Lots of my blogs have been related to getting over or letting go of things that are bad or negative in your life, thoughts, relationships etc. I say, LTSG, Let That Shit Go. Last article I talked about how letting go of positive things in life is just as important to ending suffering. I think in the moment those things we are attached to or love end, we think we need to let go of the bad feelings about the thing ending or the way it is ending. It doesn’t need to be like that. It is because we are not able to let go of the good in something that we tend to turn it into something bad that had to end, so we can feel better about it ending. So we poison relationships, jobs, work, etc. so that when they end, we don’t need to suffer their loss, because they sucked anyway.
When you read that, do you hear the ridiculousness in that? We feel this need to destroy something in order for it to end and let it go. Like we need to say that ended because it was bad, so that we don’t need to feel as bad about the ending. What if doing that actually makes the ending worse for you? What if destroying all of the positives of something just so you don’t have to miss it actually causes the suffering in the thing ending?
Say you have the perfect job. You love it and find it fulfilling. At some point, you start to feel like the job isn’t what it used to be, and maybe start feeling like you should make a change. You don’t change though. You stick it out because this was your dream job that you loved, and you don’t want to lose that. You grasp at the perfection of the job, but subtly and sometimes subconsciously, you know it has ended, so you sabotage it and start to destroy all of what is good about it. Then a break up happens, inevitably. You get fired. Someone leaves you, or you leave them in a break up scene or something. Everyone feels bad about that break up and ending because it was soured for months or years by not letting it go when the end had been reached.
What if we didn’t believe that things should last forever? What if we believed that relationships, friends, pets, family, spouses, jobs, cars etc. were all supposed to be temporary? That coming to the end of one of those relationships or times was a reason to celebrate? What if the moment we realized something has reached its end, we allowed it to end peacefully, and we just let it go? What if we didn’t fight the end of things?
I know, some people are going to be triggered by that. They will say that we should fight for our relationships. We should fight for our jobs, pets, kids, etc. People want to fight to keep things all of the time. Wars have been fought and millions of people have died fighting to keep something from ending. Something that’s end came anyway, and something that’s end was supposed to be. It was not the end that created the deaths. It was the fight to keep the end from happening that caused them. I realize not all war is fought for that specific reason, and I do not want to debate fighting a war. It is just an example of how devastating not allowing things to pass as intended can be.
I have some friends who are mourning and suffering daily because one or both of their parents died. I am not judging that, but I am going to use it as an example. Because, I also have friends whose parent(s) have died who do not suffer because of those deaths. I too have lost a parent. My father died in 2008. I loved him dearly, and from time to time, I miss him, but I do not suffer because of this loss. Like my friends who do not suffer due to the loss of their parents, we see the beauty in the relationships we had with those parents. We appreciate what was good, and how we were able to grow and be with them for as long as we were able. We also know that their passing was at the right time for their soul, and for our souls, and the souls of others who miss them or lost them. We get that there is also beauty in that loss, and that things that have been created from that loss could not have been created without it. We know that those creations were supposed to happen, and the deaths needed to happen first before the next thing could happen.
It’s like every difficult and awesome thing that has happened in my life. I have struggled. I have had depression and suicidal episodes. I felt so much pain inside that I wanted to be dead, and I would not trade those moments in my life for any more peaceful, less painful moment in my life. They had a purpose, even if while I was in them I didn’t see that.
How do I let go of the things I love without suffering? Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do suffer, however, I am not still suffering. I suffered when I was depressed, but I do not suffer because of that now. Most of the time I do not suffer though. I have feelings of loss, grief, sadness and pain, and those feelings are not suffering. They are just feelings. I only suffer when I tell myself that the feelings I have were hard, wrong, bad, etc. When I just feel my feelings as they are, I do not suffer. It is not hard. I just feel things. Not all of those things are what I would call pleasant, for sure, and some were difficult to feel at the time. Not because I felt them though. It was because I tried not to feel them. That is when I suffered. Again, it’s the fighting of reality that causes the suffering, not what the reality is.
How do I let go of things I love? I feel my feelings about them. I do not fight the loss or the feelings about the loss. I do not try to hold onto to something that is gone or ending. I just feel how I feel, and allow the feelings to also go when it is time for them to go. It’s the difference between standing in a river and trying to not let it move you, or floating on the river and letting it take you wherever it wants to take you. When you try to hold still and not let any of the scenery change, you will struggle. You will suffer, and you might drown in the effort to stay put. However, if you relax, allow the river to take you and just float on the water, you will end up wherever you are meant to go, and you will be alive to appreciate it. You might even have the energy to appreciate and notice the beauty in the new location because you didn’t struggle so hard to keep from being moved there. Even if you don’t have a boat, if you relax and just float, you will conserve energy and not drown. If you panic and struggle to not be moved by the river, you will suffer and sometimes drown.
Relax into life’s experiences. Allow them to flow over, under and around you. Feel your feelings. Try not to judge them or attach to them. Just let them be and feel them while they are there to feel, then let them go when it’s time to not feel them anymore. Appreciate the present moment. Try not to wish for a different moment or different experience than the one you are having. This one you are having has a purpose. Ride the purpose. Flow with that purpose.
My father died from cancer, melanoma. I don’t know his exact experience with that because I am not him, but from the outside, it appeared that he did not suffer from having cancer. I am sure there were moments that he wished he didn’t have it. I am sure there were moments that he wanted to be healed and live a longer life. I know that he tried many things to cure it both spiritually and scientifically. I do not know that he suffered though. It felt like he just flowed with the experience of having cancer. He flowed with how it changed his personality. He flowed with how it changed is physical abilities. He flowed with how it took away things and gave things to his life. In the end, he was visited by angels who told him it was okay to be done, that he had fulfilled his purpose, and he died in a place of peace. I was there. He did not seem to suffer when he died. He just stopped breathing and was gone. I say this because it is meaningful to me to think about how he didn’t seem to fight his experience of having cancer so much as he fought the illness and tried to find a way to cure it.
Nothing wrong with fighting a disease, getting a cure, using science and technology to enhance your experience and live longer. That doesn’t have to mean that the whole time you are fighting that you are suffering. You can fight and be at peace at the same time. Whatever will be will be. Even when I ask for it to be different. Even when I wish for it to be different. The suffering comes not when I consider how things might be different, but when my longing for things to be different becomes my experience, rather than experiencing the actual experience as it is happening.
So, let go to end suffering. Dive in and attach, love, connect and believe fully and deeply in life and relationships, and know they will end at some point, cause we all die. You don’t need to know when that will happen, and don’t focus on trying to keep it from happening. Just focus on now, and what is here for you now to experience, know, love, feel, and just be present with it. That is the end of suffering. And if you suffer, as we all will do from time to time, try to let that go too. You don’t need to judge it or try to stop it, feel it, then allow it to leave as all things will do if you stop trying to keep them from doing so.
Whether something is awesome and amazing or painful and destructive, there is a time and a place for it. When we allow that to happen. When we allow that to be, we can also be at peace with whatever it is.
-Namaste