Session 8: Letting Go
Positive Affirmation: Today I am making the decision to let go of the things that rob me of my peace. I will let them go with love and gentleness.
Seamus: This chapter starts with an image describing someone holding on for dear life. Why can it be so incredibly difficult to let go of something or someone?
Ned: It is our ego that is holding on. It loves to replay the same day, week after week, month after month, holding on for dear life. It is what the ego/mind does. Our soul holds nothing. It is only the mind that hangs on. Often, we are stuck in our minds, which makes letting go more difficult. Thus, it is hard because what we are hanging on to lives in our mind. The soul is not restrained by desires and worldly things. When it comes to the mental constraints of letting go, what we are hanging on to is generally not living in the present moment.
Almost everything that you are hanging on to relates to what you want for the future or what you are trying to drag from the past into the present. We can affect the future and the past from this moment, but we cannot drag them into it. Accepting what is around us or in our mind right now allows us to embrace what is. We can avoid indulging in the fantasy of our mind. To fully capture life, we must keep moving with it.
Seamus: It can be a real challenge to let go of something. The whole concept of letting go is the same idea of surrendering the will of our mind. For example, you may feel defeated by letting go of something. You might say something like, “My work with this is not done yet,” or “I need to see this thing through.”
Maybe it is an issue with the relationship to our mind and its desires. We create values for things, things that may not even be real or that we assume have a value before we see what they’re really worth.
Ned: It may not be worth much.
Seamus: That is exactly right. It might not be worth anything. It could even be a negative value.
Ned: I have hung on to experiences and objects beyond their expiry date. Those things or memories were not worth the effort it took to maintain them.
Seamus: That too. Right now, I am imagining someone with a huge pack on their back. Certain things that we need to let go of more than others. Some things are not taxing on us, whereas other things have a way of weighing us down. All that weight that we are unwilling to let go of is weighing us down and preventing us from moving forward.
If you were to flip through the contents of what is in the pack, it would be surprising from an outside perspective to see what someone is willing to drag all those miles. The question to ask is, “Do we really need all the things we are holding on to?”
Another may not see the value in what I am holding on to. I want to ask you, what would be the first step to letting go of something and identifying what needs to go?
Ned: I think you already mentioned the first step. We must recognize what we are dragging around. What are we hanging on to? This will be different for everyone. We will need to assess our life to find the answers. There are all kinds of things that we hang on to—mental positions, objects, relationships, and statuses.
As you just described with his concept of dragging around a backpack, what is the cost of our desires? We can look at all the things that we are not willing to let go of. At what cost do these things come to our life? Does it take away from our time with our children? Does it take away from fulfilling our soul’s purpose? Does it keep us up at night and make us tired all day?
This is subjective. Often, we just need to reduce or eliminate the importance of that thing or memory and ask whether we need all these extra things.
Seamus: You also mentioned early on in this chapter that there are a lot of subtle quirks that run automatically in your mind. We spend a great deal of time on autopilot. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Ned: We have up to a hundred thousand thoughts a day. Could you tell me a thousand of them? For the most part, the brain is running on automatic pilot. Our mannerisms are all sort of just happening. We go from one day to the next, behaving the same way and thinking and doing the same things we did yesterday. A conscious life is one in which we are aware of our actions and reactions, so that we understand the program running in the background of our mind.
When the Ishayas told me to watch my mind and look at my thoughts, I thought that was absurd. Why would I do that? When I became aware of my thoughts, I realized there is a lot of stuff going on subconsciously.
Seamus: When you catalogued your thoughts, was there a common theme? Did you notice a common theme or root to the thoughts you were having?
Ned: There are collections of thoughts, depending on your life experiences and the things that you are hanging on to. In the first session I talked about how you cannot tell me what your next thought is going to be. The thoughts coming to you are largely out of your control, but not entirely. If something is in your consciousness, then it is going to start coming to you.
Here is where thoughts are powerful. Whatever thoughts we give life to are the ones that surround us. Whatever surrounds us will eventually drown us, particularly if we respond to self-defeating thoughts. With consistency and time, we create a momentum in what is surrounding us in the mental plane.
