Just Let Go

I never thought I would be a remotely spiritual person.

For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fairly rational pragmatist.

In college, I was required to take a single “philosophy” class, and I took Logic. It was the only philosophy that I didn’t think was a joke - because it wasn’t really philosophy.

If anybody had preached to me the power of forgiveness, gratitude, letting go, and how “just changing your perspective” was the way to freedom in life, I’d have thought they were full of shit.

That is, until I saw myself. I saw my own patterns and conditioning for the first time.

I saw that everything I’d been holding onto for my entire life, was effectively negative programming.

I’d slowly turned from a happy, inquisitive child who loved to learn, to a miserable 20-something-year-old who was crippled by fear and full of self-loathing, resentment, and hopelessness.

How? Why?

Those questions caused a subtle stir in my being. My mind went from being 100% despair to 98% despair and 2% curiosity.

Most people, most of the time, are just like I was.

We are so consumed by our programming, so deeply ingrained in a state of fear and lack, that we spend 100% of our time focused on fixing our feelings. Focused on getting things we want. Running away from the things we don’t want.

So focused that we never ask, “why?”

They seemed so obvious to me before, my problems. The world was too hard, I couldn’t succeed. I wasn’t loveable. I was just a fuck-up.

I spent my entire life compensating for my inherent “badness”. People pleasing, avoiding conflict, trying to stay as small and inoffensive as possible. Being the nice guy, doing the “right” thing. I even found myself constantly over-apologizing, as if my very existence was something offensive to other people, and I needed to do something to make up for it.

My entire worldview, my entire life, everything I thought I knew, was built upon either avoiding or compensating for my “fundamental flaws”.

And what changed my life was permission to let go.

I was so sure that I knew how the world worked, and yet I was miserable all the time and I hated myself. I was so smugly confident, I almost took pleasure in my own pain.

What if I was wrong?

For so long, being right was all I had. I might’ve been depressed, but at least I was RIGHT about it. I had good reasons for why everything sucked. I had a very convincing story that I told myself over and over to rationalize everything.

Rationalize. Rational lies.

Lies that sound nice, that we can tell ourselves to feel good because we’re too afraid to face the truth.

For me, letting go meant releasing that intense grip on my own story. What if everything I believed about myself and the world was, mostly, wrong?

For years I’d been so entrenched in my own story, in my own “rightness”, that I refused to even look at the bigger picture. I was blind to the possibilities of the world, and the opportunities that surrounded me the entire time.

I was so convinced that the world was like a stormy sea, and I was clinging to a life vest with every fiber of my being.

Michael Singer (author of The Untethered Soul, great book!) perhaps says it best when he says most of us are so busy trying not to drown that we never notice we’re lying face down in a puddle, and it’s only our own flailing around that’s splashing water into our faces.

Life is beautiful. Far more beautiful than I’d ever noticed when I was running around trying to fix myself. Or trying to hide from myself.

Somehow the most painful, tragic moment of my then 26 years on the planet turned into the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Because it destroyed me. It absolutely obliterated everything I ever thought that I was.

Suddenly there was nothing left to hold onto, I was adrift in the ocean without a life-vest. Nothing made sense, I had no purpose, I had no hope.

And yet, I didn’t drown. I kept asking why. I kept searching for the deeper meaning.

Why had I been so sad? Why did nothing make sense? Why was I so dependent, so afraid all the time?

We have been programmed, all of us.

Our inner seeds of insecurity, our “fundamental flaws” that we develop as beliefs in childhood, somehow crystalize into facts as adults.

We learn that dogs bark, cats meow, and we aren’t whole and complete.

These fundamental beliefs are the foundation for an entire life built on insecurity.

Is it any wonder that our cultures and people are so insecure, afraid, so violent?

Is it any wonder that billion dollar industries exist so that you can try to dress “better”, drive a “nicer” car, have a “fancier” house?

The entire world is made up of insecure children frantically trying to compensate for their lack of inner security and balance.

They desperately need love and compassion, and yet they live in a way that consistently pushes those very things further and further away.

We kill people in the name of peace, we use fear to promote security, we suppress the truth in the name of freedom. The whole world hangs in the balance when egomaniacs control nuclear weapons - like children who never learned to share their toys.

We have been programmed to accept this as normal. To accept our role. To feel guilty for thinking we could be more. To cower in the face of our own fundamental worthlessness. Either paralyzed OR hypnotized by our not-enoughness, we either stay small or frantically flail around trying to prove to ourselves that we’re better.

All of this is built upon a seed that is a lie. You’re not fundamentally flawed. There is NOTHING wrong with you.

All the fear that stops you from acting is PROGRAMMING.

The layers of compensation, rationalization, fear, insecurity, anger, and pain go so far and so deep that many people never look inward.

We become tools of the system, accidentally or intentionally inflicting pain and misery on others, perpetuating the belief that they too, are flawed and not enough.

Let it all go. Let the illusions go. We’re so afraid to see the obvious. So paralyzed by our own negative programming and conditioning.

Our attachment to the external is so OBVIOUSLY transitory. The very nature of reality IS change. And yet we build our entire lives around clinging to the first hint of security we can get. We don’t trust life, in spite of the fact that we EXIST in the first place solely due to life.

We didn’t do anything to be born, it just happened. We didn’t have to try to grow as we got older, it just happened. In fact, you don’t even know how you’re reading this and understanding it right now. It’s just happening. Yet we frantically bounce around trying to control every single variable in our lives, under the illusion that if we don’t hold on, everything will fall apart.

We cling to relationships, money, property, and any hint of security, on the assumption that it will cure our inner feeling of lack, of emptiness.

To let go is to simply see that while there’s nothing “wrong” with ANY of this, it just doesn’t work.

It’s not the path to freedom. It’s not the way to truth. And for most people, it doesn’t lead to a very happy life.

So wake up! Look around and see that you really have NO CHOICE but to let go.

Because you actually can’t hold on anyway.