7/9/14—Letting Go With Sparky & Goddess

Today's post is from our monthly guest bloggers, Sparky & Goddess. I'll be back on Thursday night with Friday's post!

The Sparky & Goddess Evolutionary Love Chronicles 

ON LETTING GO

Part 2

Sparky - It’s been several weeks since our last blog and by now, just the phrase letting go has taken on the vibe of an inside joke - where attraction and repulsion arise together, resonating with both familiar and new twists of insight.  We ended our last blog with four questions and invited readers to join in the inquiries with us.  One result has been that Goddess and I have felt an energized sense of interest, even community, around this Letting Go topic.  

Goddess – Yes, we have, Sparky!  This quest for going into letting go came about in the first place because that’s the number one question that keeps coming up in my practice and in my own life: how do you let go?  I’ve let go of so much in my own life and I have felt my way into approaches that have served me in the past.  The how seems to be a moving target for each circumstance and certainly for each individual.  We ended Part 1 by asking 4 questions as a way for each of us to explore more about our own relationship with letting go.  Today, we thought we’d share one of our reflections from each of these inquiries.  Of course, these are just perspectives and you, the reader, can decide if there’s anything here that adds to yours. 

The first question we asked was, why let go at all?   

Sparky – The first thing that came up for me was, because it’s a pain to lug all this stuff around!  Then I realized that the statement implies that we’re aware of being in motion, which of course we are in motion, but our awareness of being in motion varies with the circumstances and events in our life.  For a while holding on can be a choice, while still in a role we’re taking on in life or part of processing a particular experience...  And at some point, all roles change and the currents of life tug at us to further process and move back into flow.  Hanging onto roles - life stories and events, as a source of personal identity is always the ego.  We have to engage our authentic awareness, or consciousness, just to tweeze these apart and become aware that we even have a choice to let go, or hang on.  

Goddess – So from this perspective letting go is consciously aligning, or resisting the flow of life.  We let go so that we can move along with, rather than being anchored by, our past.  We let go so that we can align to the present by living a more authentic life!  It’s an ongoing process and really, a personal responsibility.   

We feel this in relationships, where egos can produce static, inflexible lines that are not really boundaries but trip-wires around unexamined and closed-off, inner-spaces.  Instead of a line of respectful agreement, we unconsciously protect these lines and crossing them can trigger a reactive, attack/defend response.  Doing the inner-work of letting go lets us clean out these fortresses which then allows for freer, deeper authentic connections.  In relationships, this feels like a gift of ease and spaciousness because it relieves others from the “responsibilities” of accommodating, tolerating and endlessly satiating another’s ego.

Sparky – The next question invites us to investigate by asking, what’s it like to hang on?  

Goddess – My response to that is S.T.U.C.K. 

Sparky – I once knew a teacher who, when asked how he was doing, would reply, “Tired of living and scared of dying.”  That’s a lyric from the song Old Man River, by Oscar Hammerstein, and it sums up the essence of stuck pretty well, for me… And so did the guy!

Goddess – The poor man…  Sounds like he was hanging on to quite a lot!  

When you’re hanging on so long like that, it can be the worst kind of stuck because deep down, we know we’re our own jailer and we know we hold the key.  No matter what else changes around us, we’re stuck to what and where we’re hanging onto until we can consciously let go.  Sometimes we even know what we want to let go of, and we accept that we’re our own jailer, but we still can’t find the darn key!

Sparky – Oh yeah, and then it’s like you’re Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, where you’re living the same day over and over and you already know what’s going to happen.  

Goddess – It makes you feel disconnected, isolated and bitter… As if life is what everybody else gets to experience while you get something less.  In your example of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character becomes more and more authentic and present, and he begins to interact in ways that create a different result each day.  He becomes engaged in living each moment consciously/authentically, which opens him up and which becomes the necessary processing itself!   

Sparky – Which takes us right into the third question, what’s it like to let go?  

Goddess – What’s it like?  It’s freeing, opening and exhilarating!  But, that’s only after you’ve actually let go.  Just before that it’s uncomfortable, complicated and even scary!  There’s also that eureka moment where you feel that a way has suddenly formed - a way that had not been there just moments before!

Sparky – Yes, a way forward becomes available!  Your last point reminds me that “letting go” isn’t really so much the act of dropping something entirely, but rather re-processing and re-forming how we’re holding things.  In fact for me, the most significant letting go I’ve ever done has had more to do with dropping unwanted attachments, which winds up transforming my experience.

Goddess – That’s absolutely true for me!  For example, I’ve transformed relationships by immersing into the human condition itself and gaining broader insights and understanding around the issues at hand.  By immersing in the universal perspective, I’m free to see how specific dynamics are happening.  When I’m out of my comfort zone and floundering to align, I’m forced to find the courage to go to higher ground.  

Sparky – That higher ground is where acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude and love all become available.  To stand at that higher ground is to stand in your power and it’s where we do the real letting go.  This is the inner change that is primary to manifesting the external change, which is secondary.  

Goddess – And it’s that inner space of naked clarity and authenticity that the Evolutionary Impulse drives us to. It’s where the ‘Impeccable Imperative” arises as both your path and your purpose!     

  

Sparky – In that spirit of path and purpose, our last question was, what’s just one thing to let go of now?  

Goddess – And that question is going to carry us into Part 3 of what is now emerging as a journey with Letting Go!