Letting Go: How To Surrender to The Flow of Life

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” ~ Lao Tzu

We’re a peculiar species, we humans; we think we know everything, when really, we know nothing.

Unlike other species, who are driven by natural, primal instincts, we like to plot, plan and control our lives to such a degree that if they fail to live up to our imaginary projections (which they are likely to) we are often left in a state of despair.

We pin so much hope on what we think our lives should, or want our lives to look like, that when the inevitable twists and turns steer us off course or pull the carpet from under our feet, it can leave us feeling out of control and in a heap of tears and why me?s.

The truth is, our lives are not destined to go exactly the way we want them to. If everyone lived out their childhood dreams, we’d all be astronauts, or living in castles with Prince Charming. Life can be a bitch sometimes.

We imagined it would all be so easy; we plotted our grand six-figure career, our whirlwind romance, our 2-4 children, a dog, and a happily-ever-after ending. But it doesn’t tend to work out the way the movies would have us believe.

What really happens is, we lose our job, our relationship breaks down, we feel lost, we are let down, we lose a loved one. Life throws us lemons and we have no idea what to do with them, let alone how to make lemonade.

Perhaps a handful of people will actually stick the course and live a life they had always imagined, but for most of us, life can be one confusing and sometimes messy place, where we feel a little bit lost at times and can leave us pondering what it all means.

I lead a fairly unconventional life, with a tendency to live impulsively and from the heart. I am aware that this is not — by any means — a conventional existence (who liked conventional anyway?), but it’s my existence.

It wasn’t what I had planned or imagined, and so far it has been a bumpy old ride, but a ride full of lessons and experiences which have shaped the person I am today. And I wouldn’t take one crazy, sometimes painful, always meaningful, bit of it back.

If you had told the girl at the front of her English Class, who was destined to study History of Art at University and go on to work as a journalist in London, get married and settle down, that one day I would be living on a small Indonesian Island, selling vintage clothes barefoot and swimming with turtles, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.

I’d never have predicted that an impulsive one-way ticket to Australia would lead to me living on an olive farm in the Hunter Valley, building fires and making friends with animals I’d never encountered before. And that, this experience would lead to my decision to become a vegan and an animal rights activist.

You see, Life has a funny way of doing its own thing regardless of whether you a) wanted it to happen or b) imagined in a million years it was going to. We can try and whittle our lives down to produce a bespoke future; we can dream of plans and ideas which we think would be the ‘right’ thing to do, or the ‘best’ thing for us.

But life has a sneaky way of proving that it knows best and that actually we are pretty clueless.

It will therefore seek to prove this to us by regularly plonking us into situations which force us to question everything we thought we knew, while simultaneously teaching us everything we need to learn at that time to help us become the best version of ourselves.

A wise man once said, “The key to happiness is to let each situation be what it is, instead of what you think it should be.” There couldn’t be a more simple or profound way of summing it all up; in order to stay sane, it’s important to remember that Life Just Is and that it carries on regardless of our assumptions, actions or expectations.

We suffer when reality doesn’t match our expectations. When we project what we want to see onto something or someone that already is, we feel bad, angry, or hurt when it doesn’t match up.

But it is our decision to create these expectations, therefore it is also our choice to let go of them and learn to see everything and everyone exactly for what or who they are. By letting go of our preconceptions, we can save ourselves the pain of our own self-deception.

Hindsight is always a beautiful thing, and when we look back, we can often gain some much needed perspective. Events in our lives which seemed to provoke chaos at the time, ended up being our greatest lessons and our most valuable opportunities for change and growth.

If we can preempt that valuable lesson by reminding ourselves in the moment, that life always unfolds the way it does for our best interest, whether we want it to or not, then we can gain a huge sense of peace amidst times of unexpected change.

To Let Go is the most important thing we can do for ourselves in this lifetime. To let go of fears about the future, of preconceived ideas of what our lives will, or should look like further down the line, of the need to control every detail of our lives and the people in them, and to just let things be.

To let go is to liberate ourselves and to find a sense of harmony in the moment, as our lives unfold naturally and spontaneously.

