Letting go

This summer I realized that I was in a big transition…one I had not predicted. The experience involved a lot of allowing in the new. Letting it reveal itself, a bit at a time. This allowing felt good and restorative and exciting. There was another aspect to the transition which I noticed was a bit clunkier, less smooth. It was the letting go. I had to let go of quite a bit to allow the new vision in. I realized that letting go is not something we generally are good at in our culture. We are good at consuming, collecting, gripping, but it is harder to let go. I decided that I would start to practice letting go whenever I remembered so that I could get better at it. I cleaned out some drawers, gave some stuff away, started to really tune in to the clutter in my life. I was actually calling it “drama” and that helped. Anything that caused drama had to go. I even managed to lose that ten pounds that had seemed impossible just a few months before. On a retreat, a participant asked Adyashanti, “How do I let go?” And he just held out a fist and slowly opened it. Try that. Make a fist, hold it tight, and then slowly open it, relaxing fully. Try it with your body. Tense, tense, hold, hold and then slowly, fully let go. We can practice this. When we get better at letting go, we make room for the new. We make room for our wildest dreams, our vision of our lives that has felt out of reach. What can you let go of today?