Letting Go

In our relentless quest for deeper, truer, more personal meaning, something that often gets in the way is remembering to let go. We look so hard for these elusive feelings and opinions that when we find them, we want to hold them up and say “Aha! I feel something! Isn’t this wonderful!” We want to luxuriate in the feeling, even if it is a “negative” one. Sometimes I call that wallowing in the feeling (wallowing is what a pig does in mud). We like to roll around in it and get all dirty.

But holding on to any particular emotion can cause a pressure which isn’t the most helpful in following the true moment. By holding on, we stop really responding to what is going on around us. We say: “No, no. I don’t want that to happen now. I’m still working on this!” Unfortunately for us, this is the new moment, not that. It is analogous to what happens when a student goes for a particular result (“I want to make my partner jealous” or “I want to help my partner not be so upset” or “I want to make my partner to like me”). We turn off to the rest of the subtle behavioral clues and only focus on those that support our goal. And sometimes, we “see” behavior in our partner that isn’t there simply to give credence to  the interaction we wanted to have.

When emotions are high, letting go is extremely important. The pressure of maintaining and holding onto an emotion gets in the way of whatever’s coming next and makes us less flexible and less responsive. We need to trust in ourselves that if we let go of whatever emotion or meaning is happening now, that something else will come along to take its place.

The behavior resulting from an actor who is letting go of emotion instead of holding onto it (and remember, I don’t mean expressing and not expressing. In both cases, the emotion is expressed!) is light and nimble. It feels like it can go in any direction at any time. The behavior resulting from an actor who is holding onto emotion is heavy and consistant. No matter what the partner does, the response is going to be in a similar direction to what the previous moment was. The heaviness and sameness of the interaction can be a sure sign that someone is holding on to something.

The solution, of course, is to focus outside of ourselves. Whatever the partner is doing is going to be more interesting than whatever we are feeling at any given moment. The willingness to throw away what we are feeling in deference to the partner’s behavior (and their behavior NOW in this moment) creates the letting go. The two simply can’t exist together: Either you are focused on your partner or you are focused on yourself. And for our purposes, letting go — of yourself — is going to lead to much more interesting places than not!