growth skills
How to let go
When the fear of letting go is greater than the pain we are experiencing, we hold on.
We grin and bear it.
We complain.
We feel righteous.
We feel trapped. We feel hurt and exhausted.
We complain about feeling hurt and exhausted.
But we don’t let go.
We say we can’t.
Sometimes we say we won’t, and you can’t make us!
Nobody really enjoys being in this state, but it is often hard to change it. There are grooves in our brain, and sometimes karmic grooves in our energy body, that just keep repeating.
The only reliable way of shifting out of this particular pattern that I’ve ever found is (a) repeat it until you really are tired enough to be done with it, i.e. exhaust your ego, which is the source of your resistance (b) ask Spirit for help. (Seriously, I’ve done all kinds of different healing work and this is literally the only strategy that consistently works).
But you have to mean it. You have to be ready to let go. Spirit will not rip it out of your hands, because the lesson is to let go of your own free will. You wouldn’t learn anything if you got rescued from it. The growth here is getting to the point where you are genuinely done, and then making a choice.
If you are ready, then these are literally magic prayers:
- I intend to see the truth of this situation
- I want to see the truth more than I want to keep my attachments
- I don’t know how to let go, but I am willing to
- I am ready to let go of this pattern; please show me how
The past isn’t real
The goal of healing isn’t to fix the past, it’s to fix the present. And sometimes the way to do that is to actually just let go of the past.
The well of sorrows is endless. Like no really, it’s endless. There is no bottom to it. So you really can get lost in it. But that’s not living. Life can only be lived in the present.
There’s a time to grieve and there’s a time to let go. It is possible to over-grieve and over-heal, as in, keep doing that process when it would actually be more helpful to shift out of it, and get on with the living of life.
Grief and sorrow can be compelling, it can feel beautiful. Pain can be seductive, especially if there’s a sense of validation: “this wasn’t fair to me, and this pain proves it”.
But it’s not worth it. There is so much joy available in the present moment that just can’t be found in the past. It’s OK to just let it all be over and find the beauty in this moment right now. And if you’re a bit enthralled to the past, that’s a choice you have to consciously make. Things you are attached to won’t let go of you by themselves, you have to choose to let them go.
(If you’re not actually done grieving then by all means continue. This post is for people who are done but just don’t realize they need to give themselves permission to be done.)
On jumping off cliffs
I’d rather be naive and follow my heart than be cynical or fearful and ignore it.
But to keep that attitude through the slings and arrows of life, you have to be good at grieving when things don’t work out, and absolutely not making yourself wrong for whatever you did that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Do not begrudge your past self the lessons it still had to learn. (And lessons are always learned the hard way, or we wouldn’t call them “lessons”, we’d call them “that great time I had doing that”).
Knowing how to recover makes you more courageous.
Knowing how to love yourself through injuries to your pride makes you more willing to put your heart on the line.
Our Soul doesn’t come here with the idea that it won’t be hurt. It comes here knowing it absolutely will be hurt. So the deepest part of you is not afraid of pain, or making mistakes. It knows that is pretty much the point of life actually. 🤷🏼♀️
Love vs fear. It’s the only real choice and we come here to learn how to choose love when we feel afraid. That’s the lesson and we just have to learn it like, a million times. Because what we are doing here is strengthening ourselves by continually realizing we are bigger than our circumstances. That’s the whole game. 💚
Don’t argue for your limitations
Sometimes when I try to explain possibilities beyond the limitations someone sees as real, they will become defensive & accusatory. “You don’t understand how limiting this limit really is!!”. Sometimes this takes the form of, “You are privileged; you don’t get it; you don’t have to suffer this limit, so you can’t possibly understand it”.
I usually walk away from these conversations just feeling sad. It’s not that I disagree that privilege is a real social phenomenon–of course it is. But that doesn’t mean people are helpless, and it doesn’t mean there are no possibilities to work around the way society is set up. Two things can be true–life can be unfair, and you can still make the best of your life. But if you argue for your limitations, you are making them more real, not less.
