Letting Go Transcript

Rhea: Six months after my first session, when I had just met my shadow.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: I remember standing outside the gym talking to you and saying, I just need to let this go. I just need to let this go. Almost like parroting it in my head, and you turned to me and you were like, you need to accept that you feel this way and it's okay, and in that moment I suddenly felt relief. For three days when I couldn't sleep and I was really stressed and a big part of that was me just telling myself how wrong I was for having any emotional reaction at all to a situation that didn't warrant it. By you saying that, it allowed me to stop for a second and go, I do have these feelings and I'm not ready to let it go yet. If I didn't have them, it would mean that I didn't care . . . and I did care. So no, I'm not going to let it go. I'm just going to say, Oh that was really nice and I'm sad that it's no longer there. And that gave me the perspective to step back from it enough to then eventually allow it to fade into my memory and unwittingly then let it go.

Liz: Or heal it. Because I don't think we ever let people go or experiences go. We just allow our memory to absorb it because we've been able to process it completely. Our mind loves to tell us, let it go. Don't think about it. As you experienced, doing that was really just denying your feelings.

Rhea: And it did the opposite. Instead of being able to let it go, it made me unwittingly hold onto it for longer.

Liz: Totally. Then it becomes this obsession.

Rhea: Trying to let go drove me crazy because there was half of me that was so desperate to heal and be okay, and there was another half of me that wanted to acknowledge the wound.

Liz: Yeah.

Rhea: Ping-ponging between the two, I was going out of my mind, Oh, I'm fine. No, I'm not fine. I'm fine. No, I'm not fine. And it was going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth till it got to a point where I was like, Now, I'm not fine.

Liz: It's an emotional ping pong.

Rhea: Yeah.

Liz: Isn't that the irony? You could spend months and months just playing over those moments—who said what, who texts what? Over and over, replaying every single breath. We're always going to go back to the same place, which was what did I do wrong? And that's that place of judgment that we always have to get back to, because that's rarely ever about the person. It's about the judgment that we hold around what that relationship with that person brought out in us.

Rhea: Totally.

Liz: You were holding on to so much judgment because you were telling yourself I want to be okay but I'm not okay, and so you were having this battle of your emotional body needing to heal and your higher self wanting to support that. But your mind was saying that this doesn't feel good, so we need to get over this so come on already, because our mind doesn't like pain. It doesn't like discomfort, doesn't like feeling like we did something wrong and all our emotions really need is just space to say, can you just let me breathe? We can't catch our breath when we're on that emotional hamster wheel, can we? We're out of breath, because we're trying so hard to avoid feeling anything.

Rhea: In that instance, it was very much to not feel like I cared anymore, and in others it's to pre-empt getting hurt.

Liz: The way through that is really understanding what forgiveness is. As important as it is to forgive other people, it's also important to forgive ourselves. Forgiveness isn't necessarily about saying it is okay what you did. It is about giving it back. It's about saying, I understand that you were just a character in this story. You sort of contracted and chose this person for your own growth and evolution, so this person behaved exactly as they were going to. Maybe it's not what your mind was thinking or hoping, but they certainly did it and so you're saying, I give this back to you now. The story's over, but it takes time to get to that point where you can say that.

Rhea: I understand basically what you're saying. Forgiveness is kind of saying, look, I wish things could have worked out differently, but they didn't.

Liz: It's accepting that things did not work out.

Rhea: Okay.

Liz: The way you had perhaps wanted or thought that they would or expected.

Rhea: But knowing that they worked out in a way that was for your greater good.

Liz: Always.

Rhea: I don't see what you are giving back exactly.

Liz: You're taking the lesson, the good stuff, and then you're saying all the other shit that I got from this, the disappointment that I start to anticipate that other people are going to be treating me this way, et cetera et cetera. I'm going to give that back to you. I don't need that. When we're healing emotionally from something—a trauma, disappointment, a relationship, what have you—we think that often the first thing we must do and the quickest way to heal is to forgive. Sometimes in that concept of forgiving, we're denying how we felt, how that experience made us feel.

Rhea: I learn best through feeling. By denying how the experience feels, I'm not actually not learning the lesson.

Liz: We really need to be able to legitimize our feelings and stop saying, let it go and forgive. We keep stunting our growth through this very simple concept.

Rhea: Acknowledge how you feel. Let that lead to the lesson, and once that lesson has been integrated.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: You're able to give back or release.

Liz: Yes. Release. Very much.

Rhea: Release the patterns and the negativity that you could carry forward and affect new relationships, but at the same time keep the good, which is the lesson and the growth.

Liz: You're not giving it back to the person, as in you are not necessarily throwing it back in their face. It's not like that. You're just saying I'm willingly giving back, so you're exercising your free will. You're willingly giving back the part of the story that you don't want to carry anymore. But yeah, we don't have to keep using that word. I think it's still a nice word— forgive, to give back—but I like release.

Rhea: But it's not letting go. Releasing isn't letting go.

Liz: No, no, no, no.

Rhea: Because releasing is allowing that lesson to integrate, releasing the judgment and the pain that comes from it.

Liz: And then you allow that to guide your mental body because that's your mental body that's trying to be pre-emptive. It's trying to write the story in a way that is in your favour. Now this doesn't hurt as much as I think. If I just let it go, then I can move on. It could be any kind of relationship. It could be friendships.

Rhea: It could be a shitty thing that happened.

Liz: Oh yes, absolutely. A work thing. So there's so many ways in which we use “letting go” as an excuse to not sit with our pain. So in a case where you are forming a connection or somehow in this dance with a person and then you have to decide, am I going to let this one go or do I want to hold onto this? It's a different form of the letting go and it's still a relevant one.

