in the jungle honestly felt more like 6 months. It’s incredible how time dilates in the jungle when working with the most powerful entheogenic teachers in the world. Feels rather like spending time training in the hyperbolic time chamber.
Presently I’m on about 50 days and counting of no alcohol, no cannabis, no social media (apart from ~2-3 quick focused tasks), a largely clean diet, plus ~4-5 months of no porn, wherein I’ve been practicing semen retention for long stretches of time.
I’ve also massively cut back on reading ‘non-fiction’ texts, non-dual tomes, and listening to podcasts in recent weeks—under-cutting my addiction to constant info-absorption. For the past month I’ve been using screens less than in any other period in the past decade or so. (This was more true 10 days ago when I started writing this post; I’ve listened to a few podcasts [mainly interviews with Joe Rogan] and read a lot of Eric Brown and Leo Gura in recent days.)
I’m probably going to consciously break a couple of these fasts within the next day or two. A wise man once said, “The most important part of a fast is how you break it.” I’ll probably consciously savor a beer tonight to kick off the holiday season with family, and I’m likely going to return (with ultra-high intentionality) to social media in the next days to start sharing about a new creation/offering of mine.
I’ve also continued to drink a lot of cacao, do a lot of breathwork, and am also now returning (partially inspired by Joe Rogan) to an old practice of physically training the body more intensively.
The results of all this can be summarized as follows:
I’m returning to my native frequency on more profound levels.
I feel more like myself than ever.
I feel cleaned out.
My heart keeps opening wider.
New levels of clarity, courage, calm, and single-pointed determination are dawning upon me.
I am surrendering to God on new levels.
Taking this further, it feels like I am now in the process of giving my life over to God.
This last point feels like the most profound shift that’s taking place.
Some parts of me are still deeply scared of the notion of giving my life over to God.
Yet in my heart and soul there is a subtle feeling, almost an ancient memory, of indescribable relief, relaxation, and home-coming.
Finally, I am nearly ready to stop pretending that ‘my’ life is ‘mine.’
"Always bear this in mind: Everything is in God's hands, and you are His tool to be used by Him as He pleases. Try to grasp the significance of 'all is His'. and you will immediately feel free from all burdens. What will be the result of your surrender to Him? None will seem alien, all will be your very own Self."
— Sri Anandamayi Ma
I find myself praying to God, Jesus, and Anandamayi Ma often in recent weeks…
Asking sincerely, “How I am meant to serve? Please clean out my heart, make my heart the Sacred Heart of Jesus, utilize this body as your instrument. Make me a channel for your generosity, your kindness, your charity, your grace, your love. Clean and purify me, that I may give my life over to you.”
This might sound pretty ‘out there.’ If I had read this type of thing 10 years ago, I would’ve probably dismissed it as some overzealous religious kookiness.
But hey, I guess you never know where life is going to take you…
For me now, this feels like an extremely personal, real, and significant precipice of transformation.
It feels like a matter of great (dare I say) seriousness.
What does it mean to give one’s life over to God?
This is certainly a question I’m still in the process of answering.
However, having been in this process for about a decade now, surrendering to God at ever greater depths, I feel ‘qualified’ to say a few things about it.
In a sense, you could say that to give one’s life over to God is to be what you truly are.
It is to be you all the way, 1,000%.
To say it this way, though, is potentially somewhat misleading.
Most people may believe they have some idea of what it is to ‘be themselves all the way,’ yet in my experience this is not the case. Not even close.
The majority of people are so thoroughly encased in so many layers of falseness and fakeness, that they have only a faint sense of who they truly are.
They don’t know who they are, and they aren’t sincerely trying to find out and live that truth. Rather, they’re more so afraid of who they truly are and spend their lives distracting themselves from this inquiry.
(These statements are not intended as any sort of judgment or condemnation—simply an observation. All of life is pure poetry.)