This being said, there is beauty and necessity in dreaming and having goals, without which we might be wandering aimlessly in circles, scratching our heads. But the difference is that dreams and goals are fluid and hold promise, they are open to change and negotiation and they keep our passions alive and our spirits hungry.

We don’t always get exactly what we want, but we always get precisely what we need. Sometimes the two are unrecognizable from each other. We will always encounter the experiences, people and situations which are the very best for the evolution of ourselves and our consciousness. This much is true.

Our hearts have an instinctual knowing for what is best for us, at all times. If we can learn to listen to their whispered truth, we can learn to live in a way which is lead more by our intuition, rather than the imagined logic of the mind. When we face an unexpected situation, we can choose to see it with different eyes, and arm ourselves with a new perspective.

What we gain is the strength that comes from facing pain and moving through it, to find what lies beyond it.

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To surrender to the moment and to see it exactly as it is means we can navigate our way through life with more ease, with less stress, less heartache, less feelings of despair or desperation when things appear to go wrong. Because nothing really goes wrong, it just goes a different way to how we thought it should.

There is true freedom and liberation in letting go and accepting life in all its wonderful, unexpected, messy glory, rolling with the punches and finding the hidden lessons amongst it all.

And I promise you this: life will happen, and if you can find your silver-lined cloud in the midst of the storms, it will all be so worth it in the end.

Non- attachment; How to set ourselves free

I think we can all say that at some point in our lives we have become attached to someone or something.

What starts out as a casual desire or appreciation can slowly turn into the shackles of attachment. The fear that one day it might not be yours creeps into the recesses of your mind, and gradually you become a slave to the need to possess, to hold tight and tonever let go.

Attachment seems to link closely with an idea of ownership — a protective, ego bound possession. We are afraid that we will lose whatever it is we keep. Fear takes over as we try desperately to grapple at that which we think we have a right to own; be it a belief or a person.

Buddhism promotes the idea of detachment as a path to happiness. We let go of that which we want to cling on to and, in doing so, something wonderful happens; we realize that we never owned it in the first place and nothing is ever really under our control.

We give permission to stay or go. And with this new arrangement comes trust and an acceptance that ‘whatever may be, may be’. We surrender to the mystery of life; we set ourselves free.

Nothing is permanent, nothing is given or fixed. We can’t ever know that anything will stay in our lives, not even if we make them promise, or if we promise ourselves; promises can be broken, trust can be damaged. People change, life goes on.

Of course, to live in a state of apathetic detachment seems soul-less and empty, and it can be argued that the things we love and give us joy are the sweet icing on the cake of life; so is it possible to cherish that which we love, yet remain open to its finiteness in our lives?

The real key to happiness, and appreciating that which we have in our lives without getting attached to them, is to develop a strong sense of personal freedom and love for ourselves which allows us to enjoy connections with others and for what we have, without fear of the future or potential loss.

We are therefore whole, we are loving and we are present. And above all, we are confident in our individual strength without needing anyone or anything to validate us.

I’ve been in relationships where one or both of us has feared the other leaving, to the point where either begins to control, to grab, to cling. This inevitably leads to jealousy, fear, resentment, and all the ugly elements of a relationship which is doomed.

The unfortunate irony of attachment in relationships is that the more you cling to someone, for fear of losing them, the more likely you are to push them away and encourage their departure.

There is an analogy about holding a handful of sand. If we close our fist around the sand, it forces out between our fingers, it slips between the crevices and it spills out. If we sit patiently with our hand open, the sand stays put. This explains the very nature of attachment and clinging: when we desperately want to hold on to something, we end up losing it.

“Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.” ~ Dalai Lama

Attachment and possession are like capturing a wild animal ; the beautiful creature lives its life free to move as it pleases, to come and go and run and play. It is admired and desired because of its beauty and freedom and also because it is different and mysterious.

People want to take the animal out of its habitat and covet it. So the wild animal is captured and trapped, never allowed back to the wild, for fear that given a choice, it will not return.

