Letting to Go To Move Forward

Life Manual Newsletter No. 15

When we master the art of letting go we are able to live fully in the present. Then the people, feelings or qualities that we were holding onto, that we may believe we have lost for ever, can come to us again.

What is letting go? What happens when we hold on?
What are the tools for letting go?

In a recent interview with Psychology of Vision Trainer Sue Allen on Managing Life Change, we explored what influences our ability to manage the many changes through the stages of life. Sue pointed out that accepting, or even welcoming, change as a natural aspect of life, allows us to move more comfortably through changes. However, 

“…if we avoid the pain or discomfort of  change,
we are holding onto the past and our role in it,
and then we actually intensify the pain and its duration.” Sue Allen

You can prove this to yourself. Next time you are feeling intense emotion about something that isn’t working in your life, that you feel you can’t control, set the intention to let it go. As peacefully and wholeheartedly as you can, say to yourself, “Ok, I let go of this.”

You can strengthen your intention by physically reinforcing it. Hold your hand open and imagine it flying away with your blessing. You will immediately feel a downshift in the strength of the emotion. Your muscles will relax and it feels as if you start breathing again. When we are holding on,  it is as if we holding our breath. We can’t move forward.

When we hold on, we not only intensify the pain, but we push away the very thing or person we are holding onto. We have all experienced stepping away, either physically or emotionally, from someone who is behaving dependent or controlling around us.

“Our needs are not our love”. Chuck Spezzano

Our Needs are OUR Responsibility, or Response-ability.

The measure of someone’s love is not how much they meet our needs. Picture a bird sitting in your upraised palm, free to fly if it chooses. How much pleasure does it give you? How much can you love and admire it. Imagine what happens when you close your fingers over it. You may have it, but now it is in pain, and you can’t even see it. Nobody is happy. Any time you are holding on, just imagine opening your palm, letting whatever you have been holding on to sit on your upturned hand. It will help to ease the pressure, may even make you laugh, and overtime will change your habit.

Letting Go is NOT Pushing Away

It’s important to know that letting go is not the same as pushing away. “I don’t need him/men/her/women,” has nobody fooled!!! We have left the pain and the needs unhealed and marched off into the distance – until the next time someone fails to meet our needs, when all of the pain will come up again

In Life Manual, Jeff Allen uses a wonderful example with the emotion of anger. Many of us don’t like to feel anger, having been taught that feeling anger is wrong. So, everytime the emotion of anger comes up, like yesterday’s newspapers, we take it out and store it in the garage. This can go on for quite some time, with our store of newspaper getting larger and larger, until something finally triggers us so hard we finally lose our temper. It’s like going out into the garage and dropping a match in. Pretty soon we are all burned out and everyone around us is suffering fire damage;-)

It’s the same with our needs, where we don’t accept them or deal with them ourselves, they store up. We are probably carrying a pretty big dose from childhood too. When the person or thing we have decided was sent to meet all our needs, stops servicing them or walks out … Guess how we are left feeling?,

Taking Care of OUR Needs

What we push away, only hurts us more. Now we are not only tensing our muscles and holding our breath, but we are putting all of our energy into pushing. We are forcing ourselves to feel something that is not true for us.  Our needs, (and we all have them as long as we are human, even if we have learned to cover them over to avoid the pain) are our own. Learning how to lovingly meet them and handle them is part of our maturity as a human being. We can ask for help, we can ask for what we would like to have happen – but always with our palms open. The other person has the right to say no, or to be too busy, too tired because they are meeting their needs. Often, we are feeling upset with someone for not meeting our needs, when we haven’t even stated them aloud. People have differing needs, different priorities. What we consider a natural need may come as a complete surprise to someone else. This is a great clue I learned from Chuck Spezzano, which can take some pondering and meditation;

If you can see something is missing, then you are the person who has it to give.

Tools for Letting Go

Feeling our feelings fully is the most basic but powerful way of letting go. Owning our feelings, not spreading them around through blame, takes courage, particularly if our garage is stuffed full with unmet needs. It’s our feelings that are screaming at us, not our needs. It’s our feelings that want attention – to be heard, to be attended to. When we pay attention, recognise them as our own, we can burn through them. We can release them, so we can meet today’s needs, not all our yesterday’s. Then we can look at our options for taking care of ourselves, of being self loving, treating ourselves gently and lightly, because we recognise that the person who wasn’t taking care of us was ourself.

Acceptance is another great tool for letting go. When we can accept what is happening in our lives, a very important stage in recovering from grief after bereavement, then we can move on to our future. Accepting that our needs are not being met, that they are OURs to meet and that all humans have them, puts them into a perspective where we can deal with them. We can look for solutions rather than a person to fulfil them.

When we burn through our feelings, lean into them quietly, knowing that they will dissipate, we can hit new layers, or deeper levels of the pain of unmet needs. But the deeper we are willing to go, the more we are willing to let these old feelings burn through, the deeper the level of healing, the deeper the peace we will find, and the deeper the benefit in our daily happiness and joy. After all, there is no point trying to get yesterday’s, and all our yesterday’s needs met – yesterday has gone. It is time to let them go.

When we are willing to take responsibility for our feelings, for our needs, while being open to receive rather than take what others wish to give, we are well on our way to true partnership.

We can be the change we wish to see.

Wishing you may let go to move forward with ease,
All love
Christine

Chapter Ten of Life Manual : Independence and the Power of Letting Go will help you to understand your personal issues with holding on, including the underlying heartbreaks through it’s exercises. It will also show you how to let go and the way through letting go of a relationship that is over. Letting go is not just a tool for life but a whole stage in our personal transformation.

This newsletter is adapted for Life Manual readers from a longer article published in wisewomenonline.net Please also see my note there on the importance of having support in bereavement,.