Question: At times, when praying and meditating on surrender, I am moved to copious tears. I feel that these are tears of frustration. How can I aspire for and concentrate on surrender without becoming so emotional?

Sri Chinmoy: I am sure you know that when the soul expresses its joy with tears, it means that the soul is expressing its deepest gratitude through the physical being. In the soul's joy, there can be no frustration. There you feel only a vast and total oneness with the Highest on the strength of your surrender.

At times, however, during your meditation and prayer, you feel the uncertain drive of your yet-uncontrolled emotional vital. Since you have a few times experienced the tears of your soul's joy, which are a kind of divine Light, the frustration that lies in your unlit emotional vital cannot last for long. Again, if your prayer is flooded with purity and your meditation is surcharged with luminosity, even in the domain of the gross vital you will have, instead of frustration, a partial sense of psychic realisation in the form of the heart's spontaneous joy. The spontaneous joy of the heart will easily enable you to meditate on total and integral surrender. So please try to illumine your emotional vital through your soul's light. Once the limited emotional vital is illumined, it enters into the boundless sea of all-achieving and all-fulfilling Surrender.