05 Jul END SUFFERING: THE 4 STEPS ON LETTING GO & HOW IT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Letting go is the most important thing you can do for your health, happiness, and success in life. It is how you can restore your health from chronic illness or disease. It can lead you to vast riches in your financial life and within your relationships.
Most of us were never taught how to let go. We go through life holding on to dysfunctional relationships, jobs that sabotage our growth, and habits that literally kill us. We may smoke, eat poorly, not exercise, or worry excessively.
We have learned perfectly how to stuff unwanted feelings down and figure out ways to distract ourselves from experiencing unwanted or unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Just look at how successful the movie industry is. We do not want to experience any discomfort the emotion might evoke, such as anger, sadness, or anxiety, so we do our best to avoid them. However, we often find those unwanted feelings coming back when we least expect it, especially when someone pushes our button. It is the same button that comes up again and again, possibly when you are being criticized, not respected, not being heard, or when you are being controlled. Your button is there for a reason, to make you aware that there is a need in healing. These uncomfortable lower vibration emotions will continually come back until we are able to “let go” of them.
You know you have not “let go” when the person or situation evokes a charge such as anger, sadness or fear. We have all gone through the bitter relationship break-up, when 6 months or a year has passed and you still can’t think about the person without feeling charged up. We rationalize that the charge is justifiable because the person was (choose one or more) abusive, betrayed you, cheated, used you, etc. If you do not learn how to “let go,” you will inevitably find yourself in the same dysfunctional relationship or situation – only with different faces. You will continue on that path until you have “let go” or released what is at the heart of the emotion, the cause of it all.
After years of learning from various authors as well as methods on letting go including: “The Sedona Method” by Jack Canfield, “The Secret of Letting Go” by Guy Finley, “The Art of Letting Go” by Vidya Frazier, and “Radical Forgiveness” by Coin Tipping, I have detected key pieces of what is involved in the process of letting go. I have put these pieces into 4 key steps called “The Igniting Grace Process” of letting go.
STEP ONE: OBSERVATION
There are several components to the observation step which begins with observing the physical self or behavior. Begin by observing yourself – be the compassionate witness, as though you were a scientist gathering data. Gather this data on your behavior, watch what you do and don’t do. Do you get up every morning and have the same routine? Put on your bathrobe, go make yourself a cup of coffee, read the paper, check your email? How conscious are you as you go through your day? When you are confident you have mastered observing your behavior you will then observe your thoughts. What inner dialogue do you observe yourself having during the day? What thoughts do you have while you are driving to work and someone is 1 inch away from your bumper? What do you think when someone cuts you off, makes a left turn and creates an immediate adrenaline rush because you had to quickly maneuver to avoid hitting them? Are you yelling out F bombs and giving them the finger as they cut you off? Or are you thinking compassionate thoughts of understanding that they are having a bad day?
The last level of observation is of one’s emotions, observing your feelings throughout the day. How do you feel when you read a sad story in the paper? What happens when you watch a violent, bloody movie? Or do you not feel anything? Just become the observer, the compassionate witness without any judgment. In the process you will become aware of your true self – the observer.
STEP 2: AWARENESS OF KEY FEELING
The second step involves getting in touch with the key feeling that gets created when our button gets pushed. We must accept the key feeling and not judge it as ‘bad’. Although we do have the choice to stuff it back down, rationalize it, or play the blame game- that it is really not us, it is all the other person’s fault. However, if we choose one of those options, it is inevitable the feelings will return. After becoming aware of the feeling and accepting it, you must go deeper to find the heart or core reason it evoked the feeling. If one of your buttons is about not receiving respect, it might evoke anger or a feeling of unworthiness, if you go deeper into the feeling you will discover the core reason is that you are not feeling acknowledged. Whatever you have a knee jerk reaction to, it will lead you to one of the two core reasons which are at the heart of all buttons, not feeling good enough or not feeling acknowledged.
STEP 3: ACCEPT THE FEELING
The third step in the letting go process is accepting the feelings. By understanding that feelings are not good or bad, that they are just energy, you can observe them and detach from them. By detaching from them you will experience the realization that you are not your emotions, just as you are not purely your body. When you are able to detach, the emotions no longer control your behavior, and you then have choices. You are able to accept the emotion for what it is, simply energy providing information.
To completely accept the source emotion, you must go back to the creation of the charge. It is necessary to discover how it got created in order to gain an understanding that it was an unconscious reaction of the perpetrators own suffering that caused them to lash out. The repeated situation caused the charge to lodge deeply in your psyche. This most likely was when you were a small child and your parents, siblings or grandparents said or did something that left a charge all the way in your cellular memory. Going back to that time, through hypnosis, prayer or self reflection provides a perspective that as a small child you took their words or actions very personally. Through the process, you will come to experience a knowing that it was really your parents, siblings, or whomever, just reacting to their own inferior feelings and previous conditioning.
STEP 4: TRANSCENDING THE FEELING OR THOUGHT
The fourth step in the process of letting go is to transcend the feeling or thought. We are able to do this through becoming aware of our true essence, and by understanding that we are not our feelings. Our authentic self (our spiritual self) is not aligned with the lower vibration emotions and when we hold onto lower frequency emotions, we live in a state of conflict. When we live in a state of conflict, we live in our heads. We make wrong decisions and attract negative circumstances and disturbing relationships that are based on desperation or hurt.
When we get to know our authentic self, we then have the choice to align our thoughts and actions with a higher vibration. We are able to ‘wake up’ from our unconscious conditioned thoughts and beliefs.
Once you go through the letting go or ‘Igniting Grace Process’ of Observing, Awareness of key Feelings, Accepting, and Transcending the thought or feeling, the unwanted thought or feeling will never return. When you let go of unwanted emotions and thoughts, you are filled with a sense of peace, clarity, and a higher awareness of the beauty and joy all around you. You are no longer looking at the glass as half empty. Your life will be forever changed.
I have taken many people through “The Igniting Grace Process” with huge success. One of my recent clients commented she had made more progress in one session during this process than in all the years she spent in therapy and various other holistic modalities. I am excited about the powerful effect of this process and look forward to continued success with it.
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