Expanded Pathways

In my healing practice I get asked this all the time, “Just how DO I let this go?”

The “this” is usually a deep core belief or pattern that has been an old friend whose time has come to move on.

I’ve asked myself this question, many-a-times in my life too. And what I have come to believe as the art of letting go is really the ability to get in touch with what it is you really need to let go of.

This conversation could go the way of resistance.

When we aren’t quite ready to let go, we often stay focused on a situation or aspect of our life that we can deal with. We may ask ourselves over and over why we can’t let go of something that holds us back or what we know isn’t serving us. But really, we’re staying focused on that level of the problem to avoid the deeper issues…where the real energetic juice is.

We could also talk about beliefs.

It’s hard to let go of something when we have a strong belief about it, which oddly still meets a need for us. You know, those hidden benefits that keep us stuck despite our wanting to let go. Our heart knows we must, but our heads say, “Wait a minute, I need that!”

But where I like to go in this conversation around letting go is to the energetic core; to what is it that we are really letting go of. Typically where I find that answer is in the body.

Now that may seem strange to you. Isn’t it obvious what you need to let go of? After all you feel the pain of not doing so…right? Well, it may not be that obvious.  Again, we focus in on the things that we find we can manage, or have a road map to. We may not know to look in another direction. Or, we may not yet have the consciousness around the issue to focus in on something new.

That’s of course where getting some help comes in. But you can also begin to work with your own energy to get closer look. And often where you need to look is within the body and the body’s consciousness.

When we energetically move deep into the body — and the body’s intelligence and consciousness — we often find an answer that is related, but different enough to have had us barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.

When we get to this level of energy work, we’re really talking about what the body knows as survival… it often feels as though there’s a threat of death or annihilation when we try to let go of those big ticket items in our life. And letting go of something that we have know oh-so-well can feel to the body like a real death.

So, the energetic conversation needs to move away from, “Why can’t I let this go?” to “What is happening here that is triggering such a deep threat?”

So how do you begin to work with this?

This is where I think the real art comes in… We need to move away from the mind and what we know, and move into the body stored energy and intelligence. We need to stop looking for the emotions and thoughts around the issue we know to be true on a conscious level and descend into the body’s “biology-mind.”

And there we learn to “be with” as we look for what feels so threatening. We look for that spark of energy or emotion that gets us right to the root of the matter. And when we can do that — and I will say this usually takes getting some help from someone who can point the way — we can then let go of all the pieces of the puzzle that have been connected to that deep inner fear.

There is no real step by step instruction to this. That’s the art piece. But I will say it is a conversation that requires us to hold a level of presence around what we are feeling while at the same time deeply feeling it.

Then and only then can we begin to create an awareness of the felt physical and energetic messages that have slowly been adding layer upon layer to our inner experience.

The art of letting go, in my mind, is to let go at the most basic/core level and then let the shift rise.