Letting Go
Posted on April 18, 2018 by Stephanie Lewis, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Letting go of our anxiety about how different things are then how we want them to be is the an important step to reducing stress.
Professional Organizer Kacy Paide recently gave an outstanding workshop hosted by LiveWellFlow on How to Declutter. What came through so clearly in her talk was that letting go of the clutter can be about so much more than being motivated to sort and toss. It’s also sometimes about working with our memories about the past, expectations for the present, and our dreams about the future.
Mindfully Letting Go
Letting go is a central component of mindfulness – an attentive and accepting awareness of the present moment. In his book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., recounts a story from India. As the story goes, hunters drilled a hole and placed a banana inside of a coconut to trap monkeys. But, most of the monkeys got stuck and caught by the trappers because they couldn’t get the hand that was grasping the banana out. The monkeys that let go of the banana, though, could pull their open hand out and move on.
We often are unaware of how much our attachment to how things should be or should have been have kept us from being free to move on and reach our next steps or broader life vision. This can equally apply to holding on to a desire to avoid certain experiences.
One of the hardest areas to let go of – our expectations of ourselves and others. We many never question the beliefs and expectations by which we live our lives, often shaped by our upbringing. Unexamined expectations influence our choices and, without an awareness of their affect, can limit our options. When those expectations do not fit with our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs (much less our skill set), or the reality of our circumstances, we feel a sense of cognitive dissonance. Holding on to ideas about who we should be or what we should be doing, how someone else should be acting towards us or others causes more stress than we may realize.
Letting go of our anxiety about how different things are then how we want them to be is the first step to reducing stress. Why? Because letting that go, frees up space to move on.
Mindfulness Meditations
Meditations, such as breath awareness and body scan meditations, are one way to create more of that spaciousness in your life – taking in and releasing one breath at a time as a model for letting go of what no longer serves you. Just as letting go of things and freeing up space in your home or office increases a sense of spaciousness around you, letting go of or holding onto these thoughts more lightly increases the spaciousness within.
