Letting Go...Letting In.

 

I’d like to discuss a popular concept in modern spirituality: “Letting Go”. This is the idea that we must release something that no longer serves us. In theory, “Letting Go” beholds within itself the necessary components for relief, moving on and healing. The reality is, that letting go is a form of resistance and not necessarily a form of deep inner healing, which must in any case precede any true transcendence or the transition to beyond suffering. I’m going to propose a new concept today. It’s called “Letting In.”

How often we may find ourselves just wanting to “shake off” an unpleasant encounter, release a part of ourselves that is grieving or just shut out people, experiences and even old behaviors that seem to be doing us a much greater disservice than actually helping. I’m going to make a bold statement here: How in the world can you know, from your limited individual perspective of what YOU’RE experiencing that your unique, individual and highly personalized experience is something that no longer serves you? To claim that something you are experiencing is creating a disservice in your life, is to reject the nature of it’s creation–which at the source of the matter is, was and always will be God.

We are called on to go deep within and resolve our internal struggles with ourselves. It is a time to go deep within the inner war-zone and pull out all the “dead” parts of ourselves. But, my dear friends, these are not parts that should be discarded. Your unique, individual experiences, no matter how much pain they’ve caused you, how much shame, guilt and disservice are sacred, beautiful and blessed tools that have brought you into this exact moment of right now: alive and breathing. To reject them, throw them away like garbage is to forget that your experiences are holy. It is to turn your back on the depth of the human, it is to say that your suffering is not grace. To find gratitude for these parts of yourself is to trust your creator who created your experience that you may not yet understand.

“Why would suffering be grace?!” You must be dumbfounded at my statements. But it is you that sees your pain as suffering. In reality, your suffering is nothing more than existence moving through you and you having an experience of it. Sure! It’s hard. But it doesn’t last forever. With your patience, love and willingness to feel, you will find a subtle joy lifting from the fog of your life. One morning you will wake to a lightness, to the allure of Spirit whispering back to you to come home into the infinite dwelling of love within you. It might take days, weeks or months, but just like the sun rises and sets ever single morning and night, this Spirit is just as dependable and will rise within you too.

I ask you to open your heart to yourselves today. If there’s anything you are “Letting Go” of right now, let that into your heart fully. Feel gratitude for the experience, feel the divinity of the Spirit moving within you through this surrendering. Accept fully into your heart space that which you are discarding, envelop it as though you would envelop a lost child, crying and searching for their mother. You will find that “Letting Go” never, ever, ever feels as good as “Letting In”.