The Freedom that comes from Letting Go.

Some people find it very difficult to let go of the past because they don’t realise how hanging on to it and remembering what happened to them is still playing out in their lives.

My own journey began because I was just trying to better myself, but it has led me to want to be in a position where I myself can be of service. I became somewhat disenchanted with the industry probably through a combination of my own stagnation, and everything I read all started to sound the same. But my belief remains that while any one person is still suffering, there can never be enough people trying to spread awareness of what's on offer in a more conscious approach to life and putting self-help content out there. In my own path I’d read hundreds of books, and took all the course. I studied NLP and life coaching – I took courses on making my own course and how to market it. I’ve even written a few books myself in trying to become more clear on this content. But I was also doing all of the physical things that I thought I was supposed to – yoga, breathwork, meditation, exercising and eating well. But the truth is that I was still sabotaging my efforts and was embedded in my own subconscious unworthiness story. If you want a window into how you really feel about yourself – look at your actions and behaviours.

As some perceived ‘reward’ for myself, I was still drinking and at times quite heavily. I wasn't being true to myself and my sworn purpose. And it is impossible for us to speak our truth if we aren't living it. It just won’t happen - or at least the fraudulence will be sensed in our vibration. But I'd become confused with my 'spinning wheels'. I'd done all the work – I was trying as hard as I could – don't I deserve this small luxury of an occasional drink. If I was seeing this sabotage as some kind of 'luxury' then something in my thinking needed to change. I was beating my head against a wall taking three steps forward with my health and fitness, but then two steps back on a lot of nights. I was rationalising this habit as some kinf of reward. But then one night I was listening to this guided meditation on YouTube and I had my long overdue epiphany. It all came down to these two simple words – Letting Go.

I mean, I had done a lot of investigating into the nature of the subconscious and understood how our minds regurgitated familiar experiences. And of course I had heard the expression before. I 100% knew of the profound power of accepting where ever it is that we think we find ourselves. That there was something guiding us that was often taking short-cuts when we felt like our whole world had fallen apart. I knew that there was something far more powerful on offer in acceptance than peace of mind. I acceptance we are merging with the part of our minds that made everything just the way it was. that knows the short-cuts and sees beyond what we know of in the moment as good or bad. In surrendering to our guidance system we can trust in all of those small (and sometimes large) roadblocks as things we had to go through in order to fulfill whatever it was we were born to do or dreaming of. Our fate has brought us to our unique way of seeing and the unique set of problems that are designed specifically for us so that we might set ourselves free. But this guided meditation added something that I had never realised about the mind and its propensity to hang onto the hurts of the past. We don’t want to let them go because they’re a part of us and who we are. And if, 'shit like this ever happens again I want to be ready to deal with it'.

But that was just it – these feelings of the hurts of my past were still so much a part of me. And I was still living out these pains so the mind could help me learn to cope with them better. But it didn’t have to be this way. I didn't have to keep living through it. I could fill my life with far more desirable experiences, and in letting those people that I had judged as my wrongdoers out of jail, I let myself off the hook. By far the majority of us keep on reliving our trauma as a way of preparing ourselves for if (and when) this thing ever happens again. We get really good at experiencing the feeling and dealing with the pain that helps us remember just how undeserving we really are. But no one but us is getting anything out of remembering what was done to us, or how unjust our lives have been. And what we are getting out of it is attracting similar circumstances.

Most of the people who I imagined had hurt me probably didn’t intend to. I just got caught in the crossfire of them having a really bad day. And even the ones who did harm me intentionally were quite often waking me up to something for my own good. Showing me just what the world would do to me if I maintained the attitude I had. Or maybe some of them were just dealing with their own imperfections and they just wanted someone to lob their personal flaws on. Lots of us do that – take our feelings out on the ones close to us. Even if they did hurt us physically – if we are the ones to judge the path they’re on, we'll never be free from what happened. The feeling stays in us and it will seek new forms of expression in circumstances.

And the truth is that there were lots of reasons why they might have done it, but only one thing matters to me now. I didn’t have to take it the way I did. And because I did take it the way I did I've suffered terribly and relentlessly for it. I've suffered for it ever since that day. The event has been translated as the same old lack of worthiness story I’ve had running since my earliest years. My guide that night said it in the same old plain English I'd heard so many times, but it finally hit home. He said, ‘psychology knows these days that if we don’t forget the hurt that was done to us, we will relive the trauma as a means of protecting ourselves if it were to ever happen again’. And it happens again alright – we live it every single day of our lives if we are not engaged in, and savvy to, the benefits of letting go.

Our subconscious bias is to relive the trauma so we are prepared for it the next time it happens. Have we become good enough at dealing with this undesirable memory that we can leave it in our wake? The hurt lives in us as a living entity seeking its conditional match. It's what’s in us and familiar to us so its circumstantial counterpart is attracted to us. We don’t have to stay in relationships that aren’t good for us. But what we have is billions of people out there, all getting around bumping into each other trying to find someone to help them relive their trauma.

When we let go, it means we are ok with what happened and it can leave us forever. You might still see it but you’ll no longer have to react the way you did, and you’ll be free to take any action you thinks appropriate. When we let all of the people who harmed us out of our jail of judgement – we’re the ones who are set free. We are not going to all-of-a-sudden get so naïve that we’ll change our expectations of the people we know well - we'll just stop getting upset by their predictable behaviours. When we let go, we are free to live a wonderful and respectful life.

The mind doesn’t see the world as things and people, but problems to solve and obstacles to overcome. As a means of protecting us from past hurts, it keeps putting us through what happened so we are better able to deal with it. But we needn’t relive the same old trauma if we acknowledge the lesson and let go of the way it affected us at the time. We can live a life that is more to our liking – more like one that we would have by choice. But if 97% of our thinking is subconscious - that is we are thinking without even knowing we are thinking – then who or what is this thing doing the thinking and what does it want with our life? And the unfortunate truth is that it wants to avoid pain, by preparing us for pain. And it will take the shortest and easiest route possible to a predictable life if we don’t intervene. If we don’t set goals and milestones of what an amazing life will look like to us, and keep trying to see the truth of it as it manifests before us.