Surrender.

It doesn’t mean give up.

My agent called. I hadn’t heard from him in months. “You got the job. Amazon wants you to play the Governor of California in this new thriller television series.”

“They know I’m in a wheelchair right?” I asked.

“Yeah they know.”

This was great news. Since being diagnosed with ALS, television work had all but dried up. Now physically weaker than I’d ever been, I was ironically going to play the most powerful character of my career.

True power isn’t all physical.

As my partner was driving me to the fitting, I was starting to doubt myself. Prior to ALS, fittings were always a really fun day. It’s an actor’s first chance to meet the designers, potentially some of the cast and crew, and try on your character’s clothes!

But sitting in the back of my used wheelchair accessible vehicle, strapped into my new PERMOBIL wheelchair (both recent necessary and expensive purchases), it was hard to feel powerful.

First, I was concerned about how I would look in gubernatorial power suits. Nearly four years of living with ALS had taken its toll on my body. I had lost most of the muscle on my legs and my arms and was starting to lose muscle in my chest and my back. I haven’t weighed myself since early doctors appointments years ago, but I’m fairly confident I’ve lost at least 20 pounds of muscle.

I was used to playing guys in sexy suits. For most of my career on screen I played doctors, lawyers, bankers… wealthy guys who were kind of assholes. Type Casting? ;) But I had never played a politician. Let alone one of the most powerful men in the country.

So much of television is about looking great isn’t it? As viewers, we tune in to see beautiful people first, doing great acting second. Today’s fitting would be another opportunity amongst the many I’d endured over the past year particularly, for me to let go of the heroic Jew Jackman idea I had of myself as a leading man in a perfect body - one I had painstakingly molded over decades in the gym.

Former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger was actually one of my childhood heroes. My dad bought me a copy of Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding when I was 14, and I followed it like the Bible. I even wrote my college essay to get into Duke University on Arnold’s book.

Approaching the Studios exit on the highway, I knew I would have to try on a dozen suits. I’d already swallowed my ego telling the designer my jacket size was a 39 (down from a 42). Now I would endure the likely humiliation of being too weak to take these shirts, jackets and ties on and off without considerable help from my partner and the wardrobe team. Some governor.

At that moment, my phone rang. A friend of my partners is a highly sought after psychic and spiritual guide. I had only spoken to her once before. She’d given me a reading that was full of extraordinary hope, and the promise of healing consistent with all the karmic work I’d completed. So I picked up the phone and told her how bleak I was feeling. Rather than go into another profound reading, she simply said, “surrender.”

I paused and took a deep breath. I had heard this word before, two years prior. I was attending an event with energy healer Donny Epstein, and had lunch with the only other disabled man in attendance. It turns out he had been living with multiple sclerosis for over a decade and he saw me struggling, even though I had only just started to wear leg braces to help me walk.

“You need to surrender, Aaron,” he said.

“ Surrender?! No fucking way, I’ll never give up. I will beat this.”

The kind man smiled and said, “I don’t believe that’s what surrender means. It just means to let go.”

Intellectually I didn’t really understand him, but something that day shifted, and I ended up having one of the best days I had had in a long time. So some part of me subconsciously understood what he meant.

Now years later, I was hearing that word again. And again something shifted. As we pulled into the studio parking lot, I already felt lighter and happier. My limited ideas of what might be possible for not just this fitting, but the rest of my life melted away into the vast openness of unlimited possibilities.

Surrender. Whatever it meant, I wasn’t going to question it. I was going to accept that this is what I was being guided to do and so I was going to do it this time. Every day, every moment whatever it took.

The fitting went great and was super fun. The designer and her staff could not have been more beautiful human beings, kind and considerate. They didn’t even ask me to try on pants, knowing how difficult it would be for me, saying they knew exactly how to rig the pants for me so that I could get into them and out of them with greater ease. It wasn’t until later on set when I learned that one of the lead cast members Eric Dane, had been diagnosed with ALS, and so the company was practiced in the art of helping someone with this terrible disease look their best and do their best.

In the months following, I have been guided to surrender more and more. A new friend told me ‘randomly’ (and totally unprompted ) about a book by Michael A. Singer called The Surrender Experiment. I just finished the book last night. Of the hundred books that I’ve read, I recommend it at the top of the list.

Michael shares his more than 40 year journey of surrendering to the flow of life. Getting out of the way of what life has in store. Quieting the incessant chatter of the mind. Letting go of personal preferences, likes and dislikes. And getting down to the business of accepting what life has given you in this moment. He lived this way and continues to, and the perfection of life and its miracles he experiences as a result are breathtaking.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this chapter of surrender in my life – it is without a doubt, the most important chapter of my journey, my quest, my awakening, my transformation so far.

It should come as no surprise then that my time on set playing the governor went incredibly well. The scenes were fun to shoot and I think I’ll look pretty good too ;) even opposite one of the world‘s most handsome men, Mr. Dane. (Amazon’s The Countdown begins airing this summer.)

This isn’t to say life is no longer full of challenges Lol. Life is incredibly challenging. There are days where I wanna quit. I wanna give up. It’s so hard. It takes everything I’ve got to survive the day.

I just surrender. I let whatever the moment is be what it is. And when the darkness passes, and I can feel the light again, the sun on my face, the breeze in my hair, the lightness in my heart- I surrender to that too.

I wish I could’ve learned this without ALS. Maybe you can.