Check this out: This is great. Everything he writes is almost always great.

It's interesting how letting go is actually, in some ways, letting something take hold of me, have its way with me.

Letting go is not banishing or throwing away. It's not necessarily saying
goodbye to something. It may be simply allowing it to fulfill its purpose within me.

So how does that actually work?

I sit down to meditate. One of my goals is to stop thinking about elephants.
And sure enough a huge elephant pops up in my consciousness. At first he
just stands there quietly. So I block him out. He appears behind me and raises his trunk and bellows.

If I demand that he go away all that will really happen is that he will do his
various dances to torment me.

But if I say, okay Elephant, here you are, do your thing, whatever you have to do, he will do his dance, use up his energy and I will be thinking about
flamingoes.

Or, and this is a major flash, he may have something important to say that I
need to hear. There are lessons to be learned in letting go too. What I am
letting go of is my resistance.

When I am threatened by an idea I may try to reject it. My fear builds a wall. When I let go, I let go of the wall. I let go of the stick I am beating it with. I let go of the anger that is trying to scare it away.

I accept the idea in the sense that I allow it to travel freely in my
consciousness. But I don't defend it either. It's on its own, has to survive all by itself.

Fighting it or defending it gives it energy and staying power.

So I'm letting go of my own struggles, not the idea. The idea finishes itself off, wears itself out, dissipates, and I am left cleansed or enlightened.

Emanations
Copyright © 2005  by John MacEnulty
5/24/05, St. Louis, MO

Emanations is now a BLOG at http://emanations.blog-city.com/

Current read: Silent Bob speaks by Kevin Smith. I love Kevin Smith. Good guy. smart. Witty. Funny as all hell.

And still reading the diaries of Brian Eno. This is a bible for me right now.