What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Just Let Go
March 9, 2010
My clients and my newsletter readers have something in common with most people: they want to change things about their lives.
They want to feel better about themselves. They want more success or more balance in their lives (or both). They want better relationships with other people — and with themselves.
They want to know who they are, and to come home to a deep sense of knowing what’s true for them.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But that desire for things to be different, as natural and perfectly ok as it is, can create judgment, struggle, and what one client calls “a big, knobbly sense of something really wrong with me and my life.”
That’s uncomfortable, and often very painful.
We’re taught that what we don’t want should be pushed away. When something bothers you, you push it away. When you feel anger, frustration, sadness — you push it away. You try to convince yourself that things are better than you feel they are.
But as the saying goes, what you resist persists.
Instead, just let go.
Let go into whatever it is that’s happening for you. Let go into the moment. Let go into feeling what you feel.
That can sound frightening — and it can sound like giving up.
In reality, it’s one of the beautiful paradoxes of life. As you let go and let in what you feel, that feeling is met, recognized, and acknowledged. It no longer has to scream for your attention. And as it’s met and seen, it almost always releases in some way (though perhaps not as you might expect).
You would never turn away from a dear friend who’s expressing his pain. Why would you turn away from yourself? Yet over and over and over again, that’s what almost everyone does: turns away, resisting and rejecting the feelings that arise within them.
What would happen if you explored just letting go? Here are some things to hold onto as you try this journey for yourself.
Your feelings aren’t you
Letting go into what you feel and what is happening for you isn’t the same as surrendering or handing over your identity to those feelings.
You’re probably used to experiencing feelings as being an integral part of who you are. But there’s a larger context — a bigger space in which your feelings arise and within which they subsequently subside.
What’s always present, no matter what may be occurring? What’s just on the edge of your perception, peripheral but always with you? As you experience letting go, is there something that meets those feelings within you?
You won’t get lost
When I ask my clients to let go and meet their feelings fully, every one of them expresses fear.
Fear of being overwhelmed by what they feel, especially when they’re experiencing anger or deep sadness.
Fear that they’ll get lost in the feeling.
After all, this is usually some aspect of what they’ve come to me to help work through and resolve.
Yet ... what you resist persists.
And when you let go without handing over your identity to the feelings, but instead simply meeting your feelings where they are — well, here’s what one of my clients said: “Letting go is nothing like I ever expected. I’ve always had this stiff, stubborn internal resistance to what I’ve judged as my wimpy vulnerability. But when I just relax and let in what I feel — there’s this amazing, surprising, compassionate strength that meets it, and it’s so astonishingly okay!”
Gently does it
Letting go can’t happen by gritting your teeth and pushing through.
Letting go isn’t about “feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Letting go doesn’t mean you have to “confront” your feelings.
Simply meet yourself where you are — just as you would meet someone you love.
Gently does it.
Allow joy and sorrow
One of my clients recently noticed that letting joy be part of her experience is sometimes difficult for her. She wrote, “There are glimmers of joy, and then there’s an instant flinching back. Something deep seems to hide from it — as if I’ve been in the dark so long that the brilliance of love and joy is painful.”
Let yourself let go into all of what you feel. This isn’t only about how you meet the difficult aspects of your life!
Open arms, open heart
That’s all it is: just an expression of open arms and open heart to yourself.
And that’s a pretty radical notion for many people.
But when you just let go, you open to yourself and your truth in a whole new — and beautiful — way.
“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.” Jalal ad-Din Rumi, 1207-1273, Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.
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