To me, “let it go” means opening our energy and dropping out what no longer serves us.

It means not holding on so tight to illusion.

It means no longer hurting ourselves with our thoughts and feeling by not being so invested in believing it is true.

When we have a thought, we have a choice.

We can believe the thought as true fact, or we can see that it is just a thought and we have a choice to believe it or not.

Can you feel that?

Can you feel the innate truth in the statement that not all thoughts need to be believed?

Let’s imagine you are mad at someone, and you just keep thinking, “I am so mad.”

This thought of being mad is a temporary experience, or it can be temporary—if you let it be. I am sure there are people you were mad at it in the past that you are no longer mad at now. See, it is temporary.

So, the thought runs through your mind: “I am so mad at so-and-so.” The way to let this thought, feeling, and suffering go is not to grab on to the thought too tightly.

One way we can think of this is, instead of thinking, “I am so mad at so-and-so,” we can think, “Right now I am having a temporary experience of being mad at so-and-so, and I will have this experience until it can be let go.”

You see, we don’t need temporary experiences to end before we are ready for them to end—but we do need them to end sometime.

When we are continually mad, stressed, worried, jealous, the person who gets the most hurt and abused is ourselves. So, this willingness not to “hold on” to passing thoughts and emotions that hurt us forever is a real gift.

Imagine that the thought of anger is in the palm of your hand. Do you squeeze the anger as tightly as possible in your palm, swearing to never let it go? Or can you open your palm up wide and set the intention that when the anger is ready to leave, it can fly free?

These are choices we can make about how to relate to our own current of emotion and thought.

Nothing is inevitable; we have more control than we think.

Hard emotions and terrible thoughts are going to arise, but it is your choice and your choice alone to decide how you relate to them.

The term “letting go” basically refers to how you relate to your own ups and downs that are constantly occurring. Are you holding the hard stuff you experience as tight as possible and swearing it is part of who you are, and is impossible to recover from? Or can you stay loose, see the reality that even the pain can be temporary, and be open to “letting go” whatever is no longer teaching you?

This is not a conceptual premise. It is practical. It is something that must be done.

Your pain does not need to define you. When we choose to open ourselves to “letting go” of the old pain, it no longer needs to be who we are. And then instead, our self-love can become the part of us we shine out to the world.

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Relephant:

3 Steps to Learning to Experience Life Fully.

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Author: Ruth Lera
Image: Flickr/Alan Levine
Editor: Travis May
Copy Editor: Catherine Monkman