Psychological well-being is increasingly understood as a multidimensional phenomenon encompassing emotional regulation, adaptive coping, resilience, meaning-making, and inner peace across the lifespan, rather than merely the absence of psychological disorder. However, many contemporary psychological frameworks remain constrained by an ego-centric model of selfhood and agency, limiting their capacity to address existential anxiety, moral conflict, uncertainty, and the psychological burden of perceived doership and outcome fixation. Grounded in Indian Psychology, the present theoretical paper offers an integrated philosophical and psychological examination of Śaraṇāgati as articulated in the Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā, where surrender to God functions as the culminating resolution of human psychological and existential conflict. The paper explicitly adopts a theistic understanding of Śaraṇāgati as complete surrender of ego-based control to God, while employing psychological concepts solely to elucidate its experiential, regulatory, and therapeutic implications, without reducing or secularizing its metaphysical meaning.
Through close textual analysis integrated with constructs from depth psychology, attachment theory, existential psychology, and emotion regulation research, the paper demonstrates that Śaraṇāgati represents an ontological reorientation of the self that directly restructures psychological functioning. Surrender to God is shown to dismantle rigid ego-identification and the illusion of absolute doership, thereby reducing anxiety rooted in hyper-control and moral over-responsibility. At the affective level, Śaraṇāgati enhances emotional regulation and tolerance of uncertainty by grounding inner security in transpersonal attachment to the Divine, while at the motivational level it transforms action into disciplined engagement without outcome anxiety.
The paper concludes that Śaraṇāgati, as presented in the Bhagavad Gītā, constitutes a philosophically coherent and psychologically robust psychospiritual framework with significant implications for psychological well-being across the lifespan, including contexts of existential distress, chronic stress, trauma recovery, moral injury, and spiritually informed rehabilitation.