Two Things that Make Letting Go Easier

This pandemic has been the ultimate exercise in letting go. Letting go of plans, letting go of expectations, letting go of hopes, wishes and desires and the hardest of all; letting go of people we love. 

All of this letting go-ness has left me wondering why letting go is so hard and is there any way to look at letting go as something other than down right terrifying? The second part of this sentence answers the first. Letting go is terrifying. We tend to equate letting go with loss and loss is painful.

The great yogic sages as well as modern science explain that we are hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, so it stands to reason that we would want to avoid loss like, well, the plague. 

But, is it possible that letting go is the road to acceptance and acceptance is a bridge to comfort?

Part of the challenge of letting go is, we simply don’t know for sure what’s on the other side. Letting go requires an enormous leap of faith and tremendous trust. At some level we have to believe that the other side is less painful than where we stand now.

You would think, based on the pleasure/pain theory, letting go of pain should be easy, but strangely enough it isn’t. This brings us to two important questions: What is the pain about and what do I need in order to let it go?

If you had plans to go on a trip, for example, and had to cancel due to Covid, this no doubt caused you some sort of pain. Is it the pain of not being able to see the people, places or things you wanted to? Or is the pain that you missed out on discovering new things and you’re missing the adventure? Or something else?

If you gave up long held family traditions over the holidays and feel a kind of empty spot, is the pain the loss of a ritual that brought the comfort of something familiar? Is it the loss of a tradition that reminded you of your connection to your roots?

If you had been looking forward to taking a course or degree program, is the pain the loss of potential for who you might have become? Or the opportunities that might have opened for you if you’d completed the course or degree?

And of course the hardest loss to grapple with; losing someone of great significance. What do you need to let go of? Is it the physical connection to that living, breathing person? Is it their insights and wisdom and guidance? Is it the joy their sense of humour brings you? Or perhaps, if your relationship was challenging, the hurt of unresolved issues. 

In order to let go, we need two essential things: Faith and Trust.

In the case of death, we have to let go of the fear that we will experience the deeply etched pain of loss forever. Or that the pain of unresolved conflict will haunt us for eternity. We have to trust that in time, the sharp edges of pain soften. We have to have faith that we have been left with something, even if it was a challenging relationship, that has made us stronger.

If we had plans to move forward through courses or a degree program and had to change our path, we need to trust that the other path may be just as good or better than what we were planning before. We need to have faith that we will learn all we need to in one way or another. 

If it’s tradition that was broken, we need to trust that those bonds are always there, traditions or not, and have faith that new traditions will be born or that old traditions will return. 

If a trip was cancelled we need to trust that we can find adventure in other ways and have faith that eventually our world will open up again. 

For now though, in order to find comfort, we need to let go of expectations and accept things for how they are. We need to work hard at being present and trust that we have what we need in this moment and have faith that the future holds many more bright and wonderful people, places and things for us. 

I wish you a very happy New Year and hope that Trust and Faith will keep you afloat as we all continue to move past 2020 and into 2021!