Let go

Or bust.

Letting go is letting go, is letting go.

Thanks to the sages who did the work to learn universal truths like “you are not the voice in your head, you are the one who hears that voice” and “to let go, you simply let go.” Now we get to learn these things, which are not necessarily complex, but are difficult to practice. The mind can chew to logically understand these words, but to experience and feel their truth means the mind gets kicked to the backseat and something else takes over.

Awareness is a gift.

When you experience that you are the one who hears the voice in your head, you can watch all of the silly madness that this voice makes you do and believe. Once you see where you are still staying small, or saying yes when you mean no, or anxiously striving to control your environment so that you feel “Ok!!” — you can act to change it. And you must act, if you want to be free.

I’ve lately been fixated on solving the patterns and habits that I think I should have stopped doing by now. I can hear the internal judgmental voice that says, “I can’t believe you’re still afraid of this. You’re still acting this way? You still believe somewhere that shrinking is serving you?” I’m learning (thank you sages) that to deal with this voice in my head, I have to let go of everything it says.

And to let go is to look at what the judgmental voice of the mind is saying, stop listening to it, and feel the feeling underneath the words.

Because to feel a feeling is to let it go. 

Let go or be in pain.

Michael Singer expresses what to do when you recognize a disturbance in the mind:

‘To free yourself of inner thorns, you simply stop playing with them. The more you touch them, the more you irritate them, [and then] they are not given the chance to naturally work themselves out. If you want, you can simply permit the disturbances to come up, and you can let them go.’ - The Untethered Soul.

And David R. Hawkins tells us the letting go technique: 

“Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, staying with it, and letting it run its course without doing anything about it. Simply let the feeling be there and focus on letting out the energy behind it…When letting go, ignore all thoughts—focus on the feeling itself.” - Letting Go: the Pathway of Surrender.

This is also the essence of what Eckhart Tolle and Ram Dass teaches, and of stoicism, Buddhism, psychotherapy. See the pain, feel the pain, see the joy, feel the joy. It will all go.

Whatever is ready to be let go of is here in this moment. 

You can know what to let go of by paying attention to what is being activated in you right now. You can deal with past and future pain by feeling the present pain.

When you stop resisting all the sticky crunchy feelings that ignite in you throughout the day, they will go. Don’t feed them, just let them through. 

The bus is late? The bread you buy is out of stock? You remembered something mean your teacher said to you in 8th grade? You really wish you wore different shoes today? Your plans fell through? It’s raining? You really want that thing to be different but it’s literally out of your control?

There are endless reasons to be wound up and at odds with life every single day, and the mind alerts you to all of them. So go ahead, be upset, but don’t attach to any of it. Take these daily opportunities to become freer in your psyche.

For bigger things (a relationship, a long-standing grievance, a deeply held pattern of self-sabotage) letting go can be more difficult and involved because it might require external action. But don’t worry! If you need an extra push to let something go, life’s got you. My yoga teacher says this — “when you are gripping tightly to something that you’re ready to let go of, life will find a way to rip it from your grasp.” Let that happen. If you don’t let go now, it will grow to be more painful.

The only way for anything to change is to see, accept, and feel exactly what is right now. Whatever is present in your heart right now, let it be felt. Grieve, laugh, cry, dance, scream. Stop stopping the letting go process. After, you can take aligned action, if it’s even still needed. 

Soma, the body 

Letting go is somatic — it is not a conscious process. Until you actually feel the emotion behind it all, you will not let go, and the same patterns and pain will find sneakier ways of hiding in the crevices of your psyche. It’s similar to when you press on a painful knot in your shoulder, and the only way to release the knot is to stay with it until it melts. And maybe you return to it tomorrow, and next month, and next year, because it is still tight, it didn’t go all the way.

You can’t think your way out of angst — but you can use your mind to start to believe that you can be freer. You can decide you want to let go, you can shout to the sky “I’m so fucking done with this! Never again!”, you can choose to confront what is hard, to write or talk about it — whatever helps you reach the emotion that needs to be felt.

Whatever you aren’t yet aware of isn’t yet ready to be felt. Your body will hold on for as long as it feels like it needs to. Unless your destiny in this lifetime is Total Enlightenment, you probably will never fully let go of everything. And, that’s great.

You can still be freer than you are now. 

xx, maggie 

P.s. the two books I sourced — The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer & Letting Go: the Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins. Incredibly transformational.

If you want to share this, please do! Or share your responses with me — especially if you quit something recently, I definitely want to hear.