Letting go is sometimes less painful than holding on. It’s a common phrase we’ve all heard a time or two in our lives. How could letting go of something, knowing that it will find it’s way out of your life be less painful than holding on to something that we want? If you can imagine the rope wrapped around your wrist and you straining in resistance to it’s pull then you can imagine the redness and pain that is created with every attempt you make to hold tight to what is on the other end. Stop pulling, if the resistance on the other end continues then it means that what you’re holding onto is actually moving away from you with no regard for your desire to hold on to it. “Just let go” …. They make it sound so simple like all you have to do is open your hand and let go of the balloon in your grasp or the rope wrapped around your hand. But it’s not so simple, it’s like a hundred thousand balloon strings or rope fibers that have rooted themselves in the very cells that make you who you are. It can be a slow process of weeding through the tangled mess the strings create. You have to learn to audit each string to try to figure out which ones need to be trimmed away and the process of figuring out which memories are tainted by pain and which memories can be reclaimed and relabeled as good. It’s not an easy process, letting go, but it is a necessary one.
Sometimes we have to learn how to let go of people, ideas, or plans that we’ve made. It’s a heartbreaking thing to realize that suddenly what we THOUGHT isn’t what actually IS. Sometimes we want so bad for something to be what it is not so we hold on too tight and try to ignore the pain. But, each tug we make on the rope is a desperate plea that delays the inevitable end of the very thing that is slipping away (sometimes running away) from us. So audit, keep those things that make you smile, and reclaim the negative emotions as positive ones. The good news is, reclaiming means that there are lessons that we can learn that can guide us for the rest of our lives. There’s a lesson in the pain, there’s a lesson in the heartbreak and there’s a lesson in the process of letting go. The pain teaches us what our worth is. Pain begs us to ask ourselves if we should choose to settle in and get use to the pain or if we know that we deserve better. The heartbreak teaches us that we are capable of loving, capable of feeling, and if we are capable of one level of emotion we are capable of more. The letting go teaches us that we can, and do, survive, because every single time in your life where you thought that you’d never be able to laugh again- you have in fact been able to. Sometimes these lessons become the only fruit of our labors but isn’t it beautiful? I mean think about it, the knowledge we gain about what we are capable of opens the door to opportunities that we might never have had if we had chosen to stay chained to the ropes of the things and people we thought we needed. Life is a fantastic journey and it will leave us with scars, but those scars are the reminders of where we’ve come from and what we are capable of and they beg us to choose better for ourselves. Be present in this process friends. You are so capable.
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