On surrendering dreams back to the dimension they belong in
Photo credit: @josiahwg — Bolivian Salt Flats

Surrendering to your dreams is not giving up. It may be the most courageous thing you ever do.

My mother used to say I had wings. And in times of spiritual warfare, she would tell me gently — your wings have weights. I didn’t understand it fully then. I do now. Because I spent years placing those weights there myself, one manuscript at a time.

I wrote fifteen versions of my book. Fifteen. Each one a different attempt to make something perfect, to make it right, to make it ready. What I didn’t realize was that my perfectionism wasn’t protecting the dream — it was grounding it. Chaining it. Keeping it from becoming the living, breathing thing it was always meant to be.

We grow up hearing it: chase your dreams. And for a long time, I believed that was the only way. But somewhere in the quiet, I began to hear that word differently. To chase means you are always searching. Always behind. It means you grind, you grasp, you push — and underneath all of it is a whisper you may not even recognize as fear: it won’t happen if I stop.

Maybe the hustle was never about ambition. Maybe it was always about not trusting that we were enough.

Think about how we love. We have seen it — people moving from one date to the next with a checklist, a vision, a picture of what love is supposed to look like. Chasing a feeling they can almost see but never quite reach. And still, we say love finds you when you least expect it. We say it with certainty, with tenderness. So why don’t we say the same about everything else placed in our hearts?

I have come to believe that dreams exist in a dimension we are not meant to control. They float. They soar. Like clouds — not because they are fragile, but because that is their nature. They belong to the sky. And when we drag them down into timelines, into ten-year plans, into metrics and milestones, we don’t protect them. We flatten them. We make them worldly. We put weight on something that was always meant to have wings.

· · ·

There was a season when I fell into analysis paralysis. I had big, specific dreams — the kind you share in rooms and watch people’s eyes go wide. But I was so fixed on a version of the future that I had mapped out, so afraid to take a step that didn’t align with my plan, that I stopped moving altogether. I had confused the seed of the dream for the dream itself. I had confused the compass for the destination.

Because that is what a dream is — a compass. A north star. It was never given to us so that we could white-knuckle our way toward it. It was placed in our hearts as a promise, a mission, a whisper from something greater than ourselves — God, the universe, the divine, whatever name you hold for it. And like all sacred things, it requires trust, not force. It requires breath, not grinding.

Dreams, like us, evolve. They grow. They are veiled for reasons beyond our understanding, and I have chosen to believe that the veil is grace — so we can be present, so we can find the lessons and the love hidden in the becoming. The dream was never given to you so you could achieve it. It was given to you so you could grow into it. I explore this more deeply in The Clean Mind: Healing as Remembrance — because to heal is to remember who you were before the world told you to chase.

The most radical act is not to chase harder. It is to believe so fully that you can let go.

We live in a world that moves faster every day. AI learns without stopping, adapts without rest, was built to be unbeatable. And humans — exhausted, afraid of falling behind — have tried to match that pace. As I explored in Reinforcement Learning & the Soul, the very systems we built to outpace us may be pointing us back to what we lost — presence, clarity, and the willingness to simply be. But what if we were never meant to catch up? What if the invitation was never to run faster, but to let go entirely? Surrendering to your dreams means trusting the pace of your own becoming.

To surrender is not to give up. Surrender is the most active, courageous thing I know. It is choosing to journal, to heal, to show up, to follow your heart even when the path is not fully lit. It is releasing what no longer serves. It is choosing love over spite, presence over performance. It is doing the inner work — quietly, faithfully — and trusting that the dream is already becoming true in the dimensions you cannot yet see.

That is what it means to live divinely human. Not to transcend your humanity — but to inhabit it fully. To feel. To heal. To be here, completely, while trusting something beyond you completely. The divine and the human, held together. Not in tension, but in balance.

---

Ask yourself: does your dream feel peaceful? Like a cup of tea on a cold morning. Like crawling into bed after a long day. Or does it feel suffocating — like something you are always running toward and never reaching?

If it feels heavy, maybe it has been made worldly. And maybe all it needs is for you to open your hands. To breathe. To trust the promise that was placed in you long before you learned to chase.

Dreams are meant to float. And so, beloved, are you.