Atma-Samarpana: Self-Offering

Atma-samarpana means offering one's entire self. Mirabai offered her heart to Krishna without reservation or self-protection. For anticipatory grief, this practice means ceasing the effort to manage, minimize, or intellectualize your approaching loss. Instead, you consciously offer your fear, your pain, your love, and your hope to the relationship and to something larger than your individual control. This is not resignation but radical honesty. You say: I am afraid. I am grieving before the death. I love you completely and I cannot prevent what comes. In this offering, paradoxically, you find a kind of peace. You are no longer fighting yourself; you are not split between what you feel and what you permit yourself to admit. Atma-samarpana is the courage to be whole and visible, even in sorrow.