Letting Go, Giving Up, and Moving On

Sometimes there are things that we want so badly in life that we’d do absolutely anything to bring them to fruition. We travel great distances, make tremendous sacrifices in time and energy, and creep to the absolute edges of limits that we never knew we had in order to bring a dream—whatever it may be—to life. There come moments, however, when the universe simply will not bend any further and when the tiniest amount of continued force will cause the whole thing to shatter into pieces.

It is in these moments that we must take pause and loosen our grip on what, to our hearts, has been clutched so vigorously. When one has poured every ounce of passion and determination into the cultivation of anything worthwhile, releasing the aspiration back into the wild is nothing short of letting go. Letting go is not the same as giving up—giving up requires some amount of cowardice, of cavalier disregard for one’s personal potential, and disbelief in possibility. Letting go means having the strength to liberate oneself from that that has become a cage within which one is chained.

Dreams are not meant to tie us to joylessness; they are to buoy us in the hungry years before we can breathe them in as innately as the air around us. When everything we have worked for shackles us in unpleasantries, the dream is no longer a dream, but rather a nightmare unfolding in the daylight. In letting go, we are not only free to conjure up new hopes for our lives, but we are required to move on in forward motion. Moving on allows what’s left behind to rest in darkness, while making room in the light for what lies ahead.

This is the June issue of the newsletter I send out for the yoga studio.