Finding True Love - Between ‘Letting Go’ and ‘Holding On’
“What does letting go truly mean? Is it giving up, in passivity and silence?
On the flipside: We seldom talk about letting go of what is pleasurable to our human experience. Here, we want to hold on. “
Our life is abstract. We give labels to make sense of everything around us, wield our control based on known preferences because it gives meaning to our lives. Uncertainty makes us fearful. But if you think of it, everything keeps shifting – like water. We are born, live our human experience through its many facets and then cease to exist. Interestingly, these facets of our life, also go through their own process of birth and death.
“Can we truly hold on to anything then in our waking lives? How can we live well through intention and meaning, amidst such abstractness? “
As separate or as special we may consider ourselves to be, we are deeply enmeshed with everything around us. This gives meaning to our life, a structure to the abstractness. The tiny sapling planted grows into a beautiful flowering plant and bears sweet fruits, because it was nourished by nature’s resources and intelligence – much beyond our limited human capability. Yet also, it was the human who built a protective fence around the sapling, in its tender growing years, to prevent it from being eaten away by the grazing cattle.
He became the carrier to hold patience and care, an enabler in this world to support something outside of himself; To nurture and grow.
“We are always as together, as we are separate. We are both. “
What gives shape to our world, the roles that we choose to play, is defined through our human ego. However, our ego often gets a generalized negative reputation. This is of course only one side of the ego- rooted in an inflated, righteous sense of self which we aim to give-up and truly so. However, it is the same ego that also defines our basal human experience, in its own subtle way. There would be no human experience without an existential ego identity formed through our five senses of feeling and our ability to think. Life without our ego, would be rather colorless.
To Exist, to Be: gives meaning to our life by honoring our unique separateness. Yet also, to rely on the means and resources of this world makes us inclusive to everything around us.
This dependency keeps us humble and rooted, not letting our ego override. It is nature’s way of maintaining balance.
If we pivot into extremes, we end up losing our balance. Mind becomes confused and heart, restless. It takes a certain quality in our own awareness to realize that we have pivoted to one extreme or the other; especially in our world where more is assumed to be better than less. The suffering that arises thereof is nature’s way of telling us to calibrate back into our hearts. We have to feel the discomfort fully- To make better choices between our tendency to cling and not giving up control to believing nothing can be controlled and there is no worth in putting effort.
We are also endowed with the free-will to change course. Here is where we learn our toughest lessons – To navigate our lives in the wild interplay of ‘letting go’ and ‘holding on’ through feeling, thinking, choice of action and releasing. When we feel too much-rationality takes a back seat, if we think too much, our mind becomes divisive – we miss being rooted in our intuitive feeling. If our lives are devoted to recurring action – we miss out on our intuitive discernment through feeling and thinking.
The truth is we need a balance of thinking, feeling, releasing and acting to co-exist. None is superior or inferior.
On the surface, it almost seems like letting go is to by-pass a negative feeling- as convenient passivity, or suppression, by trying to think difficulties away. But this does not help us. Even if we think we are letting go, we are not. It is difficult to think and act clearly for this state. Our actions then, will only be myopic.
Passivity or suppression both have a resisting quality to them. It makes us tense and clouds our thoughts; this is not letting go in the true sense.
Wisdom is knowing that we need to pause here; To take time for ourselves and calibrate back into our heart’s center. We need to fall back into this place of trust and be guided by our own moral compass towards the right path. Letting go, then becomes natural. The tension in our mind and body shifts on its own. There is no force or coercion. It is almost magical to witness how it happens.
Letting go is a silent, sanguine understanding that this experience is a changing one. It is a restful quality of our intuition that invites us to recognize our own capacity to weather storms, which is larger than the experience itself. Our experience is just like a drop from the ocean. Letting go, is not an act or a performance. It is falling back into the trusting space within our own hearts, when difficulties arise; also allowing them to run their course. We take help, we offer help. We live and celebrate our interconnectedness with every form around us.
Letting go is not forceful, it is deeply patient. It is relinquishing our ego when we feel we can conquer it all.
Letting go also means that our pleasant experiences, change. A life designed purely around pleasure and comfort is incomplete. We subconsciously create this from wanting to avoid discomfort. Whatever idea, identity, status, modes of convenience we are holding onto, are all shifting. Suffering naturally follows when the conditions of pleasure that we cling to, change.
This does not mean we become anxious and avoid experiencing joy. It is true that when we get what we want, we feel happy. But when we also understand that this happiness is sitting on a bedrock of changing conditions, we understand impermanence. Irrespective of how pleasurable our experience may seem in the moment, they change. We release control.
A new world now opens up; the ‘World of Contradictions’ within us. This deepens our ability to reflect our lives from many angles. We understand how our identities and choices in life arise from the seat of changing contradictions, that we earlier held as sacrosanct and unshakeable.
We now understand why good and evil both have their place in this world and why light cannot exist without darkness. We have enough space in our hearts for these polar differences to co-exist.
This can be both groundbreaking and unsettling. When this realization deepens in our day-day lives, we soften. This settled space is where we experience true peace within our hearts- however momentary it may be.
When we learn to truly let go, what arises then is our intuitive ability to act; By choice – not by compulsion. This gives us the power to create new possibilities in the world around us, including ourselves. This effort arises from our seat of love, our heart’s compassion to steer change. This has the true ability to change the course of extremities within and around us.
We now understand why hatred cannot be countered with more hate, why true love cannot arise from fulfilment of conditions outside of us. We have the free-will to create loving change, only when we have made the effort to meet our difficulties with the tenderness of our own love. It is an act of deep self-compassion. We need to fall back into our heart to investigate and live this journey to the best that we can, refining our lives through our good intentions. It is almost as if life knows best that it is now time to deepen our self-love, and we cannot move forward without it. This may not be easy but every penny’s worth towards a more fulfilled life.
We may also have people to support us through their acts of love. Issues arise when we hold on to this, as permanent and feel that we are incomplete without it. We feel that love needs to be provided from outside of us. We are not letting go but holding on to something outside of us to make us feel complete.
We miss out on the opportunity to generate true love from within us by realizing our own Completeness.
When we receive love, we accept it fully. When we reciprocate this with our own love, we create a stronger bond that is beyond the happiness that one gets beyond meeting wants and need, which are temporary. We know that the fence protects the plant while it grows and that it is of little value when the plant grows into a tree. We are ready to remove the fence when the time comes. We now realize and practice Love.