Letting go of good things. Accept the emotion, avoid the pain.

Lots of people have big problems with letting go.  I already (May 22nd 2015) wrote a blog about this. About one month ago I learned even more during a Buddhist teaching. An insight I really want to share.

To let go, first of all means that you got something. It can be a fulfilled desire, love, a thing, work or what else. So to say… it came on your life path. In the beginning it made you very happy and excited. Lots of time you accepted it as ‘normal’ during the time together temporary ‘having’ it. When you miss it this makes you feel sad and can sting or hurt you.

When it is something ‘bad’ in your life – most of the times – you do not have a single problem with the process of letting go. It even can make you happy. When it was something good you experience a problem.

There is a wonderful saying: “Pain is inevitable suffering is optional”.

During this teaching I got a different insight. Even pain in most cases is optional.

The Buddhist philosophy learns everything in life has a meaning. It is connected with Karma (action). And the Karma is there for us to let us learn and to build up our inner wisdom. When we do good things we get good things in return. Most of the times not the things we want but always and just at the right time the thing we need most to learn and grow to fulfil our mission in life.

So the first step, before we can talk later about letting go, is you got something. During the teaching we got the metaphor of you are a piece of floating wood in a river (your life stream). The wood does not make any effort to swim back but is floating and on its way floating it meets other pieces of wood. You can see them as things or people to connect. You cannot be for yourself alone. You are always connected with things.

It is quite natural that for a while, longer or shorter, pieces of wood stay together. At a certain, expected or unexpected, moment there is a time to say goodbye. Even the wood itself passes away sometime. The pieces of wood and the river do not make a real problem of that. When you observe this process you can see it as a period of learning and enjoying together and sharing the same stream (life path).

As human beings we make the problems about this letting go ourselves. We keep going on with longing for the past (that does not exist or comes back any more). We do not open for the future because we are not willing to understand that new challenges are waiting for us to grow.

We got a metaphor for this as well. You can see it as broken glass laying in your hand. You can be sad about it that it is broken, you can try to repair it but… you already know. You will never get it back in the same state it ever was.

In our process of not letting go we try to hold it stronger and stronger. And here the pain starts coming. We are not only sad but we ruin ourselves by hurt and pain because the broken glass parts work as knifes. Nobody ask us to hurt ourselves.

The Buddhism leans, accept the emotion so if you want to cry, cry. The emotion need only time to fade away and you cannot force that process. The emotion is caused by your subconscious and the only thing to help to change this feeling is to focus and imagine on for you positive things.

Turn your hand palms down and drop the pieces of glass. After that turn the hand palms up again. See that you are open and willing to receive something new to grow and start flourishing again.


Frans Captijn
Host / Catalyst / Talenteer at Captijn Insight

Captijn Insight: “Catalyst in your process to new sustainable flow in life and work. Whether you are an individual, couple, team or an organization.” 

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