By letting go of the things that no longer serve us, we can start to move into more purposeful endeavours. For example, these podcasts that we are doing are a fifteen-part series. It is an ambitious project. But this project will reveal many new things to us. And likely some old things to dispose of as well.
Seamus: Now, another thing I am looking to discuss is our comfort level. We have delved into this a little bit in terms of vulnerabilities and those types of things. How should we or why should we evaluate our comfort levels?
Ned: Let’s put a different spin on this. Try swapping the word comfort with addiction. If we are constantly drinking coffee, we may say, “I love drinking coffee.” When we are honest with ourselves, it is really an addiction. I learned so much about my comforts by attending meditation retreats. When I really took stock, I realized how addicted I was to my comforts. When I broke my routine, I experienced agitation. I had to ask myself, “Are these routines comforts or addictions?”
Fear and fearless are neighbours. They live directly beside each other.
Seamus: Yes, it becomes a pressing concern. So, with you introducing the idea of fear, there is a sentence in the book that I would like to quote here: “When your mind is consumed by fear, that fear feels real.” What I would like to know is, are you suggesting that fear is not real?
Ned: A great deal of our fears are not real at all. I would say a vast majority of them are actually not real fears, but they tend to run rampant in us. Probably nine out of ten fears are about what could happen or what we think is going to happen, rather than what is happening. To quote Wayne Dyer from his Public Broadcasting special, “F-E-A-R is false evidence appearing real.” Many of my fears have been false evidence appearing real. Fear allows weakness to take ownership of our body.
Seamus: How would you define a healthy fear and an unhealthy fear? Because I would imagine that there must be a good side to it and a bad side to it.
Ned: Are there healthy fears? I would say there are logical fears and illogical fears. Being afraid does not necessarily keep us safe. Suppose you are walking on a roof ledge: fear does not keep you safe. Common sense does. Common sense takes you a step back from the edge. Being afraid of falling off the roof does not really keep you safe from doing so.
Common sense is employed to keep us safe in most situations. Is there a healthy fear? I think it is more about having some common sense. Fear is an emotion that arises in us, and that emotion brings information. We do not need to internalize and hold on to the fear. Holding an emotion is like trying to hold a squirrel: the more we squeeze it, the more squirrely it gets.
Seamus: I would like to know the incubation cycle for fear. How long does it take for fear to calcify, and how can a person’s life be affected if that fear is left for too long?
Ned: The classic answer to that question is that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit. When it comes to fears, however, it depends on how traumatic the event was. If you were to fall off a roof, you may have an ingrained fear of heights. The mind lays down traumatic memories much differently than pleasant memories.
In a traumatic event, everything that happens goes into long-term memory. It becomes a little tougher to deal with. This is why it can take longer to retrain the brain after a traumatic stress event. Stressful events lock themselves in long-term storage and are tricky to remove. Fears can calcify very quickly.
Our mental health is something to work on daily. If fears are starting to take over our life or we are replaying a traumatic event in our mind, it is important to learn how to set aside our thoughts and step back from what we are feeling. It also could mean that professional help is necessary.
Seamus: What if our fears are not caused by PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) but are created by small things that chisel away at us over a long period of time? Is it difficult to trace back to the actual root cause of the fear?
Ned: When a fear becomes a habit, it becomes disempowering to us and takes a strong hold on our life. A fear may start as just a little fear, but it becomes a habit, increasing the level of our fear. Eventually, because fear can be disempowering, it can completely take over our life.
Seamus: I’ve heard of situations where fear starts to take over someone’s life, starts to interfere with the person’s forward momentum, squashing out their dreams and future plans. It is important to address why people need to move past their fears and what people can do to begin making small steps towards eliminating them.
Ned: If you maintain a steady practice of staying out of your mind, your fears naturally dissipate. Go to the first chapter of my book Be Love: A Book about Awakening, or the first session of this book. Both talk about learning how to step out of your mind and get present with the moment. By doing so, you take control of your life. To be controlled by a voice in your head draws us away from our self empowerment. It is a privilege to be here. Being trapped in your mind, being controlled by a voice in your head, really does not make a lot of sense.
