Hanging on when we should let go is a road paved to hell. We invite suffering when we hold onto anything.
Letting go is the ointment that brings the healing power to that which has ended. You can take this ointment and apply it liberally across every conceivable area of your life.
We invite the coming and resist the leaving as if the leaving were a dark entity with evil intentions. This creates a fear of half of our existence here. Because we fear death, we fear all forms of ending. The fear of death creates a morbid fear of life!
Who wouldn’t be anxious and stressed when you are living in fear of the reality of your own existence?
We live in fear of loss in our lives, but for some of us, when it does show up, it comes cloaked in an amazing life lesson.
I’m going to share it with you right now as you read these words, here in this moment, the only moment you are ever going to truly experience. My birth seals my fate before I even start.
My fate, like yours, is death. It seems obvious enough, right? Why then the resistance? When we are forced to let the bullshit in our lives die, you start to notice all the micro-deaths in your existence every day.
The death of the day, the death of this moment, that out breathe, that job, that race, that parent, that animal, that beautiful sunset, that friendship or that relationship.
So, I practise my death at night and my birth in the morning. If it comes, I know it’s leaving. If you come, I know you are leaving! So to I for you: Sad? Or is it in fact the most breathtakingly beautiful design?
I actually wonder if it is perfection itself. We hold onto the past and drag it forth like a ball and chain. If I had known this earlier, I’m sure I would have been more capable of showing the love I felt.
But it’s not too late for me to learn that love is actually letting go, not hanging on. Which includes letting go of the tired old, self-limiting ideas that I have held about myself. Hanging on is not loving, it is a fear of loss and a contraction that causes the heart to close, not open. It robs life from our experience, because life is a balance of living and dying.
The only way to surf that wedge is to allow it to come and go. In coaching of any type at all, we can see the power of this application. An open heart is the most powerful agent for profound change.
An open heart means I am prepared to truly live and willing to allow myself to die to each and every moment.
Even in the realm of endurance coaching that I work in the application is obvious. That is not rhetoric speaking, that is true power and the opportunity open to all of us. Our birth requires our death. Get over it!
The balance between life and death means they come to us at every moment in equal measure as a seamless flow. Benevolence holds this whole thing together.
When we don’t know that, we live in the darkness of the fear of loss and death, then we hide ourselves away from life and love, which are actually the same thing.
All the power you have ever wished for is right in the centre of your own chest. The love of life and the life of love can only be known in the full acceptance of the rules of engagement.
Let it come, let it go.
Gilesy