How I Learned to Let Go

Once I began to more fully embrace my own spiritual path, meaning I began to run towards God instead of run away from God, once I began to more fully embrace my own spiritual calling and spiritual path of evolution, meaning that I began to run towards God instead of avoiding and running away from God, I rapidly found out that I did not know how to let go. And I began to try to figure this out. I had let go under extreme circumstances such as surfing or rock climbing or skiing or when I would be in flow states doing ceramic sculpture or running, distance running, or distance swimming, things like that, or when I would backpack for a week or two in the Colorado Mountains, I would let go then.

But I didn't know how to let go if it wasn't a highly intense circumstance, specifically if I didn't fear for my life or it was a very dramatic shift in my environment. And so I recognized that I needed to learn to let go. I would get up to the point of the false self dying, right? And I could feel it would kind of go back and forth, like grab, let go, grab, let go, grab, let go.

And it would want to kind of let go. And there would be a part of me that was just terrified that if I let go, I would die. And so it was this very scary period where I was trying to kind of figure out how to do that. And I didn't know how to do that.

And so I'm not going to tell you now that I have the secret to how to let go because there is no secret to how to let go. For me, what I found is I kept bringing myself up to the edge of the known world, the edge of my known experience, and then I would wait there with a certain amount of openness or humility towards the unknown, towards spirit or God or the interconnectedness of all things, or maybe past spiritual teachers, if you resonate with them, but something, right? So, the idea is when you trust something greater than yourself.

And what I found is I just kept bringing myself up to the edge and then waiting. And then bringing myself to the edge and waiting. And there'd be a lot of crying, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. And then eventually it just happened.

And I just let go consciously without, you know, needing the big wave or the large cliff that I was climbing, right? Without needing that cortisol or that fear response. And what I found was that the dread of letting go was all of the fear. And once I let go, it felt as if I was falling into this pit, like into this well of emptiness, right?

But there was no bottom. And you just kept falling. And it's almost like if you try to reach out to the sides and grab, you would get confused or scared or spin around in the air, like if you were jumping out of a plane skydiving. But as long as you kind of just relax and go with it, you kind of just keep falling.

And then I would get worried and be like, well, when will this end? What will it be like if it ends? If I get to the bottom. And then eventually you realize that it never ends.

That we're always just falling. And that that's how it is, right? That's what it's like when we let go of our false self and we are with spirit. Is on some level, it's as if we're always kind of just falling, but you just get kind of over a while, you get used to it, you get used to that sense of falling, and it becomes natural.

And then over and over and over again, many times of bringing myself up to that precipice and having the intention of jumping in, but knowing that I couldn't do it myself, right? Knowing that I needed help. I needed help from the universe or spirit or God or whatever we believe. And that combination of having a strong intention with knowing I can't do it myself and asking for help really speeds up that process of letting go.

And then over and over, you kind of get to that point. You bring yourself to that point over and over, and then you begin to kind of get the hang of it, right? But you can't think, oh, now I know how to let go because I never know how to let go. I've never learned how to let go.

Letting go happens, right? It's not an action, it's a non-action, right? It's the stopping of grasping. It's not an action of letting go, it's the stopping of grasping.

If you think you can let go, then you are trapped by the ego and you will not be able to let go. And then over time, what I found, and this is the most direct way of learning, is there's a feeling right before I let go, and there's a feeling right as I let go, and there's a feeling right after I let go, right? It's three different feelings, energetic tones, and almost like a pattern, like an energetic frequency or pattern. And each one is a touchstone into letting go, meaning when you become very familiar with those three energetic signatures, then letting go is not something the mind has to try to do or the heart has to do or the gut.

It's just like a knowing, like, oh, I've been here before. This is where the rocks are. This is the stream. This is the entrance into the cave that takes me to the waterfall, right?

Okay. It's like there's a feeling, like, okay, right there. And then you know that and you go, okay, and then you kind of relax. And then letting go happens because you've become so familiar with the energetic sensation and pattern right before it happens.