Everyone has baggage. We all move through our lives carrying unnecessary emotions with us. Whether this takes the form of anger, resentment, guilt, or shame, an action you took or an action someone else took against you, it is only our own refusal to release our resistance that creates pain and blockages in our life.
Fortunately, letting go doesn’t have to be difficult. In this post I’ll outline a clear path that teaches you how to let go of everything in a single breath, no matter how long you’ve held on to it, or how major an issue it may be in your life.
How To Let Something Go
Letting go is both a science and an art form. It is a skill that can be learned, but may be one you need to practice repeatedly in order to master.
The key to letting something go is to acknowledge that holding on to the issue creates more pain than the original event.
Leave the Past in the Past
No matter what happened, the past is always in the past. You cannot repeat it or transform it, other than through your own current thoughts and emotions about it. In a very real sense, you can even say that the past does not exist, unless you draw your attention to it.
Only your own thoughts and emotions perpetuate any issue from the past. Understanding this point is one of the first keys to letting go.
Become Aware of Negative Emotions when they Arise
The second key is to become aware of how your thoughts about the subject are impacting you. This means you must train yourself to be on the lookout for thoughts that feel bad about the subject at hand.
The best way to do this is to begin to pay attention to your solar plexus, which is your third chakra region located just below your ribs. When a thought feels good, you can learn to feel a sense of expansion in this chakra. When a thought feels bad, you feel a sense of contraction. You could also develop a similar awareness for your heart center.
Listening to the information these centers provide is a key part of learning to trust your intuition and follow your inner guidance. As you become aware of these sensations, you will become more attuned to negative thoughts, and more willing to release them.
Why We Hold On To Negative Emotion
As you become more aware of the hold these negative emotions have over you, you take the first steps to releasing them.
Everyday, as you go about your normal life, you receive an incredible amount of information. Your brain automatically processes this information, and releases the vast majority of it without any conscious thought. Some of it, we acknowledge consciously, and this acknowledgement forms our day to day experiences. Again, we let most of this information go immediately after it passes through our awareness.
For example, think about driving down the highway. In the span of just a few minutes, you might see hundreds of cars and pass thousands of trees, and millions of leaves on the trees. The leaves probably don’t even enter your conscious awareness. You are likely dimly aware of the trees, and briefly aware of each car around you. When the car moves on, you never think of it again.
This is the way you are meant to live, noticing and appreciating the world around you. The problem comes when something triggers a negative emotion. You hold a specific set of judgments and beliefs based on your past experiences and thought patterns, and when you come across an object in your environment that triggers one of these beliefs, pent up energy surfaces. This is what happens when you hold on to negativity.
The Only Decision: Just Let Go
You truly can learn to let go of everything instantly, as easily as you pass by a car on the highway.
The issue is one of decision: you simply must decide to just let go.
You may have noticed that the steps I’ve outlined above are all about general awareness and understanding. That’s because the skill to letting go of negative emotions is primarily about your own awareness of them and the recognition that they do not need to cause you pain.
When you can understand this point, you can choose to release any thought, belief, or emotion as soon as it arises. Practicing this consistently is an art form that will take time to perfect.
As you get better at it, the little things will pass you by easily, and even big triggers will begin to have less of a hold on you.
You will begin to live a free, effortless life, in which issues surface and evaporate effortlessly, and you enjoy a profound sense of inner peace.
If this sounds difficult or impossible, you might want to check out this exercise on finding peace within/breath-exercises/finding-peace-within-simple-exercise-feel-peaceful-every-day, or sign up for one of our empowerment courses.
