Why Is It So Hard to Let Go?

“Careful you must be when sensing the future, Anakin. The fear of loss is a path to the Dark side.

I won't let these visions come true [...] What must I do Master Yoda?

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."

If there is one thing that last year taught me, is that sadness and joy can co-exist. We should not refrain from having a good laugh and enjoying life's delights, while we are grieving, missing someone we love or struggling through difficult times. We are more resourceful than we think we are, so we need to learn how to embrace everything that is happening with an open heart and an open mind. This is of course easier said than done, because nobody has taught us how to actually do it. How to let go of everything that keeps us stuck and blocks us from growing and moving forward.

This is in fact an area I plan to focus on this year. Understanding the power that letting go has on my mental wellbeing and learning how to actually practice it in my daily life. I read and heard so much about how letting go of certain attachments, beliefs and wants, can liberate us and make us more creative and happier. But how? What does it mean? And where do I start? So, I want to take the time and explore this theme in more detail over the next posts. I hope you will join me on this journey that will ultimately help us finding more peace of mind and unlocking more creative freedom. 

Stuck in the past

One of the most difficult things to let go of, is our past. I remember in my early twenties, when I lived in Cluj, Romania, I used to rent a tiny room in a beautiful house near the central park. It belonged to Alice, someone I was working with. Alice inherited the house from her parents and had lived there her entire life. Everything in that house was screaming: a rich intellectual family lived here. While other families were happy to have food on the table during communism, Alice’s family was throwing parties where doctors, lawyers, professors and politicians were invited. Her family never missed a winter ski vacation in Austria. They seemed to have it all. And that’s precisely what became Alice’s biggest problem. 

When her parents died and she suddenly had to maintain that lifestyle on her own, she felt lost. She didn’t have a plan. She hadn’t developed the life skills and the practical savoir faire to continue her life on her own terms. Her only coping mechanism was to constantly compare her present to her past. No wonder she ended up living in the past. She thought she was special; she judged others by her high intellectual standards and she gradually became a negative and bitter person that others were avoiding. There was always someone else to blame, she was always the victim, never happy, always complaining. She was stuck in the maze of a glorious past that was light years away from where she was now. She just couldn’t let go.

If we are honest with ourselves, we all have an Alice inside of us. She is always alert and jumps on every opportunity to dig into the past. She will quickly find reasons to justify why we shouldn't do something, why we shouldn't take that step forward. Remember what happened last time you tried? She will blind us into denying the reality and the uncomfortable emotions that come with it. She will tell us “you should be careful, this is too risky", you shouldn’t forgive him after everything he’s done to you”, “you shouldn’t spend your time helping others, they will just take advantage of you’’, “you shouldn’t work that hard, you deserve some self-indulgence”, “you’re the greatest, you don’t need to change anything in your life”, “you’re not enough, buy this one more thing.’’

When we don’t take the time to really listen and understand this constant chatter, we continue to be controlled by it and make decisions fueled by fear, that we will later regret. We will live in a constant state of fear that will paralyze us. 

Living in the future

We all have dreams we work for and goals we want to achieve in a distant future. That's great and this is exactly what differentiates us humans, from other species. But let’s stop the rat wheel for a minute and imagine what happens once we will have achieved our goals and big dreams. What then? Will it ever end? You might already know the answer. We will always have some new dreams and new goals. It never ends. So, how do we navigate this continuous tension between doing what's right for our future and being fully present?

Psychotherapist Phil Stutz says that one of the reasons why people cannot enjoy the present is because they tend to develop an idealized and unrealistic image of how things should be. He calls this the "snapshot". It’s a still image that we created in our head: this is how my perfect home looks like, this is how my partner looks like, this is how my child should behave, this is how my perfect summer vacation looks like. It’s an anchor that we created, and we keep coming back to it, to compare our own reality. And the truth is, says Stutz, looking at the gap is scary. Because the snapshot is an ideal, a fantasy, often fueled by what our environment serves us or what we see on social media.

