Let Go and Free Yourself ...

Letting go is so important, and so elusive when people are inside of restrictive narratives of victimization.

Letting go implies we are holding on to something painful that we wish to but can’t easily relinquish.

Cherished but unwanted, there is a paradoxical sense of terror of losing it.

Holding on is involuntary, not a conscious decision.

Maybe at some point in the past it was purposeful, necessary, but no longer. 

Self-deception is adaptive, maintaining a sense of self-continuity, wholeness, a view of the world and people which, however imperfect, nevertheless works when reality is too disruptive to accept.

Survival is the first priority. There is time later to thrive.

Letting go

Letting go is threatening because—even if we’ve lived with the growing awareness that whatever we are holding on to is atavistic, outgrown—it feels as if letting go means reliving the original injury.

When we are ready, letting go is cathartic, often sad but beautiful, and painful. Until then, time is partly frozen.

Because we don’t have a clear, integrated sense of what or why we are holding on, letting go is mystifying, impossible even.

When it is better to hold on to an inflated, brittle sense of self than to run the risk of having no self at all?

Don’t we all want to be free of worries and anxieties and experience a sense of freedom on all levels?

Society tries to keep your focus on the external world and makes you believe that to be happy and free you have to do certain things and have other things.

That is not how the universe works though.

To experience true and lasting freedom and happiness we have to start the other way around.

Meaning, first you are free and happy and then you’ll see that the things you will do and have are happening seemingly by themselves and from a state of being your true self.

So, the first thing to do is to listen to your emotions and start letting go. 

There is a lot of information out there on letting go and stopping worrying. But many of us don’t know how this works in practice.

 Some sources even suggest pushing your emotions away and “defeating” them.

But your thoughts, emotions, desires, and deeds are like a river. If you jump into the river and try to swim against it you will eventually run out of energy and feel the full force of the river dragging you down.

So instead what you should consider is not jumping into the river at all.

If you experience an emotion, let’s say anger, don’t try to repress that anger and think you shouldn’t feel angry.

Every emotion is there to be felt.

Also don’t try to rationalize the anger, don’t try to make sense of it. Thoughts can be very deceiving as they are self-reinforcing.

One thought leads to another one leads to another one leads to another one.

Instead, fully accept that you are experiencing anger now, don’t try to change anything about it 

Feel the anger, surrender to it, just let it be there, not more, not less.

When you just focus on the feeling and not the thoughts, you will soon see that the energy behind the anger dissipates. This is usually followed by a subtle feeling of lightness.

For more articles like this, check out my website at dayalram.in