“If I let go of what I am I become what I might be.” Lao Tzu
The art of letting go is actually the art of greeting. It is making the mental shift from loss of control to possibility. From clinging to neutrality.
I’ve wrestled deeply with the idea of acceptance. For a long time I thought it had to do with naming where I am, identifying what there is to accept and then admitting the reality to myself serially. But after all this ritual, my feet were still stuck in the mud. Something still held the place of unrealized potential. Now I know it’s possible for a person (me) to say “I accept what’s happened in my life” for years and still cling to the meaning I unconsciously drew from those events. I really had accepted… the meaning I wanted to see.
If we need to derive security from knowing, we will reject the freedom of the unknown. If we form attachment to events (or people, time periods, places, anything) based on the meanings we are most comfortable assigning to them, we will reject the possibility of all other meanings that could inform us tenfold, including indifference. Some refer to this as the smokescreen of the depressed. This delays or prevents any new knowledge’s power to transmute our psyche to a deeper and truer knowing of itself.
Then we sit and google “how to get over writer’s block,” ask our therapist why we don’t like what we do anymore and drink for relief from ourselves: we treat symptoms of resistance.
Our gut senses our resistance to the direction life is leading us, yet we can be so neurologically terrified to open ourselves to another mode of being than the one we decided upon. Letting go fans the fire which burns off dead wood. Dually, we must also embrace how it refines our internal structure to a more habitable environment.
The affects of prolonged resisting and treating the symptoms of resistance are vast, including depression, anxiety, and my personal favorite, neurosis. Neurosis is when the personality becomes split. A neurotic is the ultimate hypocrite. They are dissociated. They know enantiodromia firsthand. They are control addicts who have little autonomy over what’s actually important to them. I can say from personal neurotic experience, neurosis is a murderer of many good things and truly does feel like being ripped apart. It brings about suffering and the legitimate meaning of that pain remains cloaked. I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s theory on neurosis since January of this year (highly recommend). Jung is in favor of neurosis, as it forces someone to develop their valuable qualities, holding them ever-so-relentlessly to where they must be in order to adapt. For some, a lesson is learned with an hour of rain. Others need a hurricane. Within a neurosis are a series of fantasies and meanings placed upon life. It’s a humbling process to explore the complexes that constellate a neurosis, but making the mental shift from control, and therefore the loss of it, to greeting previously unrecognized possibility offers a profound place to start.