Learning to Let Go

Well last week I was talking about forgiveness, a big part of which is learning to let go. I think we’re all guilty of hanging on to things that hurt us, even if sometimes we’re not even aware of what it is that we’re hanging onto. How many times have you thought about letting go of emotional baggage, thinking “when I get rid of this, things going to be different”? The sad fact is that most of the time we never get round to letting what ever it is go, so we never get to emotionally move away from it.

The reason letting go is so hard, is because what we have to let go of is not the person or the situation, but the part of ourself that comes from thinking about that person or situation.

The thing is, most of the time we’re not actually in control the person or sitution. The only thing we are in control of is ourselves and how we deal with the emotions that go along with those people or things.

Real letting go begins with a kind of unraveling, where we begin to recognize that what we need to let go of is the part of ourselves that believes without that person, or without that situation we will somehow lose a part of ourselves that makes us who we are.

That’s the trouble with the human mind our view of ourself is often given to us by the people we surround ourselves with and the situations we find ourselves in. The trick is to know what you really need to hold on to and what parts would be better if you let them go.

A lot of the time we feel at a loss, not because it’s something or someone has changed, but because we don’t know who we are without that person or situation we find ourselves attached to. So that person or situation was defining our sense of self and purpose.

So from there we have to begin to recognise the process and realize, that if we’re going to really learn to let go, it’s going to require us understanding that we have to give up the way we think of things if I want to actually give up the pain or the problem that we have.

Ok, so we understand in our minds that it is wrong to hold on to things that are hurting us, but how do we actually go about doing it?

Generally speaking it’s never a good plan to hold a grudge. I doesn’t matter what anybody said or did to you, going around hating people or letting previous encounters derive your future is never going to solve anything.

It is possible that day after day, if we think about it, we can see that thing we’ve been hanging onto is less and less important in the grand scheme of things. It’s a long process because generally the amount of importance we attach to something is the degree to which we’re punishing ourselves with it.

If you had a suitcase, and everywhere you went, you took your suitcase, and wherever you put the suitcase down, it unclipped itself and out popped a large mechanical hammer and hit you on the head, pretty soon you would want to get rid of that suitcase wouldn’t you! Emotional baggage is exactly the same!

That’s what we do! A part of us we carry with us, everywhere we go. In those idle moments we’re always thinking back on it, looking upon it, asking it, judging ourselves and others by it, and all the time, whatever we do, without exception, we get a smack round the head by the content of our own past.

All we need to do to let go of something, is to begin to realize that if we’re suffering by holding on to it. Squeezing it tighter and making the situation worse isn’t going to help.

Whatever it is, if you start thinking “I hope this happens” or “I want thing to turn out this way,”  we are subconsiously putting promises in our mind that if things work out the way they do in our heads everything will be fantastic!  What we can’t see in that moment is that the more we hold onto the idea of how things should be, the more we struggle with events as they might turn out.

Being aware of the things that we are hanging onto is the first step towards letting go of them, because if we are continually looking at situations and go over them again and again in our heads we’re not going forward at all. We’re just continually living over and over again in the past.

So start today by mentally shaking off the thing that is holding you back, put it into perspective and look forwards to a better tomorrow.

Look after yourself, and each other.