The hillside crumbles under my boots, their quarter-inch steel spikes useless against the soft earth, as I hike out of yet another valley I’ve only just descended into. Grasping a handful of sword fern, I haul myself up another step. No one can hear me huffing and cursing, but I do it anyway. When I reach my destination—no more than a dot on a digital map—I count and measure the trees I find there, adding another seventeen dollars to the day’s total.

“Is this why you came home?” I will ask myself later, as I pick the thorns from my fingers so I can massage my aching feet.

When reality has the audacity not to align itself with our expectations, it’s easy to doubt the rationale behind our choices. But just because we are unhappy with a situation we created, that doesn’t mean our logic—our intention, our goal, our dream—is somehow flawed or misguided. Our destination remains the same; only the route has changed.

“If you insist that your life is about what your body is doing,” Neale Donald Walsch wrote in Conversations with God, “you do not understand why you came here.”

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After a long night under the influence of a certain South American plant, I sit cross-legged on my thin mattress, eyes closed tight, hands gripping my knees, rocking back and forth. The experience is overwhelming—jarring and relentless, but not unpleasant—somewhere between hitting the rumble strip on the edge of a highway and sticking your finger in a light socket.

Electrified is as close as I can get to describing the sensation. Except it’s not coming from the outside, like an icy wind, nor is it originating from the inside, like an upset stomach. Oddly, it has no external source or internal locale. As best I can tell, I am it.

Apparently, I’m in this rigid posture long enough to draw the attention of the facilitator, who comes over and squats down to meet my eye. “Looks pretty intense,” he says, his tone neither unsympathetic nor reassuring.

“It’s a lot,” I tell him, my voice shaking. “But it’s good.”

“It can be a lot and be bad, too,” he replies, in the same objective tone.

It will be six months until I understand the gift he’s given me—until I am, again, under the spell of the vine. At the peak of my experience this time, though—instead of being charged with cosmic vibrations—I lie curled in a modified fetal position, some advanced yoga pose gone horribly wrong. My skin feels too tight and my bones too big as my body, as if of its own volition, folds over itself like a pretzel.

There is, as before, no external force acting upon me, nor internal malady to soothe. Whatever the hell this is… I am it, too.

In desperation, I implore the Earth Mother for guidance; I beg Pachamama for mercy. What is it you want me to see? Why am I suffering in this way? Tell me, please—I am listening. And that’s when I hear him again, as clearly as if he were speaking directly into my ear—It can just be bad, too.

The light clicks on; the bell rings; the release valve opens and I exhale—“Ohhhh”—as I’m overtaken by the sweet relief that follows long-awaited synchronicity, like fitting that last piece into an exceptionally difficult puzzle. It didn’t come easy, but I finally get the message: The silver lining I was looking for, the hidden meaning behind these past few agonizing hours—*spoiler alert*—there isn’t one.

All there is to do in this moment is call up every ounce of strength I have left in me and let go. To surrender to an intelligence that is me, that I do not understand and obviously cannot control, but now trust implicitly.

Carefully, I unfold my limbs and roll onto my back, my hands falling onto my chest, one on top of the other, like someone has just lain me in a coffin. I take deep, cautious breaths, each initiating another wave of pure, eye-watering ecstasy. For my entire life, I realize, I have experienced only the idea of peace—of joy, of safety, of self-love—but this is the real fuckin’ deal.

Soon, I’m practically me again. And though I can’t be sure, I swear I hear a woman singing—her high, disembodied voice rising just above the music. Hesitantly, I crack one eye to investigate, and there she is—standing at the foot of my neighbor’s mattress: an apparition, dressed all in white, her straight blonde hair hanging down to her collarbones. Swaying gently, eyes closed, she sings to the man next to me who’s been sobbing like a child for an hour. She sings to me.

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We are always going to be pushed, by the uncontrollable circumstances of our lives, in directions we will undoubtedly find uncomfortable: Away from people we love dearly or could clearly use our help; into the darkest corners of our own mind; down into another fern-infested valley. But very few routes that are free of all obstacles lead anywhere worth going.

One of the most exasperating facts of life is that fear is almost always the best compass. I know, I don’t like it either—but that which we believe we cannot possibly say or do is almost certainly our next necessary step toward further awakening.

“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting,” the great philosopher king Marcus Aurelius wrote. “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

However unsatisfying, this is the simple logic found at the core of most ancient philosophies, spiritual teachings, religions, and modern self-help ideologies: To escape the human predicament, to find an enduring sense of peace and happiness in one’s life, we must only stop trying so hard to avoid uncertainty and discomfort.

“You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control,” author Elizabeth Gilbert writes. “But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” 

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The weaker our tolerance for the inevitable ups and downs of life, the more even subtle changes in direction will feel like starting over, like quitting. Which is why we so often stay—where we are, as we are—in rigid, loveless relationships; at dull, unthreatening jobs. But change is inevitable, the only constant in the universe, and to surrender to this inevitability is not the same as quitting.

For when we surrender, we surrender to something—to an invading force, to the situation at hand, to the fickleness of fate; like it or not, we willingly place ourselves in the hands of a more powerful entity. To quit, though, is to abandon our goal—to leave it hanging, dead on the vine. To quit is to give in because we think we have nothing left; to surrender is to change tactics.

“You can only fight Fate so far,” John Steinbeck wrote in Sweet Thursday, “and when you give in to it you’re very strong; because all of your force flows in one direction.”

Most of us, at some point, adopted the notion that there’s a linear track we’re supposed to be following; that the only direction life can move is steadily up and to the right. But when you take one deliberate step off the traditional path, the whole illusion of “success” falls apart. Stop. Leave. Downsize. Apologize. Surrender. Are you still alive? Yes. What does that tell you?

“A man sits as many risks as he runs,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. Don’t let pride hinder progress in the only human endeavor that really matters: One’s ability to change—their beliefs, their ideals, their actions—for the better; until all the darkness has been replaced by light, the fear by love, and the pain by joy.