Letting Go

I stood and watched the 10-year old girl release the trapeze bar and float freely, high in the circus tent for a few moments, before her expert trainer gripped her arms and swung her back to the platform. She’d been practicing for a week, and this was her performance for her parents and other guests, me among them.

Letting go…. with this mindfulness practice.

Even with the safety net below, letting go was an act of courage for that young girl, and it took a week of training to get the skills needed to go with the courage.

Do I need courage to let go of things in my life? You bet I do. How about you?

What would it take, say, for me to let go of distracting thoughts so that I could contemplate my own death.? (I don’t know when it will come, and I am not sick, but I do know it will come some day.)

Letting go of any challenging idea takes skill and courage. It means learning to drop the defenses long enough for the mind to clear out thoughts that are quite tenacious. It means developing courage to face the emotions that the busy mind is trying to keep out of awareness.

This probably is not how you understand the purpose of your thinking. We sometimes worship our thinking minds. We spend a lifetime of education and experience learning that our thinking keeps us safe, provides pleasure, is necessary. We become thinking beings, homo sapiens, “I think therefore I am.”

Yet it is also true that we are emotional creatures who sometimes become afraid of our emotions and unconsciously use thought to keep them out of awareness.

With thinking in control of our awareness we are unable to practice letting go, unable to sit with empty mind, and so unable to feel our emotions. Our mind clutters with thoughts. Thoughts that keep us from facing what we fear. Keep us from facing something we wish to let go of. Huh, you ask, what are you getting at here? In mindfulness we learn that the way to let go is to open to the feelings and emotions about the idea or thoughts that won’t go away. Then. after some work and practice, it can fade away, rendered powerless because now we have faced it, we have experienced the strength of its emotions, and our fear has become better known to us.

In this 12-minute video you will learn about some ways to practice skills of being present without knowing what will come next. Then, on your own you can practice sitting with the emotions that surface. If they are too strong you can get professional help from a psychotherapist or expert mindfulness teacher. By sitting with these emotions you can get them in perspective and reduce the fear they brought along. All this is training in letting go.