How hard is it to Let Go ? Emotions

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What would you call that feeling when you earnestly want to start something, lets call it B, anew, afresh by letting another thing go, but that ‘another thing’, lets call it A, wouldn’t just let you go off; When you are excited enough to build your dreams and your immediate future around B but you cant start immediately; When everybody, your friends et al have the feeling that you have already moved-on from A to B but you know you havent yet; and you have to wait. Wait for the time when A permits you to let go of it and seek another life, another innings with B.

This brings me to the inevitable question “How hard is it to Let Go ?“. The other day, I came across a beautiful quote “Letting go doesn’t mean giving up, but rather accepting that there are things that cannot be”. What do you let-go? Emotions, People, Other tangible stuff. So the analysis would be in 3 parts.

Emotions
One of the most popular methods to let-go of emotions is Sedona method (developed by the late Lester Levenson ). It states that emotions doesn’t have anything in them, like a soap-bubble, and it very easy to let-go. We hold on to them, and that’s why we become uncomfortable. Hold an object and squeeze it, till the time you feel pain. But if you drop it i.e. let it go, then that uneasiness fades away. To master the art you first have to ask yourself three questions:

• Can I let go?
• Would I let go?
• When?

And you are through.

Another technique I came across is The Art of Letting Go (©Cort Curtis, Ph.D.). The crux of the Theory is when you can’t let-go of certain feelings, emotions its because you, in a way, feel that the reasons for them are ‘out there’. Like ‘I’m angry’ because ‘Kapil did this’ and stuff like that. Unless you believe that the reasons are ‘in here’, you cant let-go of the suffocating emotions. If I have attributed my unhappiness to anything that is going on outside of me there is only one thing I can do and that is to change, blame or “fix” what is going on around me. So, this theory advocates the following steps:

• Tell your story.
• Are these emotions are making you happy or sad?
• Who is responsible for these emotions?
• Do you have the ability to let it go?
• Are you willing to let it go?
• What do you want to replace it with?

Now, this reminds me of Steven Covey’s highly acclaimed book “7 Habits of Highly Successful People“. Isnt it? What these theories essentially suggest is that when we learn to accept the emotions that have been troubling us, we begin to let go of the hold they have on us. But that doesn’t mean we have to approve of them to accept them. We have to realise that the Emotions is not me, rather only a part of me.

We can, in fact, start loving our painful emotion. Now that might sound preposterous. But it is possible. Let me try with an example. There are a number of things about us which are just there – age, height, size of the pupil – which we cannot change, but which we can accept just like that. Acceptance and approval are not the same. You cannot change your height, so instead of just frowning that you dont have that Bachchan-like height, if you just accept your height you would feel a lot better.

So much for emotions. Watch out this column for analysis of the other two let-go stuff.