Here is a different perspective on your mind. Imagine there is a little speaker that hangs from the ceiling telling you what to do every moment of the day. Would you not resent the person on the other end speaking into the microphone, powering up that speaker? The voices in your head are just voices. For the most part they are not yours, or truthful, or even real. Get tired of those voices controlling and running your show.
Seamus: That is a great analogy. It is funny when you use the example of the speaker to turn those voices into an external influence. We all recognize that having a speaker hanging from the ceiling or having someone else tell you what to do would get tiresome very quickly. When you internalize things in your mind, people do think it is them. It is not as aggravating to have your mind telling you what to do because you think it is you. It is not until you draw the comparison directly, where we are being told by a speaker what to do and when to do it, that we may even notice how intrusive thoughts can be.
Ned: Imagine somebody sitting in a room and the speaker in the ceiling is the voice of someone who has abused them and it says, “You are going to think about me for three hours today.” It would not be your choice to do so. The same thing happens in your mind all the time. The reality is we do not have to. Nobody is forcing you to think about anything. You cannot tell me what your next thought is going to be, but you can choose what you think about. That is totally up to you.
Seamus: How people internalize their fears is fascinating to me. I would like to know how the mind amplifies our fears.
Ned: What our mind fertilizes, grows. Fear can be a tiny little seed but by the time we are done with it, it is like a forest; it has multiplied many times over. At the time of conception, it is just a thought. When we nurture that thought, we give it life. We empower our thoughts. If we have a fearful thought and then someone says, “Hey, would you like a piece of apple pie?” we might suddenly forget our fear. The mind can just flip over and start thinking about something else. I guess that depends on how much you like apple pie!
Seamus: Let me ask you this, then. If we are talking about a seed that is planted and then over a period of time it evolves and grows into a forest, as you say, do we have to go in there and start chopping it down tree by tree?
Ned: No.
Seamus: Is it just something where all of a sudden it is not there?
Ned: No, it is a matter of changing our relationship with the mind. If we no longer give our mind importance or, like the speaker in the room, if we just ignore it, it will not be a problem. We talked about this earlier. I was in the middle of a retreat and I was angry because I was still having these same old self-defeating thoughts. Erroneous thoughts had been tearing at my self-worth for years.
I asked my teacher, “When is this going to go away?” I was furious with my mind. “Why does this keep persisting?”
He said, “They may never go away, so you must change your relationship to them.” A staggering reality is that most people are following the speaker in their mind and they do not realize that it is not real. Most of their thoughts are not true, or real. What is revealed to the person who overcomes their fears? The present moment.
When we move beyond our fears, we get over the voices in our mind. We take back our life in the process. We claim our freedom, our joy, and are now free to go deeper within ourselves to access our purpose. We also open ourselves to access love beyond the conditions of the mind. We gain access into the holiness of this moment at hand, for we now see people and our life in their true forms, not in the way we imagine them. Most of what we look at is transmuted by what we think we are seeing. The world does not change, but our perception of it does.
Seamus: Now, the evolutionary effect of fear would be worry. This is where fear begins to manifest into something else. Why is worrying not effective in solving problems?
Ned: Worry is fear taking ownership of our body. Worrying about a problem is like offering a glass of water to a drowning person. It does nothing. I have heard parents say, “It is my job to worry.” Outside of educating your children about how to be safe, worry does not help them. If you think it is your job to worry, I challenge you to take an honest evaluation of worry and what it does for you. Worry is toxic in the body, just like fear. Worry disempowers us and builds stress in the nervous system.
Over time, we get worn out from our fears and our worries. Suppose you have a looming deadline for a project you are working on and I say to you, “You know there are only four days and three minutes left,” and then, “There are only four days and two minutes left. You are running out of time.” After a while your anxiety would be going through the roof. That is what worry does to us. It is like picking a scab. Eventually you pick a hole into yourself with worry.
“One of the interesting things about stress is that our minds can create imaginary situations, and then we play them out as if they were real and in the moment.”
Seamus: Do you believe that we live in a more stressful world today than previous generations did?
