Surrender Dorothy
“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.” ~ Marianne Williamson
There’s a hilarious and memorable scene in the 1985 Martin Scorsese black comedy, After Hours, where Marcy meets Paul at a diner and starts telling him about her husband.
“He was a movie freak,” she begins. “Actually, he was particularly obsessed with one movie: The Wizard of Oz.” Marcy goes on to tell Paul that she had been a virgin until she had gotten married and that it had freaked her out on her wedding night when her new husband kept screaming, “Surrender Dorothy!” at his peak moments.
I remember being terrified as a child at the Wizard of Oz scene where the Wicked Witch of the West cues her flying monkeys and demands in skywriting that Dorothy surrender. Like the After Hours scene, that Wizard of Oz scene has stuck with me for years.
Surrendering can be scary. You’re at your edge as you hold a strength-building yoga pose, yet you know you need to find your breath and relax. You’re in a yin pose and you keep trying to hold yourself up rather than yield to the shape. You’re finally in Savasana, but you can’t shake off the challenging practice you just did or the desire to control whatever you might be facing after you roll up your mat.
In Patanjali’s 8-limbed path, (an ancient system of attaining self-realization through yoga), the final niyama (an inward practice to improve the self) is about surrendering to a higher power. We can talk for hours about what higher power means—to me it means love—but my personal experience is that, whether you’re on or off your mat, it is completely transformative when you surrender to it.
There’s some scary stuff going on these days that we have little control of: climate change, Covid, the political climate that affects both, cancer, aging… Yet something transformative happens in the midst of those challenges when we surrender to a higher power, when we allow ourselves to love.
We all know that Dorothy didn’t surrender to the witch. Surrendering doesn’t mean you don’t muster the strength to fight the good fight like Dorothy did; it just means that you find your breath, press on, and ultimately surrender to love, like Dorothy did.