Rhea: Yes.

Liz: Because it's not totally the end of something, but you also don't know if it's quite going to go anywhere either and so you end up on that emotional hamster wheel for another reason. And it could be that we make the decision to hold on a little bit longer because we haven't fully processed the lesson and if we haven't fully processed the lesson, we will not grow. And so that's when we end up in a karmic loop because if we haven't fully learned the lesson, the universe is going to send us an opportunity to learn the lesson. And that's why sometimes people turn around and they think, why am I meeting the same type of person? Or if it's a different person, but yet it's the same scenario over and over. Why am I stuck in this? And that's when we say, well then you make karma your bitch and you ask yourself, what is it that I'm not learning? What is it that's keeping me from growing? And often it is because our minds are telling us this is done. Let it go. Move on. There are more people out there that we can go and have fun with and who's going to really want us and we can enjoy ourselves. Okay. That's cool.

Rhea: And this looks like you're going to be in pain, so you might as well go now.

Liz: Jump ship.

Rhea: Jump ship now before the pain actually comes.

Liz: Titanic is sinking!

Rhea: Literally.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: Let’s bounce. We haven't finished this yet, but let’s bounce because I can see the ending and the ending is not going to be a . . .

Liz: That's not fun. Who wants the ending of anything? Just keep the story going. We're going to keep having fun. And so then we find ourselves on many first dates or many first and second dates before things fizzle, or we anticipate there's going to be disappointment around the corner. We are not saying, okay, wait, let me, hold on. Let me just take a look at this for a moment. Let me sit with this so that it can teach me what it really wants to teach me, as opposed to my mind trying to guide it, allowing my emotions to guide my mind. Once you've been able to sit with your emotions then to allow those emotions to inform your mental body, as opposed to your mental body trying to control everything and then everything gets thrown out of whack. It's also okay to sit with it. Give it some time, give it hours, days, weeks. Because if you are very aware, at least that something's going on, the truth will come. The knowing will come. We just need to be a bit more patient. Even if you don't know what the lesson is, even if you don't know what's coming, even if you can't see the end, but you can sense the end or whatever is going on, just always ensure though that you can be as honest with yourself about it as possible. 

We tend to deny our feelings and that's how we can be honest. It's just be honest about what we're feeling at any given moment, and at the same time you can never know what's going on in another person's head. So it's important to stop projecting how you would be feeling if you were in that scenario. We're constantly feeling for other people more than we're feeling for ourselves.

Rhea: The main lesson with Unrequited Love and the main lesson with Adventures in Connecting is that once you trust yourself enough to know when you've gone as far as you can, then you'll turn around because you know inside that there was a line that you will not cross. So when you're worried that just around the corner there's pain or just around the corner, there's an ending, whether it's by your hand or theirs, then you're going to try and control it.

Liz: Oh yeah.

Rhea: To avoid the pain. But that might not be the lesson at all. That lesson might be done. It might be completed. What my brain is doing is telling me it's that again.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: So let's act accordingly and avoid that pain that we know.

Liz: Yes. The familiar one.

Rhea: The familiar pain.

Liz: The familiar situation.

Rhea: Rather than going, well, that's it. How am I actually feeling? Is this a new lesson? What is this lesson? Or why don't I just let it be, and see? Because we as people can get to a point where we have enough trust in ourselves that when something is obvious, when it's not unclear, when it's not confusing, when it's not murky, when those feelings and those emotions are really quite clear and strong and are telling you something that you know, you will act accordingly. So trying to pre-empt how you're going to feel and what you should do about it now to avoid it, you'll miss the lesson entirely because it might not be the lesson that your mind is telling you that it is.

Liz: Ah-ha. Yes, very true.

Rhea: So really what you have to do is sometimes just say, I feel confused. I feel scared.

Liz: Although to be fair, the one thing about confusion, I always find our emotions are quite clear. It's our mind that causes confusion because it questions our emotions.

Rhea: And trying to rationalize that is making my mind go nuts. Allow the emotions to come up, quieten the mind because you'll just feel it. Then what happened is you can really know what the fuck's going on and why you feel the way you do or if you're not able to do that. You're just able to recognize the feelings themselves.

Liz: Exactly.

Rhea: The first place to start is actually letting go the hamster wheel with the thoughts of trying to justify why and how we should or should not be feeling the way we are. You quieten that down. You accept that you feel the way you do, even if you can't name it and only then you can start on the path of being able to accept it and allow it.

Liz: How about we go from letting go to letting be and that's just allowing, releasing ourselves from the story. Being able to unhook each and every one of our bodies from the story and processing the issue fully so that we can embrace the lesson and grow. It takes time and it doesn't necessarily take a year. Like I remember when I was younger, and it was always like a year relationship is two years of recovery or something like that. Evolution is such that it doesn't take that long anymore, but we're also in a world where everything is happening so fast and we have so many things being served up as distractions, as various coping mechanisms that the healing can take a long time if we refuse to pay attention to ourselves and tend to our emotions, as opposed to just losing ourselves and distracting ourselves and getting involved with other people or just randomly going on dating apps because we need someone else to make us feel better about ourselves. And so for my own benefit, I just have to say it does not always happen in a day.

Rhea: You know how we said your stories create your reality and often the best way to change your reality is to change your stories. When it's time for the story to finish, however it's going to finish, you will know without a doubt.

Liz: And ultimately it will finish, even if the person is still in your life. Whatever this is, will find some sort of end in order to create a new beginning, whether it be with yourself and a new character in your story, or the same person. Who knows?

Rhea: Exactly. So however the story ends, you'll know it. So until you do, it's okay just let it be, rather than let it go.