QOTW.08.19.2019.jpg — Letting go is tough.

Acceptance is the key.

Letting go can be a frightening topic for some. Throughout our life, we’re conditioned not only hold on to things, but to accumulate more. So, it’s not surprising that the idea of letting something go can feel foreign. This conditioning leads us to hold to things, even when they are no longer useful to us.

We keep toxic people in our lives, we embrace dis-empowering ideas, we save stuff that we haven’t used in years. (btw. I’m a huge Marie Kondo fan) It seems we are just not wired to “let go”.

I encourage you to examine people, ideas, and stuff in your life. If you find that some of the these things just don’t serve you anymore and you’d like to let them go, these steps may help you.

Step 1: Accept yourself, Accept reality

For many, letting go is hard because we don’t want to accept reality. When we feel negative emotions, we try to ignore them and pretend they’re not real. We may look the other way or look for ways to forget. This can lead to a feeling that our problems have disappeared, but this is short-lived. Denying reality only creates a temporary sense of peace.

The first step in letting go is to accept who you are and where you are right now. Be kind to yourself. There’s no need to criticize or judge. You are where you are and that’s cool. Honor and explore your feelings. Evaluate the underlying beliefs that produce these negative emotions. You may uncover beliefs or “stories” like, “our family is unlucky”. Or “I’m just not a happy person”. We may not realize that we cling to things that are no longer useful, because we have dis empowering, untrue, or toxic underlying beliefs that are preventing us from growing.

By practicing some self-compassion and accepting yourself, you can more easily accept reality. This is acceptance is often the seed of change that will allow you to grow into your future self.

Step 2: Move through the pain

This step may seem counter-intuitive. To let things go, you have to move towards (and through) the bad practice, not away from it. It’s a very human desire to want to avoid our problems. But this only creates distance from the stress and pain, it doesn’t get rid of it.

Let the bad things in. Don’t push away negative emotions or bad practices. Absorb these emotions. When you let them in, they are no longer abstract and nebulous. They become definable and known. These emotions lose a lot of their power through this process.

Step 3: Set your direction

We humans are blessed/cursed with the ability to choose. We constantly make choices that generate. This change may be good or bad, thoughtful or thoughtless. Without setting a direction that we’d like to our life to follow, we can easily pick up bad practices, like bingeing too much TV or stopping your workout routine. To let go of bad practices or to add good practices depends on our ability to intentionally set a direction.

Use your wiring to your advantage. Describe the exact practice that you want to let go and then describe the practice that you want to replace it with. This way your brain doesn’t see this as a loss, just a substitution. Think about how you want to feel emotionally and physically. Focus your attention to the new feelings that you want in your life, not on what you want to let go of. For example, focus on experiencing feelings of joy or freedom, instead of focusing on not feeling criticism or self-doubt.

The path to letting go begins and ends with radical acceptance who you are and that you can choose the direction of your life.