In their heart of hearts, everyone’s deepest yearning is to fully live the truth of what they are, yet it is thus far rare in human history for anyone to approach this ideal.
To not only profoundly realize who you actually are, but to then go all the way and truly *live* that realization…
Is the ultimate hero’s journey in this human life.
Paradoxically, being you all the way is also an ongoing death of you.
It is the gradual burning away of virtually everything you ever thought you were—everything you ever took yourself to be.
Countless layers of falseness and fakeness and bullshit must be incinerated in the furnace of truth, before your unadulterated expression begins to emerge.
And if you take this all the way, inevitably you come ‘face to face’ with God.
Eventually you start to directly realize God as your own heart, your own soul, your own infinite loving essence, the omnipresent fabric of all things.
You discover that ‘you’ are a kind of instrument channeling the One Music of which all is made, to create a song only you can create.
You realize that the more ‘you’ are able to simply get out of the way and allow this Music to move through you, the more pure your song becomes.
In other words, as you gradually loosen your grip on most everything you ever thought you were—everything you ever thought your life would be—God starts living you, more and more.
The sense of being the personal ‘doer’ or ‘controller’ of your life starts to fade, as you realize that all along, God has been doing everything.
(A lot of people get hung up on the ‘free will’ question here. Do ‘we’ ‘have’ ‘free will,’ or not? In short: Both, neither, far beyond either. It’s kinda beside the point, really. God is all. Through God, all things are possible. Being fundamentally one with the infinite loving power that is God, ‘we’ are powerful creators. Life is a participatory dance in which infinity is dancing with itself, through itself.)
As you accept this more fully and gradually release more and more of the pretense of control…
And as you gradually release more and more of the identities, filters, personas, mechanisms, beliefs, concepts, and strategies you had contrived as ways of attempting to feel safe and certain and in control and to protect your ‘self’…
The infinite God-energy that you are is then able to flow more uninhibitedly through your channel, with fewer and fewer of the distorting effects of all your fear- and resistance-based egoic baggage.
You become ever more “transparent to transcendence,” as Joseph Campbell liked to say—‘transparent’ to the ever-present inconceivable reality of Divinity—and increasingly ‘you’ simply allow this Divinity to dance the dance of ‘you.’
Past a certain point of relinquishing your grip on ‘your’ life and allowing Divinity to dance you, you can be said to have “given your life over to God.”
There seems to be no end to the depth to which one can give one’s life over to God.
Bufo alvarius has shown me that even some of the most enlightened sages on Earth still have subtle ways in which they are holding on to something, or protecting some sort of nearly-invisible identity.
God itself seems to be perpetually opening to more of itself, surprising itself, making itself up as it goes along, cooking up ever more profound ways of exploring and surrendering to its own nature.
(Though on the most ‘absolute’ level it feels accurate to say that God / Supreme Infinity is already 1,000,000% surrendered to itself, to the point where the concept “surrender” loses all meaning, because there is no second thing to which a first thing could possibly ‘surrender.’ There is only infinity resting as infinity.)
So long as we remain in this human form, it seems that a certain sense of participation remains, even as we give our lives over to God at ever greater depths. There is a sense of the human self being danced and also participating in the co-creative dance. This is a beautiful aspect of the living poetry of human life.
God-Surrendered Leadership
As I experience myself giving my life over to God more totally than ever before, an interesting ‘download’ has been coming through:
God-Surrendered Leadership.
This phrase encapsulates far more than could ever be said, yet here are a few things we might say about it:
God-surrendered leadership is an ancient paradigm of leadership.
Despite being old as time, vastly older than humanity (and on another level timeless, like all of reality)…
And despite there being many notable examples of human beings who embodied God-surrendered leadership (e.g. Buddha, Christ, Gandhi, MLK Jr., Anandamayi Ma, etc.)…
This paradigm has never been understood or experienced by the vast majority of human beings.
God-surrendered leaders are, in essence, beings who have given their lives over to God, to a profound degree.
Such beings tend to be lion-hearted, uncompromisingly true, tremendously compassionate and in service, with mountainous integrity.
They are themselves, all the way, and by simply being true to what they are, all the way, they make extraordinary waves (overt or invisible) wherever they may go.
And paradoxically, they are (very nearly) no one at all—a hollow bone through which the One Music can flow, unimpeded.
Having surrendered to God to a magnificent degree, they are able to act as clear channels, allowing the One Music of Source to move freely through them, producing the healing song that only they can sing.
In recent days I’ve been receiving the message that the past decade of my life has been a process of gradually uncovering and beginning to embody shades of this ancient paradigm of God-surrendered leadership, while also coming to an ever deeper embodied knowing of how to skillfully deploy this paradigm of leadership in our present age of transition from Old to New Earth.
Note that I’m not claiming to embody this paradigm on the same level as some of the spiritual giants that I listed earlier. There is simply a feeling that God-surrendered leadership has been my calling—and perhaps my destiny—for a long time.
In recent days it has felt like God is telling me, “Yes, you are a leader in the process of giving your life over to me, to your own heart, to your own deepest essence, at ever greater depths. You are a leader of leaders. You are a leader who is meant to initiate other leaders. Own your power, own your transmission, own your leadership.”
On one level this is a lot to take in. There are parts of me that still doubt, fear, and recoil from my own destiny.
On another level there is simply a feeling of rightness and of-course-ness.
Not in an inflated, messiah-complex-type way (been there, felt that). At least as far as I can see.
No, it’s more like a sober, grounded, humble acceptance of what on some level I have always known.
There is a sense of the gravity and sacred responsibility that comes with this type of path, and as such there are shades of resignation and reluctance to fully own my fate.
There is a knowing that sacrifices must be made on such a path. This is what they don’t tell you about your “highest excitement” and the “New Earth”—i.e. that your soul’s highest excitement is likely to be some kind of insane hero’s journey of deepening service, involving plenty of trials and tribulations and sacrifices, and that you eventually find the New Earth within your own loving heart after (painfully) burning away thousands of layers of Old Earth identity and conditioning. It’s all worth it, but damn can it sting.
I found this out on a whole new level this past year: Co-parenting a newborn daughter, my first child, while running into major financial debts and entrepreneurial difficulties, while spending months living inside literal volcanoes on a sorta-haunted island in the middle of the ocean where we knew no one, turned out to be a recipe for the most initiatory year of my life. Many past wounds and traumas were triggered. It got weird at times. Deep shadow work was done. Phew. 2022 was a doozy.
“Pride cometh before a fall,” as the legendary Biblical saying goes.
Why does pride come before a fall?
Because a fall is the only way God can humble you and burn away the arrogance that is blocking you from a more exquisite surrendered heart-opened intimacy with life, yourself, all beings, and God.
The fall is actually the gift.
Though you almost certainly won’t realize that while it’s happening.
God-surrendered leadership seems to require a lot of falls. A lot of knocks. A lot of loving roundhouse kicks to the face from the universe.
“Ahhhh, he thinks he wants to surrender to me and to his heart’s truest calling…,” God says. “Well then, let’s see if he can handle the labyrinthine series of booby traps and pop quizzes that will be necessary to chisel off all the bits of marble to produce the sculpted version of him that is actually humble, grounded, heart-opened, and courageous enough to live the truth of what he is and see it through.”
That’s how it’s seemed in my case, at least.
You start out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, “following your bliss,” assuming that following bliss will always be blissful. Hah!
Turns out that your heart’s truest bliss is to find out what it’s really made of by facing a thousand and one fire-breathing dragons. The indestructible love that you are won’t melt to ash in those fires, but everything else will.
If I were trying to sell you on God-surrendered leadership, I guess I’d be doing a piss-poor job.
Good thing I don’t have to sell anyone on it.
If it’s meant for you and you for it, it will come a’knockin’. Best believe.