Ned: No, I do not. We are becoming more sensitive. We are more in tune with what we are feeling in our environment. We not only pick up more than we have in our past, we are more informed about what is happening in the world. I can open my laptop or my phone and tell you what is taking place on the other side of the world.
Is there more crime and tragedy in the world today? In our not-so-distant past, we did not know what was going on outside of our town. But today, we are overinformed and growing more sensitive to the world’s problems, which we do not have any control over. It is a travesty that our media propagates more tragic news than loving acts or positive advancements in the world.
Our youth are struggling deeply with anxiety today. They are stressed. Stress, coupled with entrapment in our mind and emotions, is a breeding ground for anxiety. One of the problems I see in our youth is they are more in tune. The problem is not their emotions but rather how they are unable to detach from them. They feel their emotions very strongly, and then they also feel other people’s emotions. A few decades ago we hardly felt our own, let alone someone else’s emotions. When we ruminate on our feelings, they begin to grow and evolve into stress in the body. This is a gross misuse of our emotions.
I hear parents saying their kids do not want to go to school because it is overwhelming for them. They are overwhelmed by their senses. We are struggling with over-identifying with our feelings, and in turn, our children do not know how to deal with their growing emotions or how to back up from their feelings. It is not that we live in a more stressful time; it’s that we have become less emotionally intelligent. We are inundated with our emotions, adding to the decline of emotional intelligence.
Seamus: That is a great point.
Ned: We are less resilient. In all our efforts to get through this life unscathed, we have made ourselves a little too comfortable. If you know you always have a soft place to land, one fall can break you to pieces. We need to fall, we need our upsets, we need our heartaches—all of it is necessary to become resilient and strong.
Seamus: Wow, that is an amazing answer, and I could not agree more with everything you just said. The point that you are talking about, with being over-informed—I have a pretty strong opinion about propaganda and things that are coloured to portray certain feelings, anxieties and stresses about what is going on in the world. There are parts of the world I may not travel to because I see stories on the news about what is going on over there and I feel that they must be true.
The thing is, we do not know how filtered this information is to make us feel a certain way. With information being so readily available to us, I do not trust half of what I hear. I could not tell you what is real or not real. I think a lot of people feel, “Well, if it is the news, it is obviously truthful.”
Ned: I have become more in tune with my own life. I am pursuing my own purpose. I spend less time fussing over things outside of my realm of influence. What is important to me now is that I project the most love into my circle or realm of influence. I know where my realm of influence is. It is right in front of me. From one moment to the next, my realm of influence is every person I meet, everywhere I go. That is where my circle of influence is.
When I heard that suicide was on the rise in my community I knew that I had to do what was within my means to add to the solution. I held a charity event that focused on loving self. I did not dwell on the problem. I focused on the solution. I know I did not put an end to the problem, but I gave what I could to help. My books are also part of what I felt I could do.
The problems that people the other side of the world are facing are not in my realm of influence. There is nothing I can do about that right now. So, I do not put my focus on them. Am I less informed? Maybe a little bit. But I feel that stewing over the world’s problems does not create solutions. What good does it do to fixate on the world’s problems? What does that solve? I could sit and worry and complain for countless hours each day however in the end, nothing happens. I have solved nothing. Is this why people need to be informed? So they can sit around and ruminate on problems they do not intend or have the ability to influence or change?
It is just our ego, dramatizing events, because the ego loves nothing more than drama. It loves to wallow in fear. I think the question to ask is, are we more fearful today?
By embracing love and empowerment and letting go of all the things that no longer serve in our life, our circle of influence grows. I am affecting more people because of my growth and willingness to love than I ever have with my worries and fears. If we all focus on our empowerment and really go for the most purposeful life, our circle of influence begins to grow. Think about the podcast that you started—your circle of influence has grown considerably. Now you are here today projecting something loving and positive, and it is going to have an influence in the world. We just may effect what is happening on the other side of the world.
Seamus: Yes. Truer words have never been spoken, man. I see a lot of things on social media, where you get these social justice warriors that will post a video about something that is going on in the world and then they put in their two cents and then a whole bunch of people just feed on it for a minute. It is bizarre to me. Like you said, it is the ego—people just wanting to be seen as a person who cares but are not really doing anything.
