Letting Go of Expectations

During a packed class the other day, our yoga instructor, Jen, said this: “Let go of any expectations. You have no idea what your best looks like.” What a powerful statement that was. Is it not true that if we think we know our best then we might unconsciously slam into a brick wall when we get there?

I’ve experienced this in yoga class before, although there are certainly postures that I have yet to close the gap between where I am and where I imagine my best to be. This is one of the primary reasons that I continue with my practice–I’m not there yet and I hope to never actually get there. For this to hold true, though, I need to let go of expectations.

This concept also rang very true for me this week. For years, celebrating the holiday in my family has followed tradition and so I have the habit of forming in my mind, my idea of how I would like the events to unfold. Naturally, it never turns out quite how I had envisioned and this year was no exception.

Several days before Christmas, my mom came down with a stomach flu that left her unable to keep down food or water. And then other family members got sick. Long story short, we decided to postpone our family gathering until next week. Since my dad’s birthday falls on Christmas day, I spent the day with my parents cooking for my dad.

So here I was, first time cooking a 7-lb beef tenderloin that had been waiting in the fridge for Christmas and that had to be cooked. Several hours later, I served my dad the most tender meat he had ever eaten with some sweet potato fries, cauliflower a la Alice Waters, and a nice pinot noir.

By this time, my mom was able to hold down vegetable broth with rice for the first time in days, so we enjoyed a meal together watching Ben Hur. My mom was happy that my dad had a delicious birthday meal; my dad and I were happy (and grateful) that mom could finally keep something in her stomach, and we all had a relaxing day.

I could have easily been disappointed about Christmas. But because I let go of expectations, it turned out perfect for the circumstances we had. Even better than I had imagined since I now know how to cook a perfect beef tenderloin. : )

The entire family is getting together next weekend to celebrate Christmas and the New Year. How will it go? Don’t know and I’m not going to think about it. I’m just going to let it happen and maybe be pleasantly surprised.

I want to wish everyone a happy holiday and I hope it's been better than ever imagined : )

Loving Others as We Learn to Love Ourselves

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “To love others, we must first love ourselves.” And in some ways, I guess this is true. If we were to walk around despising ourselves, we wouldn’t be of much use to anyone else and we certainly wouldn’t be able to offer any sort of compassion, tenderness, or love. But the following has made me rethink this idea.

I’ve been reading, The Little Book of Letting Go, by Hugh Prather. It’s a very insightful book that explains how to free our minds from things such as worry and conflict, and it outlines a 30-day program with useful exercises to help achieve this. The other day, I read the following passage:

“Even when you pray, if you pray without love or connection, you may have a temporary sense of peace, but you will not touch the eternal peace within your heart. There is no kindness in first thinking of yourself, then trying to be kind to yourself alone. Love is not an act of isolation, and “loving yourself first” is not a step toward happiness. Your will never satisfactorily nurture just your own wounds or your own needs, because those concepts include no unity. Only what joins us to another can make us happy.”

I thought for a while after reading this and understood exactly what he was saying. No amount of praying, meditation, visualization, or positive affirmations will ever get us to true happiness unless we put the results to practice. And I’m not talking about accomplishing our daily or monthly goals at the gym or what we’ve deposited into our savings accounts, or how effective we’ve become at work. Accomplishing these personal objectives may help us to feel better about ourselves, but they won’t ultimately allow us to reach the point of self-love because it’s the relationships we have with others–how we act with and react towards others–how we make them feel and how they make us feel, that will ultimately lead to us loving ourselves. It’s the feeling or the realization that we do have the ability to participate in meaningful and significant relationships with others and the unfolding of those interactions that leads to us loving ourselves. Love can’t exist for long in a vacuum. What’s to love there? Love is meant to be shared. The idea of saving up our love doesn’t work. I can’t even think of a way it can be put away for later or hoarded. If we’re not loving others, then we’re simply not loving at all.

Therefore, I suggest that learning to love others, and the acts of loving others, are what teach us to love ourselves, and if we wait to love ourselves before we try to love others, it will never happen…

Letting Go and Sending Your Fears into Extinction

Many of us don’t realize the magnitude of influence that negativity has on every second of our lives. The sad part is, the majority of this negativity is not directed towards us by others but is fabricated within our own minds. Take fear for example. Every one of us is afraid of one or more things. I’m not talking about scary monsters, but I may as well be because our fears are in our faces like monsters, or like the ferocious dinosaur below.

They are powerful, vivid, ever present, and limit our creative potential because they are energy drainers that feed off of us to grow, thereby preventing our own positive growth and expansion. It’s only when we find the courage to face our fears that they stop growing because we no longer allow them to feed. And very often, when we tackle that scary thing we realize that it isn’t so bad after all. In fact, whatever it is doesn’t change when we face it, our perception of it changes. Maybe it’s trying new a food or going out and meeting new people or getting on a plane. Whatever it is, once the fear is gone, we can replace it with happiness or confidence or the desire to take on more challenges. We can grow.

The inability to let go of things from our past that we cling to through the negative emotions we’ve assigned to them also has an inhibitory and detrimental impact on our personal growth and happiness. These negative emotions can include regret, resentment, anger, hatred or hostility. Like the fear dinosaur, these also invade our minds and bodies suffocating us, leaving no room for possibility or enthusiasm. As a result, they drag us down, sap our vitality and cause us to contract.

The first step to letting go is to identify those events or circumstances that we’re gripping onto and the unpleasant and unhealthy emotion(s) that we’ve linked to them. Next, we must make a conscious decision to let go of those emotions. A sincere attempt at this will initiate the moving forward process and once that begins, that dinosaur begins to appear further and further off in the distance and begins to shrink in size, making room within us for new experiences, learning, happiness, and growth. Eventually, the once powerful negativity becomes a vague feeling that eventually disappears, leaving behind the initial experience or event without any association to bad feelings - and a lesson. And it is this detached lesson that is the ultimate gift to our transformation and growth and in the presence of enough wisdom, will be called upon to make better decisions in the future.

So if you are committed to your own positive evolution. If you want to lead a fulfilling and happy life that is defined by creativity, enthusiasm, possibility and love, then send your fears and negative feelings of the past into extinction where they belong. And save the monuments for the dinosaurs.