The Little Book of Letting Go. Hugh Prather
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one that will be lots of fun and meet all the gardener's needs.
The reason a garden “blesses” a gardener, a pet blesses a pet owner, a child blesses a parent, and a spouse blesses a spouse is that we feel love; we have the experience of love. But we have that experience only when we ourselves love. If you don't love, the most devoted pet, child, or lover will not lay one finger on your heart—it just doesn't work that way.
For thousands of years, in song, sonnet, and scripture, we have been told that love feels wonderful. Most people assume this means that being loved feels wonderful. And it does. But before you can know “that loving feeling,” first you must love. When you love, you receive far more than the feeling of being loved. The apostle John said, “Love one another, because love is of God. And everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. But the unloving know nothing of God, for God is love.”
Because it is a fact that when people love, they immerse themselves in the experience of love, we can find parents all around us who feel deeply, blessedly loved by their damaged children, their genetically confused pets, and their overweight partners. We can find couples so old that they are shriveled who see and feel the beauty of love pouring like sunlight from each other's bodies. For this to happen, all you need to do is respond from your quiet, united, loving mind, not from your busy, fragmented, disconnected mind.
Please understand that none of us jumps straight from a conflicted approach to life to one of pure unity and peace. That of course is the choice, but, realistically, we are either heading in the direction of one or the other. We can have a growing sense of inner wholeness and be increasingly at peace with our life and the people in it, but we will have not-so-good days and many not-so-good moments. All we can do is the best we can today. It is the direction of our life that matters, not whether we have reached some perfect stage of letting go. It is enough to make a little progress each day. This is a more encouraging and productive goal than attempting achievement.
I have often used the following story to illustrate the effects of responding from wholeness as compared to responding from conflict.
Running in the Hall
Gayle and I were leaving a gymnasium where we had just watched our son Jordan play basketball. As we walked down the long hall toward the exit, three eight-year-old girls came running past, animatedly talking and laughing. As they passed the man in front of us, he harshly yelled, “Don't run in the hall!”
This slowed them almost to a stop. They were obviously confused about why they couldn't run in this virtually indestructible hallway.
When we caught up to them, the man was almost out of sight, and Gayle said, “He didn't say you couldn't skip!”
The girls immediately started laughing and skipping down the hall. We could hear them say, “No, he didn't say we couldn't skip!”
Gayle, as she so often does around children, saw these girls' core of innocence and fun and simply responded from her whole mind. If she had been judgmental of the man and said to them, “What a grouch. I think you should run if you want to,” the girls might have started running again, but they would have run defiantly or fearfully and not with the lightness of heart they had before. Although their speed would have increased, their minds would have been conflicted and uncertain.
In practical terms, responding from our whole mind means that the problems that are important to others, especially our loved ones, are important to us. For instance, a parent who loves a child does not look down on or dismiss that child's fear of thunder. If we consistently felt our oneness with our partner, we would never look down on our partner's money fears, driving or flying fears, aging fears, or fear of embarrassment. If your reaction to your partner's fear—or any other form of distress—is disdain or irritation, you do not want oneness or even friendship with your partner at that moment.
To claim that our desire is to nourish our bond with another and then to turn around and act from separateness is simple hypocrisy. First we have to admit that we cherish our separateness and look long and honestly at that fact. Then we have to find that place in us where our feelings are deeply our own. It is a place of oneness and happiness, and from there we extend outwards what is changeless about us.
Letting Go of Problems
It has taken longer to describe the process of letting go than it sometimes takes to do it. In real time, it can be more like: “I don't have to feel this way. Here's how I want to feel.” And then the weenies are cooked in peace. (Which is what eventually happened.)
You don't have to “feel this way,” because these are your feelings. One quick, honest look at them is occasionally all that's needed to remind you of that place where you can gently lay your conflicts and concerns. Usually a great deal more is needed—hence this book. We have gotten so caught up in our feelings of righteousness, put-upon-ness, irritation, cynicism, and the like that we have forgotten we can even feel another way. As a people we have come very close to entirely losing our belief in love that lasts, commitment that doesn't waver, and peace that cannot be disrupted.
At first, letting go can appear to be a daunting if not hopeless task. Our life and world are littered with endless problems, all of which we think we would dearly love to let go of, yet seldom is even one difficulty released completely. Everyone, it seems, moves from one problem to the next with no real season of rest. Even in the course of a single day, “it's just one thing after another.”
So central are difficulties to the meaning of people's lives that we usually define the individuals around us by their problems. Notice this the next time you hear someone who isn't present being discussed. Whether positively or negatively, their problems are being highlighted. This is true of our own self-definition as well. We tend to think of our identity, and even the overall meaning of our life, in terms of the difficulties we encounter.
We also believe we can gauge how severe other people's problems truly are, yet what might be a minor problem to one person can preoccupy another. There are two neighborhood cats, born and raised in the wild, who have adopted us. They love us so much that they bring us a portion of every bird, rat, and lizard they kill. Cleaning up these gifts is not a problem for me, but when I am out of town, it's a problem for the rest of my family. On the other hand, I would have to concentrate very hard to exchange e-mail with certain people in peace. Yet Gayle handles this task in stride.
It isn't that some people have a truly difficult life while others get off scot-free. We have all seen individuals go through shocking tragedies in relative peace, and we have seen ourselves and others eaten up by the daily grind. Enough happens in the course of a normal day—that is, there is enough raw material for the mind to work on—for any of us to justify being unhappy.
Problems assault us to the degree they preoccupy us. The key to release, rest, and inner freedom is not the elimination of all external difficulties. It is letting go of our pattern of reactions to those difficulties.
During the past twenty-five years of family counseling, Gayle and I have found ourselves continuously in awe of the basic happiness of most small children who live in abusive homes. It usually takes years of physical or emotional trauma before this fundamental state is finally destroyed. Live television reports from war zones, refugee camps, and areas of famine often capture the capacity of children to play and be happy in circumstances of unthinkable horror. However, to see the difference between how adults and children approach life, it isn't necessary to look further than a party.
Lisa
In the late 1970s, shortly after Gayle and I met Jerry Jampolsky—the child psychiatrist who founded the Center for Attitudinal Healing—he invited us to attend the Center's first Christmas party. It wasn't possible for Gayle to make the trip to Tiburon at that time, so I was alone when I entered the long room where all the children were gathered.
I was shocked by what I saw. Before me were kids in wheelchairs and on crutches, kids with muscular dystrophy and Hodgkin's disease, kids with