Ned: They have a term for it in the Maritimes. They call it kitchen bitching.
Seamus: Kitchen bitching?
Ned: It is when we all sit around the kitchen and start bitching.
Seamus: That is funny, man. Getting back to stress here. Obviously, there is good stress and bad stress. Stress is what gets us out of bed in the morning because we need to go to work so we can pay our bills. We need to differentiate between good and bad stress, though, so what are some tips that you have for us on that?
Ned: You are right. We do need some stress in our life. Good stress motivates us, but bad stress causes immobility. An important part of empowerment is knowing whether the stresses in your life are healthy and productive for you. I do this all the time. I ask myself and I wait for the knowingness inside of me to bring the answer. The secret is to stop talking to ourselves long enough to hear the answer. A good question to ask yourself is, “Is what I am doing worth the stress that it is causing?”
Seamus: Getting back to desires. For an example, what is the cost of the things you feel you need? I see stress as one of the biggest debts to that cost. When you say, “At what cost?” a lot of people immediately think money—how much money does it cost? I feel like the bigger cost is the stress caused by our desires. That seems to be a large cost for a lot of people who are chasing things they do not necessarily need or even really want.
Once you have the object of your desires for a few weeks, the honeymoon phase with that new thing is over. Now how do you feel?
Ned: A lot of things are not worth the stress they create.
Seamus: Yes. Here is another interesting thing—social media and our use of smartphones and how that takes time away from us. I want to quote a statistic that you presented in your book. It reads, “The average person spends up to four hours a day looking at their smartphone. That is 1,456 hours per year.” Let’s pause and think about that for a moment. That is unbelievable! Anyway, I will continue. “If we are awake for 16 hours, we are spending a quarter of the day looking at our phone.”
Again, it is not until you add up the time and you realize the weight and impact of those statistics—that is incredible. Shortly after that statistic is revealed, you say the following: “It is important to give yourself over to fruitful endeavours.” What I would like to ask you, Ned, is this: in your opinion, what are the drawbacks of wasting time with activities that do not yield a net positive result to us?
Ned: Our excessive use of social media and our smartphones takes away from our ability to be healthy and productive. Very little is produced in moving your thumb up a screen, scrolling through Facebook, and yet, I have done lots of it. Today, I tend to use social media to project a positive message. However, some of our unfruitful ventures are necessary. We can learn many things that do not yield a high reward. If they get us out in the world and put us in contact with people, we learn from it. Personally, I have had more fails than wins. Life is not about winning or failing; it is about experiencing and getting to know the true self. I think it is important to ask yourself, “Is this fruitful for me?” Only you can answer this question. Nobody knows what is right or good for you.
Seamus: Yes.
Ned: We live in a time when much of society is trapped in the idea that other people or society knows what is right for them. It is not true. You know what is best for you, and I think when you learn how to dig in a little deeper than the surface of your mind, you can learn how to find your answers within.
I feel we need to be our own guides. Nobody has time to take our hand and drag us around. We must be the one that looks objectively at what we are doing.
Seamus: I think there are two sides to this coin. When it comes to how much time we spend on our phones, I feel like our phones are a tool, just like our minds are. You can achieve a lot through your phone if you use it practically, if there is an objective you are trying to accomplish with it.
You said earlier that you use yours to project a positive message each day. That is great. If people read that and it helps their day, then that is fantastic. You just managed to affect a handful of people with very little effort on your end. It is not like you have to call a hundred different people and say the same thing over and over to them. It is a really great way to get message out to a large group of people.
There are also a lot of people online who use their phones and social media to create brands and brand awareness, because a lot of business takes place on the internet. It is a great way to market things. I am in contact with people that I could not have been in touch with if it were not for social media.
But here is the thing: it is easy to become very addicted to social media. We get a lot of “juice” from it, and when there is this progression happening, it is easy to become addicted to that—and then the next thing you know, you cannot get off it. Now you have created a habit. And then maybe a year later, when you are looking at your phone, you realize you’re on the thing all the time and forty percent of the time, you’re not doing anything.
