How To Let Go
Hello, Foxy Friends!
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, full of gratitude, love, and fun. As promised, I’m here this weekend to share with you my strategy for releasing negativity, so that we can exercise our limitless capacity to love and celebrate life.
The times when we feel that we don’t have capacity to be kind, to love, to feel gratitude, or to be happy, are the times when some kind of negativity is clogging our hearts and minds. Mistakes, soured relationships, regrets of deeds done wrong or unfortunate outcomes… the list can go on and on. But we don’t have to live with the weight of our past pulling us down. We don’t have to let inner judgment taint our perception of the world or burden our choices in life.
To start, we need to recognize that whatever pain is burdening us is valid. Our feelings count, no matter what. Discounting how we feel - and how others feel - will always prevent full healing. Even though we need not let feelings encumber us forever, it is important to accept them, and to learn from them.
Emotions complicate otherwise straightforward matters. That’s why it’s often easier to advise others on their issues than for us to diagnose and resolve our own. It follows that letting go of hurts, troubles, regrets, anything plaguing us from our pasts, can seem impossible to do. But it doesn’t have to be.
In our heart of hearts, we often know exactly what we need to release our pain and move forward. We certainly know what is upsetting us! Thinking upon that hurt and what we can do is the beginning of moving forward.
When emotions are involved, tangible or physical action often feels necessary. Maybe we need to receive or make an apology. Or we need to pay forward a generosity that we never got a chance to thank another for. Or we need to find ways to be kind in situations where we used to behave in ways that we now regret. There are so many actions that we can take to help ourselves heal. Oftentimes such actions will be to both our benefit and to others’.
When we take action to heal ourselves, we start a positive cycle. It feels great to fit in one’s skin, so to speak. Peace and clarity come when we are okay with who we are. Because our behavior is a reflection of our true selves, our actions can do more self-healing or hurting than anything else can. And we can heal only as much as we allow ourselves.
Recognize that when we feel bad about our pasts in some way, we are judging ourselves through a lens of greater experience than we previously had. We know ourselves better now. We understand the impacts that our behavior can have on ourselves, and on others. We better know our values, and what it takes to act in accordance with those values. We know more about what is right and good and kind. We have come to realize that acting from a place of love, although challenging at times, is the most graceful and positive way to live.
When we observe what we’ve learned, when we’ve taken steps to resolve our feelings, it becomes easier to forgive ourselves. We can let go of the judgment we’ve placed on our pasts, and release the pain of those memories.
Take heart, my foxes. Happiness isn’t reserved for perfect people. Love isn’t reserved for people who don’t make mistakes. We are abundant in our capacity to love and be happy. And it is foxy to learn from our pasts, to become more loving and kind. We can be our best selves when our hearts are whole, so it is important to take steps to learn and let go.
Next weekend I’ll share with you another technique I’ve used for letting go. It’s a technique that works on healing our minds and hearts. And that’s what we really want, right? For our efforts to count and for our hearts to be whole? Yes and yes. ❤️
Three cheers for my lovely foxes,
“Letting go does not mean forgetting, it just means we stop carrying the energy of the past into the present.”
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