Letting go is such an interesting process and it is one you will become intimately familiar with. You’ll know it when you feel it. You’ll try to find it when you don’t. When you find it again, you will realize that it’s not something you can “chase.” It comes when you stop chasing 🙃
How Do We “Let Go?”
Letting go is the act of not being afraid anymore. When you are not afraid anymore, you are no longer a slave to this world, your mind, or any person. You are free. This is when you become immensely powerful. This is when things start just working out for you.
Letting go is giving up. It is recognizing that you have tried so hard and yet you are still not there. It’s realizing that you are done fighting with life, done fighting with yourself, done fighting with the Universe. Letting go feels so good.
Letting go is a trust fall. You will know you are letting go because it is really scary. By definition. With a trust fall, you do not know that the other person will catch you. When you let go, you do not know that the Universe will catch you. But when you do let go and fall, it is such an exhilarating feeling. And I can promise you, incredible things happen.
Isn’t “Letting Go” Escaping?
As the Lumineers said, “The opposite of love’s indifference.” Escaping is numbing. Escaping makes you feel cold, indifferent, uncaring, dead. Letting go makes you feel alive, hopeful, powerful, passionate, excited.
Again, letting go does not mean “not doing.” It means realizing that flow action is so much more powerful than non-flow action. It means caring about how you feel first and foremost. It means trusting that YOU’RE ALLOWED TO FEEL GOOD, TO FEEL JOYOUS, and everything else will take care of itself in powerful ways. That’s not escaping.
If you feel yourself avoiding and still feeling terrible, numb, or dreading tomorrow, then you’re escaping.
Why Do We Let Go?
You know there are those people who are just immensely confident? They don’t seem to have any doubt? And they always get the girl/guy/job/thing. They aren’t afraid of not getting it, so it can finally come. They are finally attracting it.
Most of us are too caught up on:
- The fear of not getting it because we’re afraid of rejection or failure
- The desire to have it because we think it will “fix” or “validate” us
- Our thoughts about what will happen if we don’t get it
We end up stumbling so badly. Our desperation can be smelled from a mile away. We are like drug addicts chasing life. Life is not something we chase, it is something that we experience.
What are you chasing? You could die tomorrow. Where are trying to get? What will it feel like when you finally get there?
When you move from chasing to experiencing, you have let go. As Michael Singer says, “stop using life to fix something inside of you and just let go of your inner problems.”
How To Know When You’ve Let Go?
You will have let go anymore when you are no longer afraid of what might happen. This doesn’t mean you are numb. It means you are getting from inside yourself what everyone is chasing outside. It means that you have let go of your self-limiting beliefs that lead you into situations that cause you and others pain.
You have let go when…:
- Let go of your need to please anyone else.
- You have let go of your responsibility to make anyone else happy
- You have taken full responsibility of being happy yourself without manipulating or blaming anyone else for your unhappiness
- You have started wanting things just because you are a natural “wanter,” and not because you think it will “fix” you.
- You feel ease. You feel like you are flowing with the river instead of paddling up it.
Let’s be clear about something, anytime you are acting in a resistant state, you will bring more resistant. For example, let’s take a situation where you are doing something you don’t really want to do (the “I don’t really want to do this,” is the resistance).
More likely is that you have both “want” and “don’t want” to do it (my spouse wants this but I don’t…but I love her…but I don’t want to do it…).
Anytime you are in this state, you are building more resistance (usually in the form of resentment, anger, or fear). You may subtly resent them for “forcing” you to do something you don’t want to do. You’re angry at yourself for not standing up for yourself. You’re angry at yourself for not wanting to do it (because you should want to do it…it’s such a nice thing!). It does not matter whether you should or shouldn’t want to do it.
If you act with resistance you will bring more resistance and more pain into yourself and your world.
So many people think they are good husbands/friends/fathers/mothers/sons/daughters because they do what the other person wants. In reality, they are just bringing more pain and disconnect into the relationship. Their resistance brings them unhappiness and they begin to blame others for their unhappiness, which brings me to the next point…
The Only Obstacle To Letting Go Is You
You are the only obstacle. You think that you need to be unhappy to get what you want. You think that you need to paddle against the river to get what you want. You think that other people are responsible for one inkling of your inner well being (and because you think that, you think that you are responsible for other people’s well being).
You cannot make another person happy. Another person cannot make you happy. Nothing can make you happy except letting go and aligning with your soul.
What Happens When You Let Go?
You decide to trust that if you do what feels good to you and easy for you now, everything will work out way better than by any action of control on your part.
It’s that simple.
We think that if we just let go, all these “bad things” will happen. Recognize that these “bad things” aren’t actually real. They are projections of your mind. When you let go, you change the rules of the game. You realize that life is seldom as scary as your mind thinks. You realize that by letting go of those resistance/negative thoughts and projections, you actually fundamentally change the future.
That is the trust fall. I will feel good now. I will choose to turn and flow in the river. I will do what is good for me, I will connect to my inner being, and I will act only out of alignment. And I will trust that all of my worries about…money, relationships, death, health, the economy, work, family, finding my partner…will work out. Life works out for you when you feel good, not when you do the perfect actions.
You tiny being who does not even know how to convert food to energy, breath to oxygen. You do not know how to grow a baby. You do not know how to make the sun shine. You know nothing. You think you know everything and you run around all day long trying to create the perfect circumstances for you and everyone around you to be ok. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? You spend countless hours stressing at work and then you just run into the person you needed to meet at a coffee shop.
When you let go, you choose to be happy now, you choose to bring love into this world. You choose to allow who you truly are into this world. You choose to allow all the cooperative components of the universe to begin to give you what you actually want, which is exactly what you are attracting when you let go: more joy, more abundance, more ease.
It will shock you.
You will laugh at how easy it all becomes.
Don’t trust me. Try it. Just for a week.