Letting go is the key to being effective in any relationship.

At any moment, your life is exactly the way that it is. You are the way you are and the people in your life are exactly the way that they are. This is true whether you like it or not. When you fight and resist the way your life is, and how it may become, you

create a state of fear and upset that destroys your effectiveness and almost always makes your situation worse. You close down inside. You get tunnel vision and lose your ability to see clearly. You then interact in a way that destroys love and creates opposition and resistance against yourself.

To handle a situation, you need action, not resisting. Resisting destroys love and keeps you from seeing the action that you need to take. If you could let go of your resisting, you would restore your peace of mind and your ability to see clearly. You could then take the action you need to effectively handle your situation.

"Letting go" is the inner action that removes the resisting which in turn releases the fear, upset and tunnel vision. The moment you let go, everything seems to change. With the fear and upset gone, you become creative and able to discover solutions you could never have seen before.

To see how this works, let's look at the nature of fear. Fear is created by avoiding and resisting a future possible event. For example, let's say that you are married and that you are resisting the possibility of your spouse leaving. The more you resist this future possible event, the greater your fear.

As your fear increases, so does the chance of your fear coming true. You become threatened and hang on even more. This in turn pushes your spouse further and further away. By avoiding and resisting this future possible event, you create a state of fear and upset that tends to bring you the very event that you are avoiding. This is the nature of fear.

To have a fear lose its power, you need to do the opposite of resisting. You need to be willing for the fear to happen. You don't have to like it, and you don't have to sit around and do nothing. You just have to be willing.

Letting go is strictly a state of mind and is totally separate from your actions. Letting go is what removes the fear and upset so that you can see what action works. For example, in your heart, be willing to lose your spouse. But in your actions, do everything you can to create an environment where he or she would never want to leave.

The moment you become willing to lose your spouse, fear and upset lose their power. The tunnel vision disappears and you become able to interact in a way that creates love and greatly increases the chances of the person staying.

To let go of your resistance and to restore your peace of mind, be willing for your life to be however it is and however it may become. You do this by granting permission. "I am willing for my spouse to leave." I give my spouse full permission to be exactly the way he or she is." "I am willing to lose my home."

Let go of your demands and expectations for how your life should be and make peace with the way your life is. Restore your peace of mind and your ability to see clearly. Then take whatever action you need to have your life be great.

Steps for letting go

To make the process of letting go a little easier, there are two very important steps that you can take. The first step is trusting. Trust that no matter what happens, you will be okay. Now this doesn't mean that life will turn out the way that you want it to. Life often doesn't. Trust is knowing that however life turns out, you will be fine.

When you know that you will be fine no matter what happens, letting go becomes relatively easy. You can see what needs to be done and the probelm area gets resolved. This reinforces your ability to trust.

When you don't trust, life becomes threatening. You fight, resist, hang on and withdraw. You then make everything worse, which reinforces "don't trust." We don't notice, but trust is a choice. Trust is something you create. It's a declaration. "I will be okay no matter what happens. I trust, just because I say so."

Trust is also telling the truth. You really will be fine no matter what happens. Just look in your past. You have had difficult times before and you made it through every one of them. If you are in a difficult time now, you will make it through this one too.

Life is only threatening when you resist. So stop resisting and trust. Trust that no matter what happens, you will be okay. The second and most important step in the process of letting go is to be willing to feel your hurt. This is important because it's the automatic avoidance of this hurt that forces us to resist.

We think that we're resisting our circumstances but we're not. We are resisting all the feelings and emotion that are being reactivated by our circumstances. More accurately, we are resisting a very specific hurt from the past. We are resisting the childhood hurt of feeling not good enough, worthless, not worth loving, or some other form of feeling not okay.

Once you find and heal this hurt, the need to resist or hang on disappears. You can flow with whatever happens and take the action you need to effectively handle your situation.

Finding and healing this hurt is one of the most important things you can ever do. It is responsible for all your fear and all your upsets. It is responsible for all your self-sabotaging behavior and ultimately, all of your suffering.

Example

Ginger was so afraid of losing Paul that she tried to control his every move. Whenever she felt threatened, she would get angry and upset. Without knowing, Ginger was pushing Paul further and further away.

She was afraid of losing Paul because if he left her, this would reactivate all her hurt of feeling worthless and not worth loving. To avoid this hurt, Ginger hung on. Once she realized this, Ginger started working with her hurt. She allowed herself to feel all the hurt of being worthless and not worth loving. As she did this, the loss of Paul ceased to be a threat. She became willing to lose him. She didn't want to lose him, but she was willing.

The moment Ginger was willing to lose Paul, the fear and upset lost its power. She saw her situation clearly and saw what she needed to do. She met with Paul and apologized for hanging on. She told him to do whatever he needed to be happy, even if this meant his leaving her. She told him that she loved him and that she wanted him to stay, but that she was willing to lose him.

Within a few days, Paul realized that it was safe to be around Ginger. He even enjoyed their time together. Soon, Paul felt so loved and able to be himself around Ginger that he didn't want to go anywhere. By being willing to lose Paul, Ginger was able to keep him.

The audio set, How To Divorce As Friends, and the book, Get Your Power Back, also show how to find and heal this hurt. Both are available on audio cassettes and CDs.