The hardest part about letting go of things is that we love to hold on to them. It is the nature of things to come and go. It is our nature to collect things and hold on to them. We can hold on to anything, a solid object, an idea, an emotion, a person, anything we can imagine, we can latch on to it. Over the course of our lives, we get attached to a lot of stuff. Of all those things and people that we become attached to, we end up losing many of them. When we lose things and people that we have become attached to, we experience the painful feeling of loss. We can even become attached to that feeling of loss. That’s how sticky we can be.
With all of this becoming attached to things and then losing things, you would think that we would be as good at letting things go as we are at collecting them, but we are not. Loss still hurts every time. The harder it is to let go of whatever we lose, the more we hurt. That extra hurt makes us hold on even tighter. Because our holding-on habits are counterproductive to our happiness we need to practice letting things go.
The objective of practicing letting things go, is not to avoid the pain of loss, but to experience the pain of loss and not hold on to it. When we have a big loss, like a heartbreak or the death of a loved one, it can be overwhelming and will hurt a lot and no amount of mindfulness will change that. We don’t need catastrophic events to help us work with letting go. We can work on it in all of the little losses we experience everyday. When any little thing goes wrong, we get the opportunity to let go of the idea that nothing will go wrong, and then work with the loss of that moment.
The mindful response in a moment of loss is to take a breath, feel what it is that we are feeling and then work with the feeling instead of the situation. As we take a breath in the face of adversity, we invite calmness and clarity, no matter what else we may be feeling. When we feel what we are feeling, we can recognize it as our own personal feeling and then try to let go of the story that’s all mixed up in it. For example, if I am angry because somebody cut in front of me in line, I could take a breath and feel angry. I could recognize it as my anger, as me being angry, and then try to let go of blaming the jerk that made me angry. If I could let go of the story, maybe even forgive the jerk, which might take several breaths, then I could let go of the anger too.
Owning our emotional experience makes it easier to let go of the story and work directly with the emotion. Emotions can come on quickly and take time to pass. In its turn, each emotion needs to be felt. As long as an emotion lingers, the story will keep telling itself and as long as we keep thinking the story. the emotion will linger. To break that cycle, we need to recognize the pattern, breathe consciously with our feelings, and let the stories go.
Whenever we let one feeling go, another one pops up to take its place. That emotional progression is what determines the quality of our life. When things start getting us down too often and our emotional range doesn’t include much love and happiness, we’re probably stuck and holding onto too much of the wrong stuff. A fluid emotional progression depends on our ability to experience whatever is happening in the moment and whether we like it or not, let it go.
Because our personal experience is so subjective, how we feel seems to be how we are. The stories we tell ourselves, become who we are. We are not those stories. We are not those feelings. We are mostly just avid collectors, trying to hold on to all the things that we love. It’s never about the things though, it’s about the love. That’s why we have to let things go.