“Teach me to let go”.
How do you reply to that? How do you help someone in the midst of a crisis, who is hurting so badly through no fault of their own, and who has reached out to you for help?
What words can quiet the soul that is weeping from the totality of pain and suffering that has descended upon it, and how do you light a spark of hope where right now there seems to be only darkness?
Today’s post is an attempt to answer that.
Because all of us hold on to things that we should have let go of a long time ago. Maybe it’s a relationship that drains us, or a belief that demeans us, or a desire that slowly destroys us.
Whatever we can’t let go of, it’s because holding onto something that is hurting us is a sign that we are trying to fill a need deep inside of us that is in crisis.
And until you heal the need, you’ll keep reaching out to hold onto that which you really should let go of.
But healing the need is difficult, because rarely do we use language to explain our needs, we just feel them. I’ve written before about how our feelings (generated by our needs) are found in our non-verbal limbic system, but in order to understand the need we have to drag it out of the darkness and into the light of language, so that we may apply reason, and knowledge, and wisdom.
But putting words to the pain tears us asunder, creating more grief, more pain, more despair.
Until we make peace with it.
The really hard part to understand is that there is nothing real (physical/corporeal) that is holding you back from moving into a place of peace. Everything that is stopping you from moving forward is coming from deep inside your mind, patterned in thoughts and feelings, but never in something that can’t be changed.
But in order to change it, you have to go through it, rather than avoiding it.
We spend so much emotional energy trying to avoid pain that we prolong the agony we were always going to end up feeling (and usually it’s less painful than we think it is going to be).
If we had just chosen to accept the pain, and move through it, we could have saved ourselves so much distress and heartache. Please understand, I’m not saying this is easy, because I know it isn’t. Accepting the pain so that we can heal it is one of the hardest things we can ever learn.
But once you learn it, you’ll carry with you a strength you can only begin to imagine.
To first learn to let go, ask yourself these simple, but oh so difficult questions…
What do I have to give up if I let go of this?
Why is that so painful for me? What need is being threatened?
What can I change to fulfill the need in some other way?
I promise you that the way to peace is found through a deep understanding of yourself, and a willingness to work through the pain that you carry with you. Cleaning out emotional wounds is a difficult and painful process, that takes time, guidance and compassion.
But once you heal, you can let go of everything that hurts you, and become who you were always going to be.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings