LET GO AND LET GOD - BY SHANNON BRYANT

Have you ever applied for a dream job, knowing tha...t you were fully qualified and deserving, had a great interview, but—to your surprise—didn’t get the position? Yes, it could have been that someone else had better qualifications, more experience in the industry, or an inside connection, but more than likely you were too attached to the outcome of the situation to actually allow it in. When your desire for something is so strong that you are totally attached to it, your energy can have an adverse effect on the outcome and push the opportunity away. It would serve you best, instead, to let go.
Letting go is not always an easy thing for us to do. It’s natural to become attached to both the physical and emotional aspects of our lives: old clothes, our first home, an idea of how a relationship should be, our way of looking at the world, our youth… and the list goes on. However, releasing what doesn’t serve us anymore is exactly what we need to do in order to provide space for fresh experiences, new people in our lives, and personal growth.

It’s hard to let in the new when we are holding so tightly to the old. A great example of this is when we so badly want to meet someone special while we are still stuck on a person or relationship from the past. We wonder: why aren’t we meeting our perfect soul mate? But when we hold on emotionally to a past relationship it makes it near impossible to attract a new or healthy one to our life.

Letting go can be quite difficult, but with practice it does get easier. A wonderful place to start is with your closet. Find old clothes, books, and decorations you never use anymore and give them away. It’s amazing how we tend to hoard things in the back of our closets for months, years, or even decades, afraid to set them free. Yet your closet is symbolic of space in your life and this exercise of “releasing” will translate into other areas of your life as well.

One of the ultimate freedoms is the ability to let go of heavy negative feelings such as anger, judgment, and resentment. Such feelings take up a lot of space in your psyche, and it’s critical to your emotional and physical health that you release them. You should be able to make significant headway if you are committed to looking honestly within and doing some personal work, either on your own or with a counselor.

The lessons we learn in letting go, or even in not letting go, are abundant. If you hold on too tightly to people and things, you squeeze out the flow of life and risk losing what’s important to you. However, if you are able to release your grip and let go of old situations, emotions, and anything that doesn’t work for you anymore, the universe will send you an ocean of new experiences, people, and things that will keep your life fresh and flowing forever.

~Shannon Bryant

Shannon Bryant is a writer, performing artist, and educator. For more information visit www.shannonbryant.com.