Letting Go

One very important lesson that life has taught me is the art of letting go. I am a very sentimental person by nature and I like to hold onto things. Old worn things, old friends and old memories take up a lot of my mental and emotional space. The need to reminisce about days gone before is great within me. However, my unique life situation has forced me to constantly let go of the past and all its accoutrements. As a young girl, I always imagined myself married to one man for life, raising multiple children and living in one big house bulging at the seams with all my extended family and my beloved possessions - spending my days in domestic bliss. To my surprise, my life experience so far has been just the opposite. I travel almost constantly, living in a different state or country every year. I am a widow and single mom of one daughter and we have truly come to know the maxim, “home is where the heart is.” One year we went to Paris to live for several months and I packed every valuable and beloved item that I owned and lost it all at the hands of a French luggage thief. Needless to say, "Loose and Let go," has become my mantra.

In our more recent move, I was blessed with a most wonderful experience, which brought my mantra into full expression. What I believe to be a truly amazing meditation was introduced to me. “Mind” Meditation is a silent practice during which you imagine throwing every past memory, experience, person or idea that is in your mind into a tiny black hole pasted on the wall in front of you. The black hole represents oblivion or nothingness and like a magnetic vortex, it sucks all the content of your mind into it. After practicing this meditation daily for several months, I literally felt as if I were flying, so light and free. The past is definitely a burden we carry around, all the images and thoughts in our minds that circulate continuously and affect our every action, influence our every circumstance. We cannot be in the present, let alone move forward, if we are saturated with the patterns of what has gone before. The time is definitely now, to let go.

Doing this meditation daily is like fasting/detoxing/cleansing the spirit. This is why children are so youthful, bright, cheerful and full of zeal. They let go constantly, releasing and moving on from everything that has come before. It is only as we mature and begin to hold on to old stuff, attaching ourselves to it and creating a sense of self based on it, that we grow dull, pessimistic, old and somber.