Getting High on Letting Go

How lovely to hear how the practices are working for you, or not, and to hear your questions about how they could work for you, if you were to do them.

Alas, I wish I carried words of comfort, alas alack and woe-a-day, for they cannot work for you at all: it is you who must do the work. They are tools, not even power-tools: yours is the power to change using those tools. You are like a sculptor given her first chisel, a painter his first brush. Your skill evolves with a little practice and a lot of awareness – and that needs practice too! Does it never end? It does not. Its called swallowing the porcupine.

In growing and developing to be what you are, what you would like to be at the age you are now, you have means of transformation and healing like no other..

But, if the new voice sings the old songs, why bother? If you hang on to the old conditions like an old lover, you are still feeding the dog, yes?

The doing is in the undoing, but there is a high in hanging on that easily overcomes the low of letting go, and these are the conditionings of the familiar. You know them. You think they hold you, or is it you holding them?

Tell me what you think, if any of this resonates with you – as surely it will if you have lived long enough (“….sometimes my eyes feel tired of having seen so much, and my body for having lived so much, and my heart for having felt so very much, but my spirit soars ever as much…”)

A client, Gina, returned from a holiday with her beloved. She came in for her regular consultation, eyes alight with delight at her time visiting her beloved’s home in the sun.
“I remember a point in my life, not that long ago,” she said, “when I could not imagine such a fulfilling new relationship. My mind was always in the past, with someone I loved and who loved me, but I could not be with him, although consumed with passion for him and he for me. After we split I waited for that same passion with every new encounter – as did George. And I would feel triumphant myself when he overcame the difficulties that beset his life, the losing cards dealt him by an unkind fate.”

It was at that point in her life that Gina had asked me what I thought. Well, I’ve never felt right at sorting people’s lives out, but she was a shiatsu client so I thought I’d ask a few “diagnostic’ kind of questions in the hope of her finding her own answers
.
“How long ago did you split?” (how long have you had the condition?)
‘Four years.’
“And how did you know he had had the same difficulties as you in forming new relationships?” (what brings on the condition?)
‘We kept in touch, we became friends, we met socially.”
“Why?” asked I.
‘To continue our friendship. Without the clutter, I suppose.’
“The friendship that shadowed each attempt at a new relationship?”
‘I know’ she sighed ‘and it began to drive me mad eventually because I really wanted to be with someone compatible, to settle and grow together. But we couldn’t let go. ‘
“We?”
She started to get the picture and said, ‘Well, when I met David I thought that if I texted George to end it finally we might both become free.’

To me it seemed like someone who had had a really traumatic experience in life, or even a kind of deadly but comfortable condition, and was hanging on to it because it was known and familiar, and the worst of the known seems always preferable to the least of the unknown, does it not?

They were both “feeding the dog,” and while SAYING that’s an end to it, let’s get on with life, they were both DOING the singing of the old song and therefore the old song still sang in their hearts, and it continued singing to the new hearts they tried to connect with.
Who among us has never known that?

Both might have moved on in many ways but ways that didn’t matter in the context of real, day-to-day personal, heart-relationships, and yet it is those personal, heart-relationships that are our true real lives, the lives we live every day and hour, not the lives we like to live at weekend workshops or in healing consultations - who has not felt immediately better after a wonderful healing-treatment of any kind. And then gone on to continue in real life living/working in the very same way that caused the condition in the first place?

It is the real life from which springs our present reality and our future – our future generations even – and it is this real life which the practices can help us with. Everyone agrees the group energy generates a dynamic in which the practices become easy. But its outside that magical bubble where we spend most of our time, time in the mundane dimension. That’s where to practice.

I ended the story with Gina by asking why she wanted to text George that it was really over.
‘For clarity,’ she said. ‘Just so he knows.’
“What, that it wasn’t before?”
I could see the thoughts floating across the screen of her mind.
‘I can see it now,’ she said. ‘I still want him to know about me. I still want to know about him.”
“And David?”
Silence.

Is there a happy ever after? Will there be? I don’t know. If Gina’s story presses any buttons, you’ll have made up your own mind. You’ll know in your heart what you would do/have done or not done, and as long as you’re OK to live with the outcome then everything’s perfect – isn’t it?

It need not have been a lover, it might have been an illness, a condition, something you carry. I once read a book, ‘Love your Disease, it’s keeping you happy’ or some such title. How we cling to the familiar!

YOU CAN BE FREE. BE YOURSELF – keep your face to the sun and the shadows always fall behind you. Where they belong.

Thank you for the inspiration you give me.

Aloha Mahalo, Mahalo Aloha.

p.s. Gina George and David are not their real names and if any Ginas, Georges or Davids reading this think its about them, well, maybe it is but that's a coincidence...if you believe in coincidences.