One of my favorite books is Letting Go: The pathway of surrender by David R. Hawkins.
David was the founding Director of the Institute for Spiritual Research, Inc. (1983) and Founder of the Path of Devotional Nonduality (2003). His life was devoted to spreading ideas in the areas of health, healing, recovery, spirituality in modern life, consciousness research, and meditation.
This book is all about releasing negative feelings and becoming free. It is a guide to dropping what weighs you down so you no longer find yourself being involuntarily reactive.
Adopting these practices has been proven to have a positive impact on the body, interpersonal relationships, and consciousness. Doing so also decreases disease, cravings, conflict, self-sabotage, and dependency.
We fear feelings because we have no conscious mechanism to handle them as they come up and because we are afraid to face them as they accumulate. This pressure builds up and erupts as thoughts.
But now there is an alternative.
What happens when we don’t let go?
All negative emotions prevent connection with others. They mean that you want recognition, appreciation, or to be right and this makes others defensive such that they either avoid or attack. They also leave us open to exploitation.
We learn to handle feelings through suppression, expression, and escape. Suppression pushes feelings aside so that they simmer in the background often causing continuous tension in the body. Expression is a form of venting through a physical or verbal outlet and what remains is often suppressed. This expression often occurs by dumping negative emotions on others. Escape shows up as diversion, distraction, addiction, workaholism, and consumerism. However, if you instead let your feelings go, then energy is no longer wasted in unhealthy forms of emotional management that allow the energy to circulate rather than be released.
So, the source of your stress is actually internal. And, your reactions depend on how much negative emotion is already present to be triggered. Negative feelings instantly cause a loss of 50% of our body’s muscle strength and change the color and size of our energy field. David describes how to use kinesiology (muscle testing) with the caveat that both those involved must be at an emotional resonance with courage or higher.
How to let go
To let go of negative emotions, you shift from trying to find the answer to undoing the buildup that led to the question. You stop being ashamed of negative emotions and embrace them as a path to liberation. As you let go of negative emotions you also stop resisting the positive ones.
Allow the feeling to come up and be fully experienced and run its course until it disappears. Just attend to the physiology and feelings that arise without having to label them individually or collectively. If emotions threaten to overwhelm you then you can use suppression consciously to make letting go possible without flooding. In other words, you control your surrender to manageable aspects. You may experience resistance to your feelings and you treat this exactly the same allowing it to arise and unravel. Perhaps you also need to release a perceived benefit of holding on to it. The same with stuckness or any thoughts that obscure letting go such as limiting beliefs that you have to work hard or suffer to make progress, or that eliminating these feelings will hinder your progress.
You step into the experience of a specific emotion as well as any related emotion. For example, with grief, you may also experience shame, guilt, or anger. Apathy and depression can occur alongside the boxed-in role of victim when you resist or fear your greatness. It can also come from unresolved trauma that you did not know how to handle at the time. The book details letting go of fear, guilt, desire, anger, resentment, and pride, and all facets of these emotions.
What letting go gives you
On the scale of emotions given in the book, the lower ones are destructive (energy-taking) and above a certain threshold, they become constructive (energy-giving). As you move into the energy-giving emotions your vibration has shifted to include courage and you are no longer diminished by the presence of a problem. You now believe that you can handle the ups and downs.
As you empty these emotions you move from self-service (having) to being of service (doing) to having your own needs fulfilled through that service (being). You begin to accept that everyone is doing their best with what they currently have. You realize that they are not to blame because they don’t yet know. Letting go brings unconditional love, peace, removes the course of suffering, and opens the path to realizing your dreams as you are no longer constrained by fears or conditioning.
You observe the mind experiencing positive and negative emotions. You are not your feelings you are just witnessing them. As you become more positive you become clearer and more decisive and less inclined to anticipate, hold expectations, control, or hang on. You move into adopting win-win choices.
This book is for anyone ready to adopt simple practices to bring greater happiness. With commitment, you can establish new habits for dealing with your emotions which will bring a much greater quality of life. As a coaching technique, you can guide the client to embrace emotions. You can also support increase awareness of and releasing mindsets that slow the flow of these emotions. With regular implementation, it can become a familiar part of daily sustenance like eating.
Check out my Self Alignment Program to learn more about up-leveling your own use of the Law of Attraction.
Image by FotoRieth from Pixabay