This usually boils down to an unmet need for validation, but limiting yourself to prove you have been limited is a costly strategy to employ. You can validate the suffering you’ve experienced without staying in it. “This sucks, and I’m moving forward anyway.”
Talking to yourself is good actually
It’s ironic to me that we are told that talking to yourself means you’re crazy when it’s really the opposite – parts work (talking to the inner parts of yourself) makes you sane.
But you have to do it with respect. Give up inner bullying, inner tyranny (thinking one part can overpower all the others and “get them in line”)…approach your inner parts with genuine curiosity, respect, and care and you can transform your inner world from a battleground to a symposium of support and cooperation.
How I use NVC
Let’s talk about NVC – Nonviolent Communication. NVC sometimes gets a bad rap because using it as instructed can make you sound like you’re a robot. “Are you feeling sad because you need connection?” Like, ya think?
But I’ve found NVC to be one of the most useful foundational skills you can have in doing growth work, NOT because I talk like this IRL or insist everyone else talk like this. Trying to make someone else change their speech is a form of violence, and talking like a robot does not meet my own need for authenticity.
But what NVC does brilliantly is show that there is a pathway from competition-for-needs to cooperation-for-needs. It doesn’t always stick the landing on helping people make that shift, but just from understanding the basic principles (that everything everyone does is in service of a need), you start to shift how you think about human behavior. You move away from judgement and expectations and toward the ground truth that we are all just running around trying to get our needs met. Some of us have better strategies than others, but ALL of us are steeped in the idea of competition and scarcity and zero-sum. And that’s just a terrible way to live, honestly. To think that the only way your needs can be met is to deprive someone else of their needs (or sacrifice your own needs) puts you into a trauma headspace and limits your options to fight-flight-freeze-fawn.
And we often turn into assholes when we are triggered. I did for a long time, and had to do a lot of work on being able to meet my own emotional needs and heal attachment trauma, and un-suppress parts of me that were coming out sideways. Equally I had to work on my tendency to fawn and self-sacrifice when I felt a connection I really valued was on the line. NVC wasn’t enough to heal all that–I had to do a lot of other kinds of work. And that’s one of the downsides of NVC, that it doesn’t tell you how much inner work is actually required to stop being violent. (Especially if you have any significant trauma history).
But NVC helped me understand what the goal was–to be able to stay in a space where I believed everyone’s needs are valid and can be met, at all times, because if I’m not in that space, I’m going to be doing some form of violence to someone (could be me, could be you). So I see NVC as a kind of touchstone for myself–it shows me where I still need to work on my beliefs and mental habits to deprogram myself from violence. Because the violence isn’t just over in Gaza. It’s in all of us, and all our relationships, constantly. It’s in our politics, it’s in our economy. It’s in our heads and often in our hearts, unfortunately. When we are overcome by fear, someone loses (often yourself). The antidote is to believe we really can solve for everyone’s needs if we stay in connection and conversation. But to have faith in that when our biology kicks in requires a lot of practice and work for most of us. So in summary, don’t blame NVC that it doesn’t instantly make people genuinely nonviolent. That’s just the work we have to do as a species, and it’s going to take a lot from all of us.
Learn more about NVC on my other blog Joy Ninja. I also have a mobile friendly list of needs.
You don’t have to meditate to be spiritual
If you can’t meditate, it’s OK–mindfulness is the point (that is what unlocks neuroplasticity and allows brain rewiring), and you can do that other ways. I have never been able to mentally sit still enough to meditate. What I do is apply mindfulness all day long. I am constantly noticing what it’s like to be me and how I’m responding to things, and considering whether that response is a conditioned response or an authentic one, and if there is any emotion present to process (process = sit with and talk to the part that holds the emotion, with compassion, until it releases). And I’ve been wildly successful with this–so no, you don’t have to meditate. And yeah I’m sure it would be good for me to meditate the way vegetables would be good for me to eat, but neither are very accessible to me right now (see: ADHD). You can start where you are and be who you are and still use mindfulness to change who you are. Your path of liberation doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s path–it just has to actually work for you.
Learn more about mindfulness on my other blog.