Letting go

Following on from yesterday’s blog about memories and the Past, today I’d like to think about letting go.  I know a number of people who are struggling with this.  I have to say, I am aware of no magic wand to resolve this issue.  There are a number of NLP and symbolic methodologies to help with this, and for some, they work.  However, I think that our minds carry some memories in much the same way as our bodies carry their scars.  The actual structure is changed and this makes it harder to let them go.  I suspect that we hold on to them because we fear to let them go, after all, if we let them go, perhaps we might be hurt again.

However, carrying around this mental scar tissue also has a cost.  We are constantly scanning for danger from the same quarter and if we see anything that awakens this memory we go straight into our Flight / Fight patterns of behaviour.  This is our equivalent of a herd of wildebeest stampeding across the plains just because a shadow reminds one of them of a lion.

What experience do you have of successfully letting go?  When is it appropriate and how do you best release these things?

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”    Havelock Ellis

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.”    Lao Tzu

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”

Tags: letting go, memories

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 13:28 and is filed under Flight / Fight, General, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.