Smokey Mirror

Recently, at a party, a dear friend said, “people always say well-meaningly I have to ‘let go’. It doesn’t help me, I don’t know how to do that.” I fear I inadvertedly was one of those well-meaning friends. I want to make it right.

It appears that the subject of letting go is surrounded with a lot of mystery. Unjustly so. Imagine your holding a tennis ball in one hand, when I ask you to drop it, you relax your grip and let go. You relax the muscles in your fingers, they move automatically to an open position and the ball drops. That’s it. The key to letting go is to relax.

Letting go is natural. When we are balanced, tension and relaxation alternate like a wavelike motion.  Look at your breath, you take a breath in and then let go. Your heart  beats and then relaxes, as do all your other muscles. Neurons fire and pause to recharge. Our whole body is designed that way. Yet somewhere along the way we have forgotten to relax our mind and spirit, and we’ve become used to holding on to thoughts and ideas that keep us running in circles, emotions that slowly poison us and fears and deep-seated beliefs that keep us from living our best lives. Let’s change that.

We are designed to move. When we move our bodies, we remain strong, lean and flexible. The same holds true for our minds and our metaphorical hearts. When we don’t move our bodies, we lose muscle tissue and we gain fat. When we don’t move our minds in a healthy way, we lose flexibility and focus, our thoughts become negative and repetitive. When we don’t allow our hearts to move, our emotions stop flowing and they become stale. You feel stuck. People tell you you have to let go, you don’t know how and you stay stuck. Most people would see letting go as a condition to move forward. I have learned it is the other way around: it is in moving forward that we let go. By creating a new reality, we release the hold of the past.

Letting go is to accept fully what is happening now and to surrender to the uncertainty of the future. Letting go is building bridges between where you are now and where you want to be. Letting go is taking small steps in a new direction, with every step heading for a new destination, and in the process releasing the hold of the past, one step at a time.

Taking steps in a new direction is taking leadership of your life. You’ve allready taken the first step. Are you ready to take the next? In the next blog post, you’ll meet the mind whisperer. A mind whisperer is an expert in leadership. The mind whisperer will help you let go of your mind’s unhealthy habits.

photo by Dani Simmonds