Omega: The concept of surrender can be confusing. Can you describe the distinction between letting go and giving up?

Tosha: Giving up is usually tied to a problem that belongs to the ego. It exists for a long period of time. It's connected to very deep desire and it stays unresolved. You’ll hear phrases such as, "I have to have this relationship." If it doesn’t come in a period of time, eventually the ego will often go into a place of so-called "giving up," which is extremely different than surrender.

Giving up is often bitter. It’s often resentful. "Oh, I tried, and tried, and tried, and now I just give up." I’m not saying these things are bad, but those are often the emotions that accompany it.

Surrender is really different because it can’t be forced. I’ve found that it comes through the act of offering desires and problems over to the source of love. Then it really does belong to divine order whether or not that particular issue is meant to be fulfilled the way the mind might think.

Surrender is really about desires becoming preferences. You’re no longer angry if you don’t get it. You’re no longer resentful. You find a spaciousness comes, and you feel whole with or without the fulfillment of that desire.

You notice the desire come up and say, "That’s interesting. Okay, I’m giving it to God. If that’s meant to occur, great. If not, let this be a preference."

Tosha Silver's advice for learning to live with your desires without being a prisoner of them.

Omega: What does it looks to give your "love life" to love, particularly when it comes to finding a partner?

Tosha: I think romantic love is the topic that’s most powerful to try this offering with. Let’s look at the normal way people are taught to look for love. You go on a hunt to find this person. You're in a competition with everybody else your age. People will tell you all these insane, limiting ideas about what's possible based on the ego's understanding.

If you start to give your life to love and really start to ingest this idea at the deepest level, you're saying to the divine, "Okay. I have this longing. I'm giving it to you." That's the divine order or prayer. The perfect partner is already selected, independent of all my fears and worries about it. It will be taken care of in the right time, in the right way.

In the meantime, show me anything I need to do to wake up from this trance that I'm incomplete. Because it really is the ultimate sleepwalk. Whether I was in a relationship or not, this topic made me crazy. If I was with somebody, I thought maybe I was with the wrong person. If I wasn't with someone, I was looking for the right one.

So, I took this topic away from the ego. It has nothing to do with learning how to manifest or learning how to get my wishes. It has to do with offering it back to the divine and truly beginning the process of getting the wholeness with or without it.

My friend Christiane Northrup said, "Once you’ve offered your love life to the divine, you've really done it. Then it's like layers of wallpaper on an old house, and the divine starts taking down layer, after layer, after layer, and sanding you, and preparing you. And then you can really be in something healthy and wonderful."

But without that act of the offering, if you just say, "Take this house and shove someone in here with me," or "Just bring me somebody, so I don’t feel lonely,” that doesn’t usually work too well.

Omega: How can the divine help us with our soul purpose?

Tosha: We all have a mission that our soul is here to do. When I was trying to do mine from the place of "doership," there was a lot of anger. I was angry about the injustice and all of that. There's a heaviness in approaching life through doership. We think, "Even as a spiritual being, I have to get it perfect. And here’s all the steps. And I have to do it right. And if I don't, I won't get what I want. Even awakening—I won't get that if I'm not doing it right."

It started to change for me when I offered it all to the divine. It isn't that you don't do things anymore, but you start to wait for the right actions to get shown. When you let the divine take the lead, your actions become so playful and so spacious. The ego is no longer guiding it. It's a very fun way to get through our crazy time on the planet.

A friend sent me this quote from Daniel Nielsen that says, "If you want to change what's going on around you, you're going to have change what's going on within you. And that means being prepared to surrender."