Pressed by a thousand injunctions, we dream of “letting go”. How to draw freedom from this formula without making it a new constraint?
While our society has kept its promises of progress on essential points – most of us live better than our ancestors: access to health care, to property, to studies, to recreation, to travel, to freedom of expression, etc. – a deep unease is expressed.
Behind the scenes reveals symptoms of great suffering, of which frustration, depression and burnout are the most commented on. In response, personal development methods provide us with the keys to holding on by inviting us, for example, to “let go”.
Let go in order to hold on… How can this paradox be made tenable? By not deviating from its true meaning.
Let go… a very current temptation. Why you think?
While claiming to free ourselves from certain standards, our time is producing new ones in all areas of our life. The speeches are becoming uniform in all directions. In order not to be outdone, we torture ourselves to integrate them, when these standards do not correspond to us and, often, they can contradict each other.
We therefore deeply aspire to “let go”. Except that this very project, formidable in itself, does not always escape injunctions that cut us off from ourselves. It’s simple, if when I’m angry I’m told, “Let go!” “It annoys me even more! If you want to “let go”, quickly abandon this idea …
How not to make a new untenable injunction?
At what moment do we hear, whether in our inner voice or that of those around us, “Come on, let go!”? Most of the time, it is when we feel a so-called “negative” emotion: anger, fear, stress, sadness … In other words, we feel guilty for feeling what we are feeling.
If it is necessary to let go, it is precisely with the contradictory injunctions that urge us to be “perfect”: positive, relaxed, calm while our lifestyles, and life itself, provoke tensions in us and sometimes extreme clashes. This is why, before being able to let go, it is necessary to know what we are going through, certainly not to forbid an emotion to meet it, on the contrary, to hear what it has to say to us, to fair, or unfair.
So is it an invitation to take risks, to be freer?
Yes. To be truly active. Because by meeting our emotions, we can transform them, and thus transform things. Otherwise, “letting go” becomes an encouragement to helplessness, or violence, which amounts to the same thing. By “not giving a damn” we give free rein to our resources, we discover our singularity. And this is what we need most today: confidence in our own resources to find courage, strength of soul, inner freedom and the possibility of becoming one with the object of our attention. .
The exercise: meet what you are experiencing to be able to distinguish between an important goal and one that does not make sense.
• Just sit where you are. Take a moment to just sit back and give some room to what is to come.
• Try to meet what you are feeling right now, whether it is pleasant or difficult.
• Let go of the “I am not allowed to feel this, I should feel this” judgments.
• Be prepared to meet your experience exactly as it is. Irritation, anger, embarrassment, excitement.. without any criticism.
• Explore, take the time: is it joy, enthusiasm, sadness? Is behind my sadness there anger?
• This moment is really good because it allows us to get out of the confusion. Because our emotions only ask to be recognized, not necessarily explained – here it is not about analyzing.
Reference: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/11-signs-that-tell-you-its-time-let.html
Photo by Adina Lavinia Moldovan from Pexels
