The Art Of Letting Go (And How To Get Past The Doubts)

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Each of our lives has its own unique rhythm. There is an ebb and flow, and a time for stillness that continues to repeat itself throughout our lifetime. The art of letting go is about honoring this rhythm. It’s about knowing when to hold in stillness, and when to move forward, even if the way isn’t clear. Letting go is really about opening to receive. It is living in this moment, honoring who you are. It is a process of trust.

When seen from the soul’s perspective, there is beauty and grace in the life story we play out. There is absolute perfection in each step of the way in what comes forward for us to handle.

Our soul works in cooperation with Spirit to bring exactly what we need in perfect timing. And since our soul holds the blueprint for our destiny in this lifetime, it brings forward the people and situations that are necessary for our evolution.

When our soul has learned enough from a person or situation, it is ready to move on. It has absolute trust in the way the journey unfolds.

The other parts of us, however, are not always on board with letting go. When we first receive that inner stirring or outer message that things are changing, we often go into a place of fear and resistance. Questions arise such as “What will happen to me? How will I survive? How can I live without him/her?” Resistance also takes the form of denial, dishonesty with self or others, or, hanging on to something even when the joy is gone.

So, we resist the flow of life out of our fears, and the belief that  “I am safe only when I am in control, or when things stay the same as they are.”  And the result is living in the shadows, not fully alive, yearning for something more.

Letting go can mean physically leaving a person or situation, or just shifting your perception. It can mean changing a lifestyle or giving up the need to be right. It can mean just surrendering to what is.

Letting go does not mean to ignore responsibilities or to become disconnected or apathetic. It means releasing any thought, action, emotion or belief that keeps you from being fully present in this moment, loving yourself unconditionally. It means opening up to the Divine presence that resides within, and trusting that there is a plan for you.

“When you come to the end of all the light that you know and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for you to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”
~ Edward Teller

Written by Dixie Clark : The Art Of Letting Go (And How To Get Past The Doubts)

 

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What Is “Awakening”?

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Worth Reading Off the Web – The author, Scott Kiloby is an international speaker on the subject of freedom through non-dual realization, a Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor/Registered Addiction Specialist.

EveningofLight

EveningofLight

Awakening is a living, breathing, constantly unfolding moment-by-moment adventure.

The Head-Awakening

What gets passed off as awakening is a certain shifting that happens, where one sees that they are not the concepts in their heads. In awareness-styled awakenings (there are different awakenings that look and feel differently in different traditions – awareness-styled is just one), the shift usually involves some sort of non-conceptual realization of awareness, being, presence or no self that seems to be an end point at first. It can be a sudden or gradual shifting, but people generally report this kind of change in perception. Things are seen to come and go within awareness inseparably or things seem to come and go but there is no self to be found.

Because this opening reveals a profound seeing that separate things, including a separate self, are not really there, it is easy to see why the proclamation of “I’m done”. In many ways, one is done – done with seeking as a self in time and in thought. But this is only a head-awakening. Even in a head-awakening, it can feel as if the body is open and transparent at first. But given time, areas of the body that are dense with the feeling of separation start to become conscious.

There are at least two other big areas to be navigated after a head-awakening.

1. The baggage of mental concepts around awakening itself.

2. The body.

Let’s start with the mental concepts. In my experience, there is a desire in many people to grasp mentally what has been realized. There are elaborate conceptual frameworks devised to “make sense” of awakening, just as this writing is a conceptual framework. There’s nothing wrong with having a conceptual framework, until it becomes the new mental prison. Just as there is a rush to a head-awakening, there is often a rush to neatly place the realization into certain conceptual boxes. There are many boxes. All the buzzwords you hear in awakening circles can be imprisoning boxes, including:

• “we create our own reality”
• “everything is just a concept”
• “nothing is true”
• “life is a divine mystery”
• “oneness is the ultimate truth”
• “no self”
• “awareness”
• “I AM”
• “all there is, is THIS”
• “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”
• “The Middle Way”

People can spend years after a head awakening endlessly identifying with all sorts of mental stuff around the awakening. This is the time when people desire to be teachers. I went through it. It’s really very innocent and comes from good intentions. But what gets passed off is only what a teacher has realized, nothing more. And many times what gets passed off are ideas about static, fixed things that are taken to be objectively true and real. Spiritual experiences and realizations get concretized into doctrine or dogma or “this is the only way” type thinking.

Eventually, what becomes important is the living of the realization itself, rather than the conceptualizing and understanding of it.

Conceptualizing goes on, but things are held a lot more lightly and non-seriously. The Living Inquiries were born out of my experience of being first immersed in certain boxes and then turning attention towards the moment-by-moment living and seeing.

The Body

The body has its own say in the matter. There are other chakras – not just the crown and mind’s eye. The heart can feel heavy, dense and closed for years after a head awakening. So can the root chakra, the sacral, the stomach and the throat. The result is often an arising of addictions, anxieties, self-limiting thoughts, grasping after understanding, issues with money, depression, big ego trips, issues with control and jealousy. I found this out by proclaiming that I was done too early. My issue was the continuation of certain addictions long after the head awakening. In my conversations with other teachers, they reported similar things. It takes a while, sometimes years, after a head awakening to fully see the darker, denser aspects of the body that remain closed. This is why becoming a teacher right after a head awakening is not a great idea. It’s like the blind leading the blind.

Adyashanti speaks eloquently about the post-awakening dilemma. Somewhere between 3 to 7 years after an awakening, the other shoe drops. Everything that was held in the mind and body and that was not seen through in that awakening will come up and bite you. It’s like it all wants to be seen and released. And it can be painful. You can even wonder why you started the awakening process to begin with. The body awakening doesn’t happen through seeking. It happens just from remaining open and working with those energies in skillful ways.

Try working with a therapist on this “Shadow” self. It is the doorway to greater and greater levels of evolution and freedom.

Article Source: http://kiloby.com/premature-claims-to-awakening/