Life is a series of letting go’s– an “infinite” series of letting go’s. All things in life are given us on loan. Stand face-to-face with life, learn to let go, and whatever comes our way– success or failure, joy or sorrow, support or betrayal, light or darkness– it all blesses us. Once we have learned to let go, we are prepared for whatever life gives us. And death itself is nothing to be feared.
–Matthew Fox
For many years, I resisted the concept of letting go. I resisted mostly because I didn’t understand what people were talking about. I’d be loudly obsessing about something. “Just let go,” they’d say. “Okay,” I’d say. Then I’d walk away and wonder what they meant, and mostly how to do it. Soon, I caught on. If I didn’t want people harping on me about letting go, I needed to obsess silently. Privately. Or at least in the presence of someone who wouldn’t lecture me about letting go.
As the years wore on, I was forced into letting go. Eventually I even wrote a book called The Language of Letting go. I thought it was the end of my need to practice letting go.
When my son died, I learned that writing the book was only a prelude, an introductory course in letting go. Over the years that followed, I gradually began to learn a new respect for this behavior called letting go.
Letting go is a behavior we can practice each day, whatever the circumstances in our lives. It’s a behavior that benefits relationships we want to work. It’s a helpful behavior in insane relationships, too. It’s a useful tool to use when we really want to bring something or someone into our lives, and in accomplishing our goals. It’s a helpful tool to use on outdated behaviors such as low self-esteem and manipulation.
Letting go takes the emotional charge, the drama, out of things and restores us to a sense of balance, peace, and spiritual power.
Letting go works well on the past and the future. It brings us into today.
Paraphrasing the mystic writer Matthew Fox, everything that comes, comes to pass. Demystify letting go. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Learning the art of letting go really means learning to calmly let things be.
God, help me learn to let go.
Our own guide for our monthly group meditation practice entitled ‘How GUGOGS Meditation Works’ has gone through a few iterations and changes over the years. Wayne S. who authored our group meditation article and leads our group meditations made a very similar discovery about this important shift from ‘let it go’ to ‘let it be’.
Originally our meditation practice included this line:
“Learning to meditate gives you the ability to simply let negative emotions go (or be).”
Wayne made the subtle but important change in the current version to:
“Learning to meditate gives you the ability to simply let negative emotions be.”
And his guidance continues with these helpful suggestions:
You can learn to recognize and accept your anger, sadness and frustration with less judgement and more curiosity. Through this practice, you can have these insights and experience and change your perception of yourself and the world.
Further, for many of us , letting reality be reality … letting it be … can be a very important shift as we attempt to practice the AA slogan ‘Let go and let God’ … as we surrender our delusion that we’re directors of the universe (BB Third Step p.62,63).