When negotiating life’s twists and turns, it’s easy to get bogged down by our past experiences and things that have gone wrong in our lives. Fear and worry can be the main drivers of our existence and, without us realizing it, they can slowly destroy our happiness and our health.
Learning the art of letting go is the answer to living a fulfilling and productive life. This doesn’t mean not acknowledging the trials and tribulations of our own reality. Quite the contrary. It means reflecting on them in a way that helps us to digest what has happened, extract the life lessons, and then put them behind us.
Risk is your friend
When you’ve been burned before, whether in a relationship, a friendship, or a job, it’s easy to shun similar situations to avoid getting hurt again. Fear stops us from living a full life. It prevents us from reaching our full potential because we miss opportunities in order to remain safe. We worry that whatever we have suffered will repeat itself and so we avoid taking chances. Risk is necessary if we hope to push our own boundaries and discover what life has to offer beyond the mundane. Wisdom comes from experience and taking into consideration our past helps us to make calculated risks. The art of letting go turns fear into intention. It gets us out of our own head. Often, our fears and worries are just in our mind and letting these go by facing our anxiety head on makes us feel accomplished and courageous. It leads us to greater achievements.
Learning from failure
Failing means you have tried. Although failure can sometimes have a huge impact on our confidence, security, safety, and even our finances, that doesn’t mean that failure is necessarily a bad thing. Our failures are where our life lessons lie. If we reflect on what went wrong, we are less likely to repeat the same pattern. If we do, or a situation is out of our control and we must, we are better prepared to handle the outcome. We needn’t dwell on our failures to take away the most valuable information that can inform our future decisions. We just need to properly acknowledge them and understand the reality. Then, commit to letting go.
Living in the moment
Obsessing about the past or anticipating the future too much distracts us from what is right in front of us. It is important to analyze what we have been through so that it can contribute to what we do next and it is always necessary to have some sort of forward planning to guide our life’s trajectory. However, the here and now is the most important, and really the only, thing that we have. Letting go requires us to be mindful about the present; to enjoy each day and each moment as it happens by quieting the noise in our minds long enough to open our intuition. If you have adequately recounted what has been and have suitably deliberated about what will come, then it is time to just be and to surrender and accept life’s inevitabilities.
Trust is key
Letting go is all about trust — trusting your own decisions and instincts about what is best for you. When you have done all the ground work and developed your perceptiveness about how to strive for your goals and build your achievements, letting go becomes second nature. The hardest thing to do is to surrender control in life. We all want to hold onto the reins of our lives tightly and to be able to steer our destiny in the direction we desire. We like to think that we determine what happens to us and that the outcome of our life’s challenges are our responsibility alone. Letting go feels like losing control, but it isn’t. It is actually assuming complete control, not of what happens to us, but how we survive it. And that is the key to a happy and healthy life.
Featured photo credit: sunsetevansville.com via sunsetevansville.com