Maybe you already hear it—a faint tap tap tap—knocking on your door.
If so, you might wanna shake in your boots for a little while, but after that…
Count yourself lucky, kid.
I probably don’t know enough about Bukowski to assess if he was a God-surrendered leader, but his words seem damn relevant here:
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski
It’s the only good fight there is.
At the end of the day, ain’t nothing in life better than living the truth of what you are—every day, always, in all ways, all the way.
That’s what a true leader does:
Surrender to the truth of what God made him, in his heart of hearts.
Be what he is, in loving service to all, protecting all that is good and innocent.
I may begrudge it at times, and it certainly gets hairy and gnarly sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s.
The feeling of honor in my heart—the warrior’s honor of having stayed uncompromisingly true—is priceless.
And the love of God that I feel in my heart—that I feel as my own essence—is worth more than all the glimmering treasure in the world.
2023 and Beyond: More Storms Ahead — Earth in Need of More God-Surrendered Leaders
Now, let me say this…
We need more God-surrendered leaders.
A paradox of life is that on one level everything is light as a feather, totally insubstantial, non-serious, pure weightless poetry… Nothing needs to be done, all is well at all times, all is taking care of itself…
Yet life is always “both, neither, far beyond either.”
On another level life is gravely serious. We live in a time of immense transition, in which there is a tremendous amount of suffering and enslavement. The fates of trillions of innocent beings hang in the balance.
And make no mistake: There are more storms on the horizon.
I’m not big on doom-saying; this simply seems like a sober appraisal of life on Earth, especially at this juncture.
Unfortunately, the Covid-1984 Saga was likely far from the end of our totalitarian [and economic-systemic collapse / meta-crisis] concerns in this century; probably it was more like the prelude. So…
Eyes wide open.
(Without falling into a the trap of over-immersing in dark rabbit holes).
I recommend unplugging from the big-bank-big-government-big-corporation-big-food-big-media-big-pharma-big-education-big-rat-race matrix in as many ways as possible [that feel heart-aligned] over the coming times. Babylon is falling, but it won’t go quietly. The attempts to reinstate control will become more overt, more desperate.
The most powerful antidote for the machinations of the Old Earth ‘matrix control system’ is…
God-surrendered leaders.
Universally loving, fiercely authentic, New-Earth-attuned, lion-hearted, God-surrendered leaders.
If a sufficient number of us activate on this level, a New Earth becomes inevitable.
With that being said…
I am calling you forward.
The focus of my work is shifting.
It is becoming clear to me on a new level that I am here to initiate leaders.
I am here to initiate leaders into the paradigm of lion-hearted, God-surrendered, New Earth leadership.
(And in doing so, to further initiate myself into this paradigm.)
This will be the north-star theme of my work in 2023 and for the foreseeable future.
I will share more on this soon.
For now, I would love to know if this piece sparked something in you.
If you would respond to this poll, it would mean a lot to me:
(I am asking about your sex because I feel most profoundly called to initiate men, yet I also want to create ways for women to receive this medicine, if they are called to it—so it is helpful for me to know the respective levels of calling.)
If you feel an especially strong call to work with me and want to boldly affirm that reality to God, Life, and the Universe… reply to this email and tell me the truth of your heart in this moment.
Also, always feel encouraged to comment on these posts to speak your truth.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to the poll, comment, or to send me a message. It means a lot to me.
I also deeply appreciate those who take the time to hit the ‘heart’ button on these posts or to share them. This type of feedback and support is immensely helpful for calibrating, navigating, and reaching the leaders I am meant to speak to.
Thank you.
2023 feels like it is going to be a gargantuan year.
I’m gonna try not to make any assumptions though. I’ve learned the hard way to (mostly) break that habit.
Let’s see what happens.
I hope this finds you noticing and savoring the reality that your life is pure poetry written by the Creator of the multiverse.
God is real, brothers and sisters.
You can absolutely trust.
One Love,
J
