The Mystery of Letting Go & How We Must Persist in our Desires

When I hear the phrase “letting go”, I have a visceral reaction. I have a tantrum. It is laced with confusion and rage. This comes from years of not really understanding what letting go means nor how to actually do it. Letting go is elusive, shrouded in a colloquialism that continues to be passed on which causes more harm and does a disservice to our feeling life. #Misinformation. There seems to be a misunderstanding in our society about what Letting Go actually means. I am convinced that what most people mean when they utter this phrase is a semblance of repression, distraction, forgetting, stopping, and numbing. It’s actually an inability to want to feel; willing the pain away to escape from it. The “it” is the realization that the desire, the thing we want, has not come to fruition: expressing how we want to express, being in a beautiful relationship, birthing a child, garnering a new job opportunity, creating an adventure, repairing a friendship. There is a grief process that must be witnessed in the letting go. When someone tells us to “let it go”, it is often indicative of their own inability to witness, to feel or incapacity to feel feelings with us.  

Meanwhile within us, the desire does not go away and letting go feels really hard. I have had many occasions where I fight the grief. I fight it like I’m trying to tame a tiger, which is inevitably a losing battle. When I am facing the tiger – the ferociousness of disappointment, of frustration that something is not occurring on my timeline, uncertainty, or lack of control – sometimes it is embodying as literal kicking and screaming or a ferocious pace of thoughts in my head. For others, it can look like lethargy or insomnia. Yet, we shouldn’t be tamed. What this reminds me of is the line from Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying light”. The poem is about death and yet we are still living. We must fight for our desires AND we can reframe letting go. So what I have found to be true and magical in this letting go and grieving moment is to tell myself…

“For this moment, I accept that I cannot have the thing that I want”.

It is acceptance in action. It is a way to drop the resistance to the unsatisfaction of the current situation. By saying “this moment”, I focus only on now. This allows me to not feel like my desire has to be squelched. Because really the longing will undeniably prevail, which is just evidence that a desire cannot and should not be ignored. My desire is my aliveness—it is the flame inside me that brings purpose in my work and meaning I have when moving through the world. So this phrase is a surrendering to the present moment. Rather what IS being let go of, or rather shifted, is my attachment to a specific outcome. Gripping on tightly to a specific desire of how it must play out is relaxed. Grief can be felt and when I’ve rested in the what is, then I am able to still feel the desire within me.

It has taken me years to make peace with this concept. I have found that on the other side of this beautiful phrase is release, relief, and freedom. It is a restoration of hope. The embracing of uncertainty is possible because there is certainty that, as I move towards my desire, more will be revealed.