A lot of people that I know who are social media influencers have pulled away from it because they have noticed that they have become more mindless with it than tactical and objective. But some people run their business through their phone; it is a fruitful endeavour for them to be on their phone. It is providing them with income. But the thing is, we need to employ balance.
Ned: Yes, good point.
Seamus: Now, the other thing is instant gratification. I love this topic. This is a very common issue in our society. There are a lot of people who have no patience. They expect everything to happen very quickly. I want to ask you how patience is crucial in balancing a healthy outlook on our goals, and how we manage our day and monitor our expectations.
Ned: I’m very familiar with long-term goals or delayed rewards. I think any successful person or anyone who has mastered something understands the concept of delayed reward. You, being a professional drummer, must understand the concept of delayed rewards. You did not get to where you are overnight. The three P’s, practice, patience and perseverance, are more easily mastered once we set down our mind. If our mind never interfered with erroneous or random thoughts, patience would not be a problem. Patience is the ability to set our mind down and to remain steadfast to our goal with faith that we will get there.
When speaking to a group of kids at the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), I was asked what it takes to be a tattoo artist. I said, “Practice, patience and perseverance.” There is more sideways movement in your career than there will ever be forward. Life moves sideways for longer periods than it ever moves forward.
I used to watch my artists. They would start out tattooing, and they would get to a certain level and then they would plateau. They would find that they were not moving forward. I would tell them, “The more devoted you are the faster things will move in your life.” If you are an impatient person, learn how to be committed and devoted to the moment at hand and you will find that the things you are wanting will come at an exponential rate. The more devoted you are to your purpose the greater the results.
Seamus: That is great advice. This is just to tickle the drum community for a moment. Jared Falk talks about this quite often: nothing that has a great reward is ever easy, especially the things that require skill. It takes time. It is like, “Who wants to be the best person at watching Netflix?” That is easy to do; there is no skill involved in that. With any challenging endeavour, the reward is going to be more significant, but you must anticipate that it is going to require some effort.
Ned: That is right. Hard work is indicative of great rewards.
Seamus: However, there are micro steps to get there. You will hit these small milestones along the way. Wherever you are in your progress, it is helpful to continue to shoot a little higher each week. Just keep yourself in check with that, so that you are never looking too far in the distance.
Keep yourself within the range of five feet in front you. With this podcast, for example, I always kind of just looked at my feet and kept moving them, and then by the end I looked up and realized, “Oh, wow. Look where I am now! This is kind of neat. I have not looked up in a while.” I think that is important to keep your head down, keep working, and focus on what it is you want. You will progress little by little.
Ned: By applying devotion to whatever you do, you will experience many milestones and gratifications along the way. You may be surprised by the gifts. You will feel a sense of humility, gratitude, reverence. Whatever we pour love into becomes grand.
Seamus: That is what separates the wheat from the chaff. If you are not loving it, the length of the time for which you need to pour effort into something increases. Things do seem happen so fast nowadays. However, there are certain things that do require time and effort.
Another thing I would like to ask you is, how do we learn tolerance? How does intolerance lead to more problems within us?
Ned: I think my book answers this very clearly. I would like to share what I wrote in my book about tolerance.
Tolerance[JM1] can help when you feel that life is out of control or that you need to control what is happening. Your need to control only briefly satiates your ego so, with tolerance, you will find and accept the humanity in others. You open the door for deeper and often unexpected experiences to unfold. These experiences are often positive in nature. Tolerance is just the right button to push when you feel you have had enough.
Intolerance only gives you more to let go of inside your mind and prevents you from moving toward your ultimate peace, whereas learning tolerance lets you and others live amicably while inviting equanimity, especially in the midst of difficult situations. Intolerance feeds selfishness and leads you to believe that you need more than your share. It also forces you to see through a narrow line of vision.
True tolerance is not just a willingness to tolerate another. It is found in your ability to respect other people, their differences, their beliefs, the way they express themselves, and the choices they make. However, that does not mean you should be passive. Taking a stand and finding your voice when you need it is not intolerance. Often the hardest things to say hold the most truth. Tolerance will simply help you get your point across respectfully. This will call others to attention when you speak, but only if you are able to truly embrace tolerance.
