March 8, 2023: This week, I’ve been #reading about #love and the concept of #LettingGo. If you follow my highlights here, you’ve likely seen my sharing of posts that examine #selflove and #selfcare.
Embedded in the concept of unconditional love is the idea of letting go, or of letting things be. Kain Ramsay, in his @udemy course, #Mindfulness Practitioner Diploma, describes how: “Letting go is a way of simply accepting things as they are. Let your experience be what it is and practice observing it from #moment to moment. Sometimes things end, and sometimes people end.”
It’s one of the nine attitudinal foundations of mindfulness, as described by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn. Specifically, Kabat-Zinn notes how this process can be painful, “… but the letting go is actually the doorway to freedom, and it’s something you don’t do once - it’s something you practice over and over and over again, moment by moment by moment. Every time you catch yourself clinging to something you remind yourself that it’s possible to just let it be, and to just let it go. The breath can remind us of that because every time we take a breath in, we have to let it go.”
@leeoralexandra notes how, “…whenever a challenge comes up, just let go, and you’ll open more. And that’s my path, it’s the path of the ocean, of love, of seeing God in everybody. And one of the things stops us from seeing God in everybody is attachment. Attachments come from the ego. Do you feel you can only be happy if you have this person in your life? Or this thing? Or this experience? Or this event? Or maybe it’s an attachment to who you want to be or who you see yourself as, to who you think you are.“ Alexandra also notes how “Our attachments are nightmares. When we’re attached, we are at the whim of our attachments and that’s such a heavy way to live…“
It’s something I’ve thought a lot about in recent weeks, especially as I find myself at a kind of a crossroads in my life - one where I can continue on the path where anxiety and depression continue to weigh down my life and muddy up my reflections and decisions. @aarondoughty44 explains, “…the key to this is realizing that it’s the #power of coming back to self, and not #abandoning yourself any longer. The most #magnetic thing you can do is to pull back your #energy, to be and feel safe in your own body… that allows you to heal (and in situations where another is involved), and it allows them (to heal), go through and get the space they’re asking for.”
It’s something that terrifies me. In a @coursera program on mindfulness I’ve been working through, it asked us to rate the level of difficulty we found an attitudinal foundation to be in terms of implementing it in our life. In terms of actualized practice, I rated it a 9/10, or very difficult. But ultimately, it’s a concept I know I need to do some serious work on.
67/365.