The Power of Letting Go:Three Steps to More Peace of Mind

As a holistic psychotherapist and life coach, I work with clients all week long who are going through major transitions of one kind or another; relationship endings and beginnings, career changes, geographic changes, death or loss of a loved one, health challenges, etc.

So often I hear my clients say they feel lost, have no idea what to do next, feel like they don’t know who they are anymore and often feel hopeless that things will get better and their life will once again feel back on track.

It strikes me in these conversations, that my clients often feel like they did something wrong, somehow were misled or took a wrong turn because these events are happening to them. They seem surprised that life got so messy and out of control.

As I get older, I am aware they we are socialized as young children to believe we have more control over the outcome of our lives than it seems we actually do.

As someone who specializes in helping people understand their lives and make more conscious decisions, I can clearly see that so much in life is out of our control. Major transitions are part of the curriculum here on planet earth whether we like it or not. Yes, we do have some control over our choices and responses to things, but a lot of stuff is going to happen that we never consciously planned for.

So what do we do? How do we navigate these transitions with as much grace, ease and peace of mind as possible?

Here’s 3 Steps I have found helpful in working with both my own transitions and my client’s.

1. Don’t Argue With Reality

I use the work of Byron Katie a lot with my clients and her basic teaching is that it is our stories about what is happening that is actually causing us the pain more than the event itself. I see clients have all kinds of negative interpretations about the events in their lives that amplify their pain and cause a huge negative emotional spiral that can cause tremendous suffering.

Byron Katie says, “Why argue with reality?” She explains that when we argue with reality it hurts and causes all kinds of frustration and tension.

Katie states, “If you want reality to be different than it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. You can try and try, and in the end the cat will look up at you and say, “Meow.” Wanting reality to be different than it is is hopeless. You can spend the rest of your life trying to teach a cat to bark.”

When looked at in this context, you can see how much time we all waste fighting against what is. Learn to let it go…

2. Practice Self Love and Acceptance

Fighting what is takes tremendous energy, causes untold stress and tension, whittles away at our health, self-esteem and destroys our peace of mind. Why are we are all so hard on ourselves?

From what I have seen as a therapist and coach, very few of us were taught to love ourselves.  For the most part, we are trained to try and please others and make a good impression. This creates a false self that spends the majority of life in a sense of disconnection from oneself and is in constant self-judgment.

It’s time to stop the madness.

Spending our life trying to get approval and pleasing others is a recipe for an unfulfilled life of codependency and self-loathing.

It’s time to put the focus on you. Everyone is lovable and deserves complete love and acceptance. While we may live in an imperfect world that does not give this to us, we must learn to give it to ourselves.

Start somewhere small. Stop criticizing yourself and begin to honor you own thoughts, feelings and choices. No matter what is happening in your life, you can chose to see it through the eyes of self-love, compassion and acceptance.

3. Chose a Thought that Feels Better

Thoughts are energy and they carry a vibration. Our negative thoughts weigh us down and create heaviness in our energy field. Like attracts like in terms of energy and negative energy tends to attract more negative energy. It is imperative that we learn to manage our own energy in skillful ways.

We can chose a thought that feels better. Byron Katie calls this a turn around. This is when you chose a thought that is equally or more true than the original painful thought.

Here’s an example. A common thought I hear from my clients is that they don’t have enough money to do something they would like to do.  This thought represents their conditioning and current level of money consciousness or money story.

Often when I inquire more deeply into this story, the client actually does have the money, they are simply afraid of spending it. When they turn the thought around to, “I do have the money to do this,” it releases the internal block to being present to what is and allows the opportunity for more money to flow to them when needed.

Choosing a better thought shifts the energy and takes us out of the painful story. When we let go of the story and relax into what is, our peace of mind returns and life can flow with more grace and ease.

Give it a try and let me know what happens.