Seamus: Yes. Absolutely. Is there is a way to balance a respectful level of assertiveness? Because you mentioned that you do not want to be passive.
Ned: That is right.
Seamus: But how can we maintain a level of assertiveness that we need to be respected but also be tolerant?
Ned: I think it is a matter of self-awareness and maintaining a willingness to love. With these two things, we know when it is time to act or to speak, or when it is time to be silent. One of my favourite quotes is, “Speaking our truth sometimes requires no words at all.” Being assertive sometimes means saying nothing at all.
Seamus: That is funny. There is a lot of content in what we have just talked about, but let’s get back to the question: How do we let go?
Letting go is like dumping a rock out of your shoe. You stop, let it go, then keep walking without looking back. Your hidden power waits for you under all the things you need to let go of.
Ned: Well, I guess I just throw it back to you: how do we not let go? Is it not tiring to hang on to everything? Just the thought of hanging on to everything tires me out. When I reflect on all the things that I needed to hang on to, my life felt like I was pushing the ball uphill. I remember watching the movie with Thomas Keating, A Rising Tide of Silence. Thomas had a dream that he was putting wallpaper up and then, as fast as he could put it up, it was falling off the wall.
He was crying in the dream, and he felt like he was pushing the ball uphill, basically. I can relate to that. Much of my life I felt that I needed to control, I had an unwillingness to let go. It felt like I was constantly pushing. We can release our need to control. You might be surprised at how many things that we can let go of and nothing changes other than your mental position. There is so much going on that we think we need to control, but our control does very little at the end of the day.
Seamus: Well, part of this, too, is learning acceptance and having that be part of your life as well, right?
Ned: That is right.
Seamus: That is the thing: we keep coming back to acceptance and the realization that it is not defeatism to accept. As we discussed, there are a lot of things that we do not need to claim ownership of. We talked about the idea that the more we let go, the more we accept the things that we cannot change or people we cannot change. There are circumstances we cannot change. Is it better just to accept them and let them go?
Ned: That is right.
Seamus: What are some of the mental and spiritual rewards for letting go?
Ned: The mental reward is that we have less stress and we are not as tired. Spiritual—that is an easy answer. We open a space for peace to come in. It takes a great deal of effort to hang on to all our attachments. When the things we are holding have a hold on us, then we have an unhealthy attachment.
I was talking about this one day with one of my clients, and they said, “What do you mean by no attachment?”
I said, “Well, think about this way.” I asked him to put out his hand and I put a stone in it. I said, “Now, close your hand. Now, turn your hand upside down so your palm is facing the ground. If you let go, you are going to drop the stone, right?”
“Yes.” he replied.
It takes a certain amount of effort to hold that stone. “That is attachment,” I told him. “Turn your hand over and open it up. The stone is not going to fall.”
He turned his hand over. He opened his hand and there was the stone. That is non-attachment. That is a metaphor showing how we can hold things in our life. If we hold things with attachment, we cling on to them in fear of losing them. Or we can let go and enjoy what we have without the fear of loss.
No attachment means that we let go of the outcome. We don’t worry about how things are going to turn out. It also means that we learn how to be present in our endeavours. With no attachment, we enjoy each step of the way. Life is not meant to be happy and extremely joyful all of the time, but joy is the heart’s way of saying thank you for following it.
Seamus: Wow.
Ned: That is the difference between attachment and non-attachment and the rewards of letting go.
Seamus: What a great way to sum that up. It is such a simple way to observe something. As I was reading your book, there were nine words that stood out to me. It has to do with our traumas in life: “They are happening for you and not to you.” That is great way to see our life, because there is growth through trauma.
Even great comedians may have had horrible childhoods. That is where they developed their great sense of humour from. So, how and why must people look at their misfortunes and traumas as an opportunity for growth?
Ned: First, I want to share with you who taught me that. It was one of my many great teachers, my friend Susan Weisberger. She is a psychic who lives in Sedona, Arizona. My wife and I met her by chance when we were there on our honeymoon.
