I received a complementary copy of this book for review purposes. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.
If you are a control freak, even just a little bit, M.D. Judith Orloff’s new book is the one for you: The Ecstasy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life.
“I invite you to explore the sublime state of surrender,” writes Orloff in the book’s introduction. “How to increasingly achieve it each day to improve the quality of your life, reduce stress, and have much more fun by lifting the curse of being overly serious.” With over 20 years of experience in her private psychiatric practice and with her academic background as an assistant professor at UCLA, Orloff’s credentials are impressive. Far from a scholarly book, though, Ecstasy of Surrender is an easy read packed full of advice on how we can let go and live in the flow.
I am impressed with how much content is in the book. The 12 chapters are divided into four main sections:
- Power and Money
- Reading People and Communication
- Relationships, Love, and Sensuality
- Mortality and Immortality
Each of these topics could be a book in itself. Rather than save some material for future publication, Orloff doesn’t hold back in delivering her “letting go” message in each of these areas. At over 350 pages, Ecstasy of Surrender is longer than most books I have read and reviewed in the self help genre.
I like how Orloff relates her own struggles with control versus living by intuition. “I don’t want to clog the flow of success by micromanaging or inserting my will into places where grace belongs,” she writes. Throughout the book she shares lessons from her Daoist teacher. “Daoists believe in the doctrine of wu-wei, or non-action,” she relates. “This doesn’t mean doing nothing; rather, it means doing nothing unnatural to obstruct nature’s flow.” The Daoist philosophy is new to me and reading Orloff’s words encourages me to want to learn more.
As an engineer for most of my career I could relate to the medical establishment that Orloff says “worships the intellect, equates statistics with reality, and views surrender as counterintuitive since it means giving up the fight of failing.” Her way of surrender is a different approach to life than many of us have been taught.
“I want my life to be on fire,” Orloff writes. “I want to inhabit the moment as much as I can and have a great time just being Judith. I want to trust intuition, instant by instant, so that I can sense perfect timing – when to move ahead and when to wait. This is so appealing because it places me in the center of passion, attuning to what feels most true.”
I want my life to be like that, too. Reading Ecstasy of Surrender has me pondering: “What areas in my life am I trying to hard? Where can I just let go?”
Ecstasy of Surrender will be released in April 2014. For more on Judith Orloff’s letting go message watch her TEDx talk here:
