Let Go To Let In
I was chatting with a friend the other day about all the new blessings in her life - a new home, a new romance, a new job and even a new geographical location. We were reminiscing about all the pain that came before and how she wouldn't have been able to manifest this bountiful and beautiful life if she kept clinging for dear life to the old one. I recently had a similar conversation with a client who said she felt “as if she was dying under the weight of all her old things”. She knew it was going to be an arduous task, but her courage and desire to purge decades worth of old clothing and furniture (and old, stale energy!) revealed a beautiful, clean slate underneath. Now, in the void created by removal and letting go, she is free of old impedances and can see new possibilities for making this her dream home once again.
It is precisely these stories that amplify the need for us to get comfortable with letting go and understanding non-attachment, and why it is such a constant theme in my writing and work. Life is fluid and time waits for no one, plain and simple. So why try and fight that fact?
It is said that pain is inevitable in life, but misery is optional. How many of us exist in a state of misery because we hold on to physical possessions, toxic relationships, rigid ideologies, self-serving behaviors and identities we feel obligated to keep embracing? How many of us futilely direct our energies to try and keep life looking the same - by denying that our loved ones will one day die, or that our children will grow up and leave us, or that we ourselves will never age? None of us has the power to keep life frozen in a place and time that no longer exists. But even if we did, why would we want to deny ourselves of new adventures we might have, or interesting new people we might encounter? Why would we want to forego all the possibility of the future?
By lifting the veil and realizing that we have little power over (most of) what happens in life, we can see the impotency in our need to control and we can loosen our useless, self-paralyzing grip. The irony in letting go is that it is actually the way to receive more abundance and ease in our lives.
But we humans seem to have a common built-in flaw, in that, we believe that giving something up, or the absence of something, is to lose, feel empty, or be deficient in some way. We believe that we must stuff ourselves with the familiar (fill in the blanks) to feel secure, powerful, informed, loved or alive.
Admittedly, letting go and practicing non-attachment is not easy. Even if we intellectually understand that making space (physically/emotionally/mentally/ spiritually) is healthy and in our best interest, it still requires a leap of faith that the unknown can be better than the known. Some might argue that there is no need for change and that letting go somehow strips us of our humanness - and that’s exactly right! The way to elevate ourselves to higher evolutionary beings - who don’t need to take more than we need, who don’t need to subjugate or deny others, who don’t need to destroy the natural world, who don’t need to resort to war and greed, who don’t need to live lives filled with pain - is to release the control we think we have. To realize that our sense of holding on is mere illusion.
Letting go, practicing non-attachment and embracing the impermanence of everyone and everything is one of the most crucial things we can do to help us find our way through a world that is ever changing. In the absence of what we have given up we find more than we could ever have imagined possible.
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