It has been a real game-changer for me. What I have learned from this wisdom is that it takes the victim out of the scenario. This simple shift in mindset allows us to extract the lessons out of what is going on in life, instead of being stuck in the sad story that pulls us back to relive the traumas and dramas that have unfolded.
Seamus: It is one of those beautiful simplicities where you read it and immediately understand there is a lot to take in. Then you start flipping through the things that have happened in your life and think, “Man, if I shift my mindset, it makes such an enormous difference.” Suddenly, you can see the value in everything. There are some things in this book that helped me catch a glimpse of the depth of what you’re talking about and I could see, okay, there is a lot more there to really get into. Once we have let go, is there a chance that they can resurface again?
Ned: Yes, they generally do. I think that is something you want to be prepared for. I was talking about changing your relationship to all the things in your mind. When something resurfaces that you need to let go of, stay willing to keep letting go until it becomes effortless or it no longer arises in you.
Seamus: Right. It is just rinse and repeat, right?
Ned: That is right.
Seamus: Some of the burdens people hold on to are very significant. You cannot expect them to be resolved in an afternoon of contemplation or a simple mind shift. This is a practice. Everybody who is listening: this is a practice. Don’t expect that this thing is going to change immediately for you. This is going to take some time, and some devotion as well.
Is there a profound moment where you became a witness to an event unfolding in front of you?
Letting go takes a hero’s heart, for the mind can replay your traumas and dramas your entire life.
Ned: Yes. There is a story I tell in chapter five of my book. It was labelled Panic in the Park. I was helping a friend in a drum booth when this event unfolded.
Panic in the Park[JM2]
One day while helping a friend sell drums at a festival in London, I heard a small child yelling for help. When I looked out from the booth, I could see the child begging people to help her mom, who was lying face down in the grass, crying and hyperventilating. But it was as if the little girl was invisible and no one could hear her cries. I quickly ran over to the girl, took her by the hand, and asked her to come and hold her mom with me. There we were, all three of us on the ground, the little girl on one side of her mom and me on the other. I held her mom and told her she was safe and that she was going to be okay.
After a few minutes, the mother’s panic attack subsided, and her tears gave away to a deep sense of love and peace. We all sat there just looking at each other in love and appreciation for what was present.
After what felt like an hour but was, in real time, likely fifteen to twenty minutes, we all got up, hugged, and parted ways. No words were exchanged. We did not need any. It was such an intense experience of love with two people I had never met, and whom I figured I would most likely never meet again.
That day I listened to my heart. My mind was not necessary. My heart knew what to say and do every step of the way.
The next day while I was helping my friend in the park, the little girl, accompanied by her mom, came skipping into the booth. This time she was full of joy. She presented me with a beautiful painting that her mom had made just for me. Her mom looked at me with open arms. Her only words, through her tears of joy, were “Thank you.”
That experience transformed my heart and taught me about the power of listening to it. That day, my heart was wise beyond words and it delivered truth in action. You open the possibility for your heart/soul to speak when you silence the mind.
It is a good story for this topic. When this woman was having an anxiety attack, she was hanging on to it, but as soon as she felt safe, she let go. I think that is something that we must realize: that we need to drop our fears and understand that we are going to be okay if we let go. When we let go, there is a peace that opens to us.
Years ago, I watched a trainee of mine do their first one hundred tattoos. At times it was like they were squeezing the tattoo out of the tube. I would tell them, “Just let go and relax.” It was not until the artist could really let go that I started to see flow and movement show up in their work.
Letting go in the act of creation is one of the more important parts of the creative process. The truth about creation is that we are just co-creators in the process. I am a witness to what is happening. If you have ever been in the zone or in the silence, you lose your mind in the presence of the moment. It gets so big that you lose track of time and space. If you have ever been there, you will know that you are not hanging on to anything in that moment. You are simply letting go.
“Letting go readies us for the gift of peace to arise in us. It is not that you obtain peace. It is more like you surrender to it within and allow it to gift you with a visit.”
[JM1]This would be another good block quote (have your formatter set it for you). It will set it apart visually for your readers.
[JM2]Another excellent spot for a block quote. 😊