Hi ,
One of the critical skills for creating health on any level is the ability to let go and move on with our life. From the philosophy behind acupuncture, this skill is associated with the organs of the large intestine and the lungs because both of these organs primary function is to help us let go of the waste and poison from our body. The lungs eliminate carbon dioxide from our blood, which will quickly poison us if not eliminated with every breath. And the large intestine is for eliminating all the solid and metabolic waste and poison from our body.
Our life needs us to let go so that we can clear out the waste and poison from our lives that block our movement into new areas of experience. Old habits, old relationships, old beliefs and assumptions, old desires and dreams – all will keep us trapped in life patterns and experiences that no longer serve us if we hold on to them. Our thoughts and feelings create and define our experience of life. They create the perspective we see life from; the lens we view life through. Our thoughts and feelings define where we stand in relationship to life, and we can not stand in two places at the same time and still function. If we want something new in our life, we have to stand in a new relationship to life to create that new experience. That means we have to let go of the old relationship(s).
But letting go is hard. We invest a lot of who we believe we are into our present relationships with life. Letting go feels like we are loosing a part of ourselves, because we are. Our daily self-identity is built out of where we stand with life. If I am a vegetarian, my identity is deeply wrapped up in a whole worldview on food and how I act and feel in relationship to food. If I suddenly discover that my health is going down fast because of my attachment to being a vegetarian and I have to start eating flesh to recover, I may go through all the classic stages of grief before I accept that I am no longer a vegetarian. If I am married, I go through the same challenges adapting to becoming a widow or a divorcee. The same thing applies to job identity, social group affiliations, and so on. We are deeply attached and invested in maintaining our life’s status quo.
The interesting thing is that we are just as deeply attached to our relationships that don’t serve us that we know we don’t want on the surface level. Deep down we are intensely holding on to the very things that on the surface we say we hate and don’t want. Bad habits that we say we are done with and don’t want any more like drinking, smoking, drugging, inappropriate anger, abusive personal relationships, the bad job, and so on all have deep roots in our identity and our basic relationship to life itself. Letting go is a move into chaos and a loss of self. We don’t do that.
So how can we change? Our mind is unwilling to simply let go and face nothingness; face not having a way of relating to life. This is simple survival. We have to have a way of relating to life even if it is a bad way of relating. A bad way is better than no way. Our bad way may have negative consequences we are tired of, but we have survived this long with it, whereas having no way of relating is certain death. Besides, every way we have of relating to life has hopes and promises built into them that we don’t want to give up on.
My dysfunctional care taking in relationships has the hope and promise that some day it will be my turn and I will be made center and taken care of. After all, isn’t the rule that “as we give so shall we receive”? So no mater how much pain and abuse I endure sacrificing my wants and needs to care take someone else, some day it should be my turn to receive and they will joyfully care for me. Yeah – well it does not work that way. The hope and promise are lies. But I want to believe them, so giving them up and seeing the truth of ‘what is’ is painful and hard.
Changing is accomplished by replacing one life stance with another. Letting go is about letting something new in to replace the old. Our brains are not able to just let go into emptiness without years of deep spiritual training and profound trust in ‘what is’. So we have to open to something new to complete the cycle of letting go of the old. To be successful, the new has to really engage our spirit. Giving up sugar does not work for long unless we can find something we like even better as a result of giving up sugar. That something is the replacement we can grab a hold of and make into a new identity. Maybe letting go of sugar lets us identify with a new social group we want to belong to. Maybe we want to golf, but the sugar is causing so much inflammation in our knees, we can’t. So enjoying golf becomes our new “self” to help us let go of the old enjoying sugar “self”.
Letting go is a change of self-identity. What new expression of self do you want that makes letting go of the old self worth it? This is what creates real change. History shows us that the use of will power to simply shut down old habits and behaviors does not work for long. Yes you can power your way through with the strength of the mind in the short term, but in the long run it always fails. If you have a habit of using anger to get your way in the world, even though it makes everyone hate you, you will not let it go by simply trying to shut it down. You have to find a different way of getting your needs met that works without the negative consequences.
“Getting our way” is one of the toughest life stances to let go of. It never works to give us the feeling we are after even when we are able to force the outcome we want. This desire has one of those hopes and promises at the bottom of it that is a lie. This lie is why people who pursue wealth or fame to gain happiness are never happy. Discovering the lie is the process of filtering out the poison and eliminating the waste that is the core first half to letting go. Once you do that then you can open to something new. Invariably the lie has to do with false expectations that something outside yourself can fulfill you. “If only my mate would just do _____ or be _____ then I would be happy.” If only I had ____ I would be ok.” “If only people would just stop acting like ____ then my life would be good.” These are fundamental falsehoods because nothing outside yourself can fill the empty spaces inside you. Only you can fill those spaces by what you become. The feelings of not-okness inside each of us are literally the incomplete parts of ourselves crying for manifestation and expression. We want to believe that that emptiness can be filled like an empty tummy is filled with food, but it can’t. That emptiness in our soul is only filled by the light of our own beingness as we grow into our completion.
The driving desire to quiet the inner discontent is the truth behind the demand that we “get our way.” The lie is the belief that if we can surround ourselves with reflections of our truth – what we believe is right – that we will finally be right ourselves. Nope – doesn’t work that way. It has to come from within. Besides, it is impossible to achieve. To truly surround ourselves with a reflection of our rightness, everyone around us would have to be identical to us and already be fully manifested in all the things we feel deficient in. We want to believe that “if they truly understood us, then they would want to be the way we want.” Nope – first, our insides are invisible to everyone else. No matter how much we communicate our truth to others, they will never understand us the way we need because their understanding of the very words we say is different than ours. Their life experience is different than ours. Most importantly their drive is to fulfill their own needs first, not ours. We can negotiate mutually beneficial exchanges with others, but we can never get others to truly be the way we want because they are fundamentally different from us. Denying this poisons us. We have to let it go. Instead we have to become the rightness we are seeking.
So, how do we let go? 
First feel the pain of the attachment to what we are holding on to. That will probably involve walking through the stages of grieving – denial that you need to change, anger that you have to change, bargaining over what needs to change, depression that you can’t achieve your hope and promise, and finally acceptance that change is the answer.
Find the lie, the false hope and promise. Only by seeing and accepting the truth of ‘what is’ instead of clinging to the lie that we can be filled from the outside in, can we move forward. The false hope does not let go easily. Like building a new habit, you will need to feel the hope and feel how it is a lie an average of 21 successive times to extinguish it.
Let in the possibility of a new self-fulfillment. Find a new expression of self that attracts you and meets the same feeling need – without requiring anything from the outside world – that you were trying to fill with the old external desire. Look for a new way of relating to life from a new understanding of ‘what is’ and how things work. Successfully achieving that expression will probably be a trial and error process, but this new hope and promise of something that will work will sustain you.
It sounds simple, but the rewards for your life are huge. This basic process is for letting go of anything from bad habits to bad relationships. It changes our relationship to life by changing our self-identity, because our identity is tied into what we pursue to get the feelings we want. As long as we continue to believe that our feeling needs have to be met by something outside ourselves, we are going to be unhappy. We have no security that way. When our happiness flows from how we express ourselves in life, we have it made.
Take care,
David