One Year of Letting Go

It’s been a little more than a year now since I started letting go consistently. What has happened for me in that time? More than I can cover in a blog post but I’ll share some of the major highlights below.

This post is based on Letting Go by David Hawkins. Reading that book taught me the technique and using the technique as often as possible has benefited me tremendously. I started letting go regularly in the second half of 2020 because I wanted to see if it would help me get over something that I couldn’t seem to get past. Before that year ended, I had gotten over it completely. This astonished me, especially since it took me a while to figure out how to use the technique properly. I also discovered there was a lot more to work through underneath the surface of that particular struggle than I’d previously thought. Still, consistently letting go got me through something in a matter of months that I thought I’d never get past.

While working through that issue, I noticed feeling a lot less anxiety and depression overall in life. Interacting with other people became easier, the social aspects of my job were much less draining, my communication became much more effective, and I felt more like myself than I had since I was a little kid. All this despite not working specifically on any of those issues. This showed me that letting go in one area relieved pressure in all other areas. However, focusing on specific areas is the quickest way to see progress in those areas.

The letting go technique also works for physical problems caused by suppressed emotions. A few times a year I’ll get pain in a certain part of my back from stress. I learned how to let go of the stress that caused me pain earlier this year and doing so, along with a few other measures, got rid of that pain in less than a day. I’ve done the same since that pain came back last week and I managed to get rid of it even faster this time now that I know what I’m doing. The more I let go, the deeper I’m able to go within myself and heal things that need more attention. This includes a number of issues that in the past never seemed to get better regardless of how much work I did on them. They kept coming up and I kept responding the same way every time. Eventually, I found ways to address them. It took working through a lot of guilt and shame to finally start feeling relief from things that had been frozen in me my whole life. Breaking them down into manageable bits has been the key for dealing with my hardest issues. Letting go of anger, sadness, grief, guilt, and fear one by one has done far more than my previous attempts to let go of all of them simultaneously.

As an experiment, I decided to see what would happen if I set aside 15 minutes to let go every waking hour of my day. This meant 4 hours of letting go each day. I did this when I had a rare two days off in a row from work so I had plenty of time to let go and still pursue all my other interests that weekend. I noticed a deep feeling of peace with all background anxiety removed, which is exactly how I feel after getting out of a great float. However, my mood was more stable throughout the day instead of starting lower and then rising incredibly high as it tends to do on my float days. Plus the mood boost was evenly spread throughout the day instead of concentrated over part of the day as it is when I float. After doing several rounds of this on the first day, it became easy to let go automatically even between sessions. Emotions that would normally have been hard to release went away quite quickly and I found it difficult to dwell on anything unpleasant for more than a few minutes. One major realization I got from this experiment was how much fear contributes to anger. Although I’ve let go of a lot of anger, I noticed it kept coming up when certain past situations came to mind. Going deeper, I saw how much fear was still present. After letting go of that fear, the anger also melted away. All of this was even easier the second day. It seems to get easier each day since I’ve kept up this practice as best as I can and my fear of my own emotions is almost entirely gone, meaning I can work through anything now.

In addition to all the letting go work I’ve done over the past year, I’ve also done some other extremely valuable things. The most helpful by far has been working with a life coach for most of this year. More than I ever imagined, that work allowed me to dig deep, identify the sources of my struggles, and work through them with compassion for myself. I’m certain that coaching greatly accelerated my healing process and for that I am immensely grateful. The other beneficial practice was inner child work as described in the book Homecoming. That revealed a lot of issues I hadn’t noticed before and made it easier to work through original pain from early in my life. Both the coaching and Homecoming have involved a lot of letting go work so the letting go technique has been a staple of each personal growth milestone I’ve reached and practice I’ve undertaken this year.

Letting go throughout 2021 has taken me to entirely new levels. Even before 2020 ended, a number of people close to me noticed my major personal growth, and that has only become more common over the course of 2021. The recent progress I’ve made from the above experiment, as well as continuing it as much as possible since then, has allowed me to remain in a state of peace for longer than I ever have before. The small amounts of stress or other negativity I’ve experienced since that experiment began have been much less intense than they were before and they’ve also gone away much faster. I plan to keep this up going forward as it seems to be the secret to continued progress. If you haven’t yet, please either check out the Letting Go book or at least read some of what I’ve written about the technique (especially the link in the second paragraph of this post) so you can start practicing it yourself and see how much it can do for you. I look forward to continuing to grow with the letting go technique and seeing where it takes me over the next year.