(Apologies for the early letter this week. I'm having technical issues and it was either send it on Tuesday or Thursday, so here it is. With love from me. Eilat)
In life, we are often faced with letting go – letting go of control, of how we see ourselves, of how we think things should be, of the old ways, of loved ones, of jobs, of life as we know it…
We tend to find it very difficult to do.
A colleague once told me that when he wants to help someone let go, he uses the analogy of a trapeze artist swinging from bar to bar .
There comes a point, he tells them, where you have to let go of the bar you are holding onto and trust that moment in mid-air, so that you can catch the next bar – the one you want.
I love the metaphor. It puts that great moment of courage into perspective.
The reality is, if you don’t let go in moments of life transitions, you’ll just land up swinging back and forth in the same spot indefinitely.
“Open your heart and let go,” I urge one beloved after another.
“Open your heart and open your hands and let go. It’s ok. It will BE ok. Open your heart to the love and stay with that.”
It's terrifying. I know that.
But when we try to fight what is happening to us, to control it, or avoid it, it hurts more - and in the end it still happens.
The self-loving way to face inevitable life changes and transitions is to open your hands and let go of the bar you are holding, so that you are able to catch the next bar that's swinging towards you, offering to take you to a new place.
I witness a lot of letting go.
Someone I know is having to let go of a loved one, and it isn’t easy.
Saying goodbye and letting someone go is painful.
We get frightened, our heart feels broken, we hold onto our history – yet we have to let go.
If we stay open, we can use our time to put things right between us and them. To clear away any interactions that rankled and hurt, all the little things of a relationship that press into the spirit, that restrict the free-flow of love.
It can be a time to love, accept and forgive – as much as is possible.
If we fight what is happening, we miss out on the gifts the change is bringing.
A man I know is watching his brain-child business deteriorate.
He has put his all into it: dedication, sweat, stress, love, intense excitement.
He has done so much and he has achieved something remarkable.
It will probably change how we see and do things in his country – but that’s in the future.
At the moment, in its current circumstances, it is ‘failing’.
He has panicked about this, angsted, berated himself, been angry at the system and experienced intense anxiety in trying to hold it all together.
Recently it is dawning on him that his intense control of it may be part of why it is not succeeding.
Trying to make it a certain way is limiting other ways of looking at it.
Fresh new eyes may be just the thing that will take it to the next level – but for that he needs to step back and let go.
Step back and allow it to maybe fall apart. No easy task.
A woman I know has also created an incredibly important project that may in time save thousands, if not millions, of lives around the world.
She has sweated her soul into it and been intensely challenged by the conditions in which she has had to do it.
She has exerted all of her control, desperately trying to hold it all together to make it go the way she imagines it can.
Finally, after feeling painfully unappreciated for many months she has realised that she has to let it go.
Even if the people who take it over mess it up – and she strongly suspects they will – she can no longer subject herself to the indignity and stress of how she has been doing it.
With fear and anguish she let go.
The very next morning she had a realisation about how it can be done differently in a far better way for everyone involved.
Another woman I know was watching her partner behave very self-destructively.
It was destroying their relationship.
But she loves him and he loves her. She was not ready to let the relationship go.
She kept going back and trying to make it right, fix it, pretend it was ok for his sake and her own.
She tried to keep it together, to control his feelings and behaviour, to control her own – to keep everything as she thought it should be.
She began to have intense anxiety and feel silenced and disconnected from herself – but the only alternative was to let the relationship go and she wasn’t ready to do that.
Finally one day she understood that she has to let him live his life and make his own choices.
She had to step back and observe the choices he makes and based on that, decide if life with him suits her or not.
She realised the only way she can be with him is to first and foremost connect and listen to herself with love and respect – not lie to herself like she had been doing.
She felt great relief about this.
It may take some practice for her to keep letting go but she wants to. It feels much better to her this way.
My goodness, all this letting go.
I’ve also been practicing allowing instead of pushing, opening instead of guarding, trusting instead of fearing.
It brings me relief and then panic in alternating waves as I allow myself to truly be who and where I am, instead of pushing and controlling to be where and what I think I should be, or what it should look like.
In the moments when fear is louder, it feels like letting go is just asking for trouble.
"What am I supposed to do? Just stand back open my hands, open my heart, stay connected to the love and watch it all fall apart, or fail, or leave me, or die?"
The answer, apparently, is yes.
The next bar is swinging towards you.
It will take you to good places.
This is the healing in times of transition and change.
To open your hands, open your heart.
And let go as you stay aware and open to the new thing, so that you can receive the new gifts.
If you loved yourself, what would you allow yourself to let go of now?
Share this with anyone who needs to hear it right now.
