Letting go 08: making the emotional connection




Joining the dots






The hidden connection












False premise




The big picture






Refusing this dynamic




Letting go of ‘impossible’




Might as well say “I don’t believe”.







Letting go day 01




It reminds me of a story from the Zhuangzi:


‘What did he mean?’ asked the duke.





Remember to let go

It’s funny how, when life is going well because we’ve let go, it can be suddenly enticing to pick up the oars and hurry things along.

Letting go points us in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean we can rush off in that direction and get there sooner.

Impatience, the desire to be in control, these impulses suggest some resistance to the journey, a refusal to find satisfaction in the moment.

Letting go, allowing, can’t be rushed because it’s all about learning to rely on a greater power than ourselves. What we need is practice: steady, consistent practice that will one day become permanent.

Making “ordinary” beautiful



Are you bohemian or bourgeois?






Say that out loud again….



Momentum of old thoughts







What is “ordinary”?




Take it for granted?




Isn’t that bad?



“to regard (something) as not requiring proof”

In other words, taking for granted is believing without seeing.

Getting it wrong


Aren’t we therefore more deserving?




Taking as given







Seeing the best in others

The greatest help we can be to others is to not join them in their misaligned thoughts.

Sometimes we find ourselves thinking that other people need our help. They need to be rescued, assisted, and it is our job – our responsibility – to make them feel better.

But this has to be false.

We create our own reality, and our emotions are a direct response to the thoughts we are focused upon.

When other people feel bad, it is because they too are focused on misaligned thoughts.

If we are noticing other people feeling bad, it is not up to us to make them feel better. In fact, if we are noticing that they feel bad it most likely means that we too are focusing on misaligned thoughts.

If you love someone and you believe God is with them, and you know they have their own journey and their own inner guidance and their own inner being constantly showering them with love and appreciation, then what exactly is the problem?

Rescuing people

Some of us grow up with patterns of thought where we feel accountable and responsible for the happiness of others.

The flip side is that we are always on the look-out for other people’s displeasure and unhappiness, with the disempowering premise that they can’t feel better without outside help.

It’s an unhealthy need to be needed and fear of being hated or blamed. But it doesn’t have to persist in us because it is only some thoughts with a bit of momentum.

No one needs rescuing

No one needs rescuing, no one can be rescued.

Everyone has access to the same relationship with God, and none of us is the special conduit of grace for anyone else.

We need to look past the appearance of their neediness and struggle, and recognise that this is really a matter of our own perception and our own thoughts about them.

If you feel bad about someone else’s struggle you are the one feeling bad. And trying to feel better by “helping” them is really an attempt to make yourself feel better by changing your circumstances.

They don’t need your help. You need your own help to focus on thoughts that feel good. Maybe thoughts about them and how capable and wise they are. But it’s still your thoughts that control how you feel and the reality you create.

Other people are as wise as you. Other people are as close to God as you. Other people have their own emotional guidance and experience as much as you. Other people’s happiness depends not on you but on God and their own thoughts.

So let them all off the hook. Other people are not your responsibility. You are not accountable for them or to them.

Everything is going as well for them as it is for you. They are as much on their path as you are on yours. Things are going very well for them, and you’d see it (and so would they) if you just stop focusing on thoughts that don’t feel good.

Remembering ease

I have this recurring suspicion that the answer to all of my questions in life will turn out to be “just stop trying”.

That’s partly because I used to be so intense I turned relaxation into an effort and “giving up” into a long-term goal that never got closer.

I’m so much happier these days, and my current themes of ease, trust, accepting, allowing, and letting go of the oars resonate so strongly.

Occasionally things are going so well that I forget. But the beauty of ease is that everything can always get easier. There’s no limit. The wonder of trust is that it just gets stronger the more you do it. There will never be a time to stop trusting, to stop enjoying ease, or to stop letting the current carry you downstream.

There will never be a time when happiness, appreciation and joy aren’t the only game in town.

So remind yourself to let go of the oars, let go completely, and allow God to reach you continuously with all the love and the blessings He has made for you.

Other people’s bad moods

I used to feel responsibility and fear of other people’s bad moods and negative emotions.

But like everything in my experience, how I feel is not determined by circumstances (including the circumstance of other people being moody). How I feel is determined by my thoughts about circumstances.

For example: “he’s in a mood again!” feels pretty bad. I could sit, tense with anxiety, because I think someone expressing unhappiness or frustration is the foreshadowing of angry outbursts and cruel attacks on bystanders like me.

And in most cases I’d be wrong. Not just wrong, but blinded to the many positive aspects of the other person’s experience of contrast, blind to the value it holds for them and me, and at worst unwittingly contributing to the outcome I fear.

