Yesterday was a seminal day for me. I finally got closure on an issue I had been grappling with for more than 18 months. The choice to surrender and let go in the moment was excruciatingly difficult. All of me was shouting to resist, fight on and get my story heard. I felt that in settling I was being muffled and made to feel small yet again!
The choice to fight on was appealing in that I was holding on to the attachment of winning and being right. The choice to make a deal and surrender in the moment was less appealing and seemingly more difficult because I was relinquishing control and or deciding for myself without relying on an external force or people to do the deciding for me.
It is amazing to me how helpful yet how difficult it is to let go. We hear the refrain all the time and it sounds so deliciously easy yet it is not. I think it is because the notion or action of letting go is inextricably linked to very definite psychological obstacles. From a psychological vantage point one explanation for the difficulty of letting go has to do with early life experiences around trust and faith. Trust and faith, it seems, are prerequisites to letting go and surrender.
There are strong correlations between the nature of one’s relationship with early authority figures and one’s present day capacity to trust or have faith in something greater than one’s self. With a less than healthy orientation towards authority figures we learn to rely on our own steely reserve. This however can prove detrimental and insufficient. At best it is one dimensional. In such cases, trusting that it is safe to let go of your perception of a situation, or your seeming sense of control, is understandably, very difficult.
Another element is the condition or conditional need for attachment.
The psychiatrist and author, David R. Hawkins, offers a powerful distinction, noting that we are not attached to the thing in question, but to attachment itself. What that means psychologically is that we are attached to the satisfaction of the resentment, the satisfaction of seemingly being in control, the satisfaction of our perceptions of ourselves and others.
So what is the upside in letting go and in surrendering if as this author subscribes there is a lot of satisfaction to be derived from being “in control”
This answer is purely personal but from yesterdays experience it seems that letting go yields a release of pain, a satisfaction that I took responsibility for my decision and I was not beholden to any external authority. I took what was in reality a tough choice but I made it all the same.
My choice now is not to beat myself over the ever vexing question “what if”
If I can manage that then I conclude I will have let go.