I started my self-improvement journey in 2017. That journey went to the next level in late 2020 when I started practicing the letting go technique that I first learned from reading Letting Go by David Hawkins in 2019. While 2020 and most of the years since have been incredibly painful, I have healed enough to reflect on how it’s gone. Let’s explore some of those reflections together in this post.
Over time, my journey has gone from self-improvement to healing. There is a lot that I added to my life in the first few years of taking this stuff seriously. In contrast, the last 5 years have been more focused on removing things, mostly various kinds of emotional pain from different points in my life. By far the greatest pain I’ve dealt with in my life is the death of my dog Sawyer in April 2022. Nothing has made me cry longer and harder or depleted me so much. Thanks to using the letting go technique every day since that dreadful day, most of the pain around Sawyer’s death is now gone, thank goodness. As such, I often forget how bad that pain was until I look back at things I wrote or reflect on things I did to cope with the pain while it was still overwhelming. Just as David Hawkins wrote in Letting Go, once all the emotions around a particular situation have been surrendered, the memory of that situation and all its pain tends to go away. It’s been incredible to verify that for myself.
The fact that I’ve released so much of the pain of Sawyer’s death allows me to focus more on other kinds of pain, especially deep-seated pain from early in my life that has never been healed. In a way, the pain around Sawyer was easier to heal than the early life pain. The Sawyer pain was much fresher, easier to experience, and so overwhelming that I had to work through it. In contrast, the early life pain has been suppressed for so many decades at this point that it’s extremely difficult to reach, let alone work through, especially since I’m so used to it by now. Additionally, all of the healing work I’ve done has always been easier when I can focus more on the feelings than whatever thoughts arise out of those feelings, and I have decades’ worth of thoughts built up around the early life pain. That’s another major obstacle to healing that particular pain.
There are several things helping me with the deeper pain. One of them is focusing on just one emotion at a time. With this particular pain, I often feel a combination of fear, anger, sadness, disappointment, shock, and several other emotions. That can be quite overwhelming. By tuning in to whichever emotion is strongest at any given moment, I can let that run its course more easily than if I try to release them all at the same time. That also prevents an onslaught of thoughts that distract me and take me away from the healing work.
Another huge help is remembering the successful healing work I’ve already done. A big pain that I healed toward the end of 2020 is especially useful for that. I got quite creative with how I addressed that and went at it from all kinds of different angles. The final piece of that puzzle was realizing that I didn’t have to try to bear anyone else’s pain in that situation. Once I let go of that expectation, the deed was done and I was free. I have a feeling that a similar approach will also help me work through this lifelong pain.
Working through the pain from 2020 felt like walking a long road, and healing the pain from Sawyer’s death was like swimming a long way to shore after a shipwreck. Working through the early life pain is more like chipping away at a mountain. Given enough time, I’ll have worked through it all. The only question is, will I have enough time over the remainder of my Earthly life to make that happen? The 2020 pain was easier and faster to work through since I was still floating in sensory deprivation tanks at least once a week, and I made working through the Sawyer pain my main focus for almost two years because I had almost no obligations during that time. Now that my day job takes up so much of my time during the week and my hobbies and interests take up so much of my time on weekends, I often wonder if that leaves me enough time for the major healing work that has gotten me through some of the darkest times in my life. My healing progress seems minimal at this point and sometimes I even seem to regress. That’s always disheartening.
My focus as of late has been to let go as best as I can, wherever I can. While I prefer to let go while sitting or lying down with my eyes closed for 15 minutes at a time, I’ll take whatever I can get at this point. That might mean lying down to let go for just a few minutes, feeling through some emotions while driving, or letting old issues run out in the background while engaged in another activity. Slow progress is better than no progress and far better than regression. I hope that continuing to do this while also getting in some longer letting go sessions when I can will take me back to the wonderful place of peace that I glimpsed years ago and finally let me live there for the rest of my days.