When you fight the truth of the way your situation is, you create a state of fear, upset, and tunnel vision. You destroy your ability to find solutions and you tend to make your situation worse.
To handle a situation, you need action, not resisting. Resisting keeps you from seeing the action you need to take. Letting go is the internal process that removes the resisting so you can see what you need to do.
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To see an example of letting go, find a time when you were actively resisting something. Then you stopped resisting and said, “The heck with it.” You stopped fighting your situation and moved on with your life.
What happened the moment you let go of the resisting? You got your peace of mind back. Fear and upset disappeared. You also saw everything differently. Everything looked different because the tunnel vision was gone.
Now notice what happened to the area of life that you were resisting. It started clearing up. Life always takes care of itself when we get our egos out of the way.
How letting go works
Letting go is the inner action that stops the resisting. This in turn removes the fear, upset, and tunnel vision. Instantly, you restore your ability to see clearly. You become creative and able to discover solutions you could never have seen before.
A good way to see how letting go works is to look at the nature of fear. Fear is a state of mind and is created by resisting a future event. For example, if I have a fear of losing someone, I am resisting the future event called, “losing someone.”
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The more I resist losing the person, the bigger my fear. The bigger my fear, the more I am threatened. The more I am threatened, the more I hang on and push the person away. By my resisting the future event, I make my fear come true.
To have my fear lose power, I need to do the opposite of what creates it. Instead of resisting the future event, I need to be willing for my fear to come true – not in my actions, but in my heart.
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In my actions, I will do everything I can to save my relationship, but if she goes, she goes. The moment I become willing for my fear to come true, it loses power. I restore my ability to see clearly and become very effective in handling my situation. This is the essence of letting go.
Steps for letting go
To make the process of letting go a little easier, there are two very important steps to take. The first step is trusting. Trust that no matter what happens, you will be okay. Even if your greatest fears come true, know that when the smoke clears, you will be fine. When you know that you will be okay no matter what happens, letting go becomes relatively easy.
As you trust, you discover that you really will be okay. This reinforces trust. When you don't trust, you fight, resist, hang on, and withdraw. This makes everything worse, which reinforces "don't trust."
Ultimately, trust is a choice. It’s something that you create. It's a declaration. "I will be okay no matter what happens. I trust, just because I say so."
Trust is also telling the truth. You really will be okay no matter what happens. You have had tough times before and you have made it through every one of them. If you are in a tough time now, this too will pass. Life is only threatening when you resist. So stop resisting and trust. Trust that you will be okay no matter what happens.
If you are engaged in your spirituality, a powerful way to let go of resisting and hanging on is to give your situation to God. It’s amazing, but life always seems to clear up when you do this.
Be willing to feel your hurt
The second and most important step in the process of letting go is to be willing to feel your hurt. This is important because it's the automatic avoidance of the hurt that forces us to resist.
We think that we're resisting certain circumstances, but we're not. We are resisting all the feelings and emotion that are being triggered by the circumstances.
More accurately, we are resisting a very specific hurt from the past. We are resisting the hurt of feeling not good enough, worthless, not worth loving, failure, or some other form of feeling not okay.
Once you find and heal this hurt, the need to resist or hang on loses power. Letting go then becomes relatively easy.
Finding and healing this hurt is one of the most important things you can ever do. This hurt is responsible for all your fear and all your upsets. It is responsible for all your self-sabotaging behavior and ultimately, every area of your life that doesn't work.
In relationships, the automatic avoidance of this hurt destroys love, creates conflict, and pushes people away