What happens to this animal in captivity? It begins to wither and its souls begins to fade; it remembers how it loved to roam free, how it could explore and experience life the way it wanted to and  the spirit it once had in its heart begins to fade.

The very nature of the wild animal disappears, and its place is taken up by nothing but sadness. And who wants to keep prisoner a sad and lonely soul?

In the same way, when we love something or someone, we do so because we love the state they are in naturally and spontaneously. We love their wildness. If we try to preserve thiswildness by keeping them close, taming them and protecting them from their natural habitat, controlling them and enslaving them, we will watch the very element we loved in them disappear.

The key is to realize that what we have today, we might not have tomorrow, and we will be okay with that. We need to feel secure enough in our own lives so that we needn’t look for validation elsewhere. We need to know that we will survive the loss of love and friendships and possessions and still continue to exist.

“You must love  in such a way that the person you love feels free.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

In this way, detachment is a beautiful expression of gratitude and appreciation, because we are acknowledging the impermanence and wildness of that which we love, which begins with the love we have for ourselves and transcends to the freedom of others.

It means leaving an open door to those who come into our lives and hearts — free to come and go as they please and being thankful for their presence along the way.

It means loving the spaces, the gaps and the distances between each other; it is within these reserves that a mutual appreciation awakens. When you take a step back, you can admire something in its entirety. And the space allows for a little mystery to grow.

It means honoring the freedom and wildness of everyone who comes into our lives; they may stay a season or they may stay a lifetime, but they certainly crossed your path for a reason.

People are lessons, sometimes we have to let the most important ones go… for that was part of the nature of their very teaching.

It is acknowledging everyone’s individuality and choice. What might work for one might not work for the other, and what worked once may cease to at a later stage. It is accepting that life moves in mysterious ways; sometimes in our favour, sometimes against.

The beauty of life is in the acceptance of its fragility, like a delicate crystal — a reminder of the impermanence of our existence.

To embrace this is to embrace the unpredictability of life, to give thanks for the connections with others who are present in our lives, knowing that one day they may not be, and to focus on building relationships which set ourselves and others free.

Do you see me?

When you look at me, what do you see?

Do you see me whole, naked, as I am or do you see a constructed metaphor for the idea of me – a promise or a lie? Do you see me unmasked, bare, or do you paint me with the colours of your dreams?

I want to be seen beyond vision. I want your eyes to bore into my very soul and explore the dark corners like an intrepid explorer of my heart. I want you to hang off guide ropes and lower yourself  gently into my cavernous depths, so that we might encounter each other there in the shadows. I want you to venture deeper than others have dared go – Your piercing torch-light of inquisition penetrating my vulnerability.

I want you to look at me and question everything I am, smashing me apart into a thousand shards in a magnificent display of surrender, like a broken mirror. Only to piece me together again, with truth as the adhesive and love as the instruction.

I want to be exposed to you like an open wound, or ocean – the expanse of my wholeness, my realness; a stark reality which shakes and awakens us. I want to shade my eyes from the glare of your intense gaze only to realise that the real blindness comes from the denial of who we really are.

I want to see myself in everything you are; a reflection eternal of a million lives, loves and losses. I want to be brought to my knees by the eyes that surprise me with their imitation of my soul.

I want you to scold me with the fire and brimstone of your burning heart; scarred forever with the permanent scorch of your passion and desire. I want the glaciers of my self-protection to melt under the solar flares of your safety; to watch my levels rise as the ice falls away.

I want to unravel, slowly like old denim.. each thread, a piece of me that untangles and detaches, adding to the whole, a gradual creation; the bigger, more beautiful picture. I want to unfurl, softly like a precious scroll containing my wishes and secrets… opening up to reveal the promise of my desires and the honesty of my heart.

I want to be seen, so undoubtedly, so clearly , that I become translucent  as if being held up to the light – exposed in both my innocence and my guilt; a stained glass window to my soul.

I want you to see my troubles, my insecurities and my imperfections as part of the beautiful mosaic that makes me whole; each piece a part of another story, but held together to form the art of my being.

And I want to look at you, and see the same…