So one thing we can do to be more present, is to take a step back and calibrate our future expectations and ideals. Is there a realistic gap to our current state?

Accept reality for what is it

Reality is made of three aspects that no human being can escape: pain, uncertainty and constant work. It doesn't matter if you are a blue collar working in a factory or the president, you will equally be confronted by these three aspects of reality. And if we don’t learn how to live in the present and deal with reality, whatever it throws at us, we will never feel content and happy. 

Pema Chödrön tells the story of a man who walks through the world annoyed and angry about everything and everyone. To diminish his pain, he decides to wrap everything he touches in leather, so he would not experience any more discomfort and pain. But he soon realizes this is a never ending effort, because there will always be more and more things upsetting him. Instead, if we wrapped his own shoes in leather, he would also be able to avoid the pain, but without changing his environment.

We too can develop positive coping mechanisms that help us become less reactive to our environment and focus on those thoughts and emotions that give us energy to move forward. And to do that, we need to stop living in the future, let go of the past and those behaviors that won’t do help us anymore

Try this

I have been using a simple visualization exercise that Phil Stutz explains in the movie Stutz. I recommend you watch the movie as it also includes some cool animations with the exercises. But I leave you below the step by step transcription. I also recorded myself and I play the recording whenever I feel tense and I feel I need to let go of something. You can find my recording here, or simply record yourself while reading it. It is very powerful to hear your own voice while you do this visualization exercise. 

Find a comfortable place, sitting, or laying down. Take a couple of deep breaths and close your eyes. Now think about something that you can’t let go of, something that consumes your energy and doesn’t let you move on and focus on what is really important in your life. You're afraid that if you let go of it, something bad is going to happen. Take the time to visualize all the details that you can imagine, whether it’s a person, an object, a situation, an idea or an emotion.

Now imagine you are grasping this thing. It doesn't matter if it's not a material thing, just imagine you're grasping it. Like you're grasping onto a branch of a tree. It's scary, you're afraid to let go. But you let go anyway. And when you let go, you start to fall. It's not a bad sensation. The fall is actually slow and gentle, to your surprise. But you're dropping down. And you're saying, I am willing to lose everything. You have to say it silently, but you want to really feel the intent behind that.

And the moment you say that, you hit the surface of the sun and your body burns up. Now at that point, you have lost everything because the instrument of possession is your physical body. So if your physical body is burnt up, you're just one sunbeam amongst all these other sunbeams. You're radiating outward in all directions, and what you're radiating is a very loving, giving, outflowing sensation. And then you look around and you see all around you an infinite number of other suns, just like the one you're inside of, all of which are radiating outwards.

Then you hear the suns, all of them saying in unison, WE ARE EVERYWHERE. All you can do is give, you can't take. You can't grasp, you can't hold on to anything. It's just impossible.

Now you can open your eyes. How did it feel?

In the next post, I will tell you more about some of the mechanisms of letting go that I discovered and started to practice. Once you learn a few simple exercises, you learn how to be less reactive, more present and peaceful. What I personally want to let go of, is achievement. I feel like I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself because I have this natural drive to achieve more and more. Letting go of achievement doesn't mean I become laid-back and not driven to achieve any goals. It just means that I am focusing on the effort and not on the result. I am willing to accept that even when I put effort and I do my best, some unexpected things can happen and block my progress and I might not achieve what I want. And that doesn't mean I am failing or I am less worthy of love and appreciation.

Stay tuned and have a mindfully productive week, with presence, enjoyment and peace of mind!

Learn to let go/ stock.adobe.com

If you feel like you need more clarity in your life, but you're not sure where to start, schedule a Free Change Strategy discovery session, by writing me at heysparkingdrive@gmail.com or in the Contact form. We will assess together your objective and discuss different possible strategies to achieve your goals.

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