For all I know they might look up from their moderate feelings of frustration to catch me staring sidelong at them as if they are something horrible.

For all I know, my fearfulness contributes to their sense of dissatisfaction and overshadows the ease and happiness that is there even in the midst of a bad mood.

And for all I know the reality might be entirely benign. A moment’s contrast amidst a sea of calm, but I fly off in panic and stick the label “bad mood” over the whole day.

Is the bad mood in them or in me?

I don’t really know how other people are feeling, but if I’m sensing a dark and foreboding mood then that mood is active in me too.

Even if someone is in a bad mood, how does that effect me?

No, a bad mood is just another circumstance, and it’s my resistance that makes it seem so dire.

It’s therefore within my power to ease my thoughts and find relief, either by changing the subject of my focus or by telling a new story about it.

What is a bad mood?

What is a bad mood after all, except misaligned thoughts creating negative feelings.

The person in question is experiencing contrast, and their emotional guidance tells them their thoughts are out of alignment.

It’s actually nothing to do with me, anymore than my emotional guidance is the “fault” of others.

In fact my guidance is telling me, in my fear of others’ moods, that I have the wrong idea about them. Other people’s moods can have no impact on me, because other people do not create my experience.

Other people do not decide what thoughts I will think, what stories I will tell. Other people do not control my perception and focus.

When I was a child people’s bad moods scared me because I thought they were about me, reflections of my self giving rise to anger and malice in others. I interpreted their moods as judgement, and anticipated a terrible punishment to follow.

Now I’m an adult and I understand how things work. Other people’s negative emotions are not about me, but about their own thoughts, stories and perceptions.

Change your perception

I’m lying here on the couch and my wife is watching a video with headphones on, and it sounds like she’s sobbing her heart out.

Except she’s actually laughing her arse off, quietly so as not to wake the baby.

My thoughts lead me to hear crying before I hear laughter (don’t worry, I checked) and that’s just a matter of practice and momentum.

What kinds of thoughts can we have to help soften our experience of others’ emotions?

People are happy most of the time. People are usually in a good mood. People have their own emotional guidance to help them find alignment. People have their own inner being to call them always towards happiness and joy.

Sometimes people get stuck in their resistance but it’s okay. Being stuck just increases their desire for freedom.

And if people are resisting, and feeling really strong guidance, I hope they get it. I hope they heed the call. I hope they learn to feel good too, as good as I feel right now.

I’ve had my own resistance too. I’ve dug my own hole deeper than it ever needed to be, and that’s how I understand now that it was never necessary to increase my suffering.

I can really relate to people in a state of resistance feeling strong guidance, and that’s why I feel good for them. I know the joy and the trust and the ease and the freedom that flows to them, even though right at this moment they are looking away from it.

I know how good life can be for them, and with that loving intention I can let them go, knowing that they will find their answers too. Knowing that there’s nothing really “wrong” about a bad mood.

Awakening to your higher self

There’s always been this dichotomy of two selves.

The self you are most aware of is more like a focal point than a separate entity. It’s how you participate in the physical world, but it’s not the fullest extent of your being.

When we worry, fear, struggle and fight, it’s as if we are focused on this self to the exclusion or ignoring of its true nature, and ours.

What people call the higher self, Buddha-nature, Christ dwelling within us, is an awakening to this greater being of which we are a part.

If we say the physical self is a focal point, then it is this greater, spiritual self that is focusing here.

We could live most of our lives focused only on the physical self, with only fleeting awareness of the bigger picture.

But the real joy and ease and happiness comes as we come into alignment with this higher, spiritual self that is an extension of God, and begin to merge those two perspectives.

Our higher self is always united with God. It knows only endless streams of love and appreciation and joy.

Our physical self can, as a focal point, be in harmony with our higher self and enjoy the resonance and beauty of that most satisfying relationship.

That is why ease and relief are important, because from God’s perspective there can be no reason, no obstacle, no thing to stand in opposition or resistance to the love and the light that is His very being.

This higher self, this relationship with God is always within us. It just takes practice of relief, practice letting go of the oars and turning downstream, practice of trust to the point where we can feel its presence as naturally as we feel a cool breeze on our skin or the rhythm of our own breath.

It’s only taken me two years of exploration and practice to cease feeling chronically depressed and find relief and trust available to me at all times.

And in that two years it only took about two months of daily focus to really hear the answers i was seeking: let go of the oars, again and again let them go. Let the current turn you downstream. Stop trying, stop efforting, let go into trust that the universe is good, that God desires your happiness, and rest in the utter totality of trusting the creator of the universe to carry you gently, easily into the love you always desired.

This trust is the spring of life-giving water. It is the abundance of joy promised us. It is everything we desire, and it is available to us always.