off step 2.
The third step of letting go: To experience your wholeness, you must respond from your whole mind and not from your conflicted mind.
To do this, I had to find the place of wholeness within me. This is an attribute of the heart that we all possess. It is the place where we feel a quiet and loving connection to others. Even though it is always there, if your mind holds a disrupting thought, and if the first two steps are not done honestly, you simply will not feel wholeness or any real connection with other people. But if you are able to go to what has been called “the place of beauty,” then you must respond from this place—and you must resolve not to slip back into your old, conflicted state of mind.
And what is the nature of this “resolve”?
It is simple sincerity. Do we sincerely want oneness and equality with those around us? Do we sincerely want to look at our life in peace? Do we sincerely want a mind that knows stillness, wholeness, and a deep bond with our partner, children, parents, siblings, and friends? Or would we rather hold back our heart just a little? Would we actually like to remain in position to judge, triumph, and be right?
Here's where the third step can get a little tricky: The process of letting go of your more destructive emotions and darker impulses does not require tight control of the subject matter of your thoughts, although most people think it does. In fact, it doesn't require control of your thoughts or feelings in any way. You are not at war with circumstances, your behavior, other people's behavior, your feelings, other people's feelings, your thoughts, or other people's thoughts. You simply are not at war. It is just the reverse. Letting go is freedom. When you find yourself in a useless battle, you merely walk off the battlefield.
An illustration of how this third step works can be found in the way we experience love. All of us have seen examples of the disastrous results of people deciding to have or adopt a child because they want someone who will love them. The reason this doesn't work is that the child has to act like the image of the child that the parent expected. But the child is her own person and acts like herself, so the war begins—and war never feels like love. Similarly, people who decide to get a dog or cat for the same reason end up making themselves unhappy. Inevitably, the pet will disappoint.
Those two scenarios are common enough that many people see the mistake. Yet when it comes to romantic relationships, they don't question their desire to find someone who will cherish them, think they are wonderful, share their interests, meet their needs, have eyes only for them, and adore them even in old age. But that doesn't work either, as our divorce rate shows.
There are many people who love gardening so much that they spend significant parts of their day watering, feeding, weeding, pruning, transplanting, and the like. And they feel adequately blessed by every effort they make. It's a pleasure to walk in a garden that someone truly loves.
How do these blessed “relationships” between person and plant come about? It would be absurd to suggest that they hap-pen the way we are now telling ourselves romantic relations should work—the person who wants a garden looks for one that is astrologically correct, that is the right age, the right shape, that had the right upbringing, one that will be lots of fun and meet all the gardener's needs.
The reason a garden “blesses” a gardener, a pet blesses a pet owner, a child blesses a parent, and a spouse blesses a spouse is that we feel love; we have the experience of love. But we have that experience only when we ourselves love. If you don't love, the most devoted pet, child, or lover will not lay one finger on your heart—it just doesn't work that way.
For thousands of years, in song, sonnet, and scripture, we have been told that love feels wonderful. Most people assume this means that being loved feels wonderful. And it does. But before you can know “that loving feeling,” first you must love. When you love, you receive far more than the feeling of being loved. The apostle John said, “Love one another, because love is of God. And everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. But the unloving know nothing of God, for God is love.”
Because it is a fact that when people love, they immerse themselves in the experience of love, we can find parents all around us who feel deeply, blessedly loved by their damaged children, their genetically confused pets, and their overweight partners. We can find couples so old that they are shriveled who see and feel the beauty of love pouring like sunlight from each other's bodies. For this to happen, all you need to do is respond from your quiet, united, loving mind, not from your busy, fragmented, disconnected mind.
Please understand that none of us jumps straight from a conflicted approach to life to one of pure unity and peace. That of course is the choice, but, realistically, we are either heading in the direction of one or the other. We can have a growing sense of inner wholeness and be increasingly at peace with our life and the people in it, but we will have not-so-good days and many not-so-good moments. All we can do is the best we can today. It is the direction of our life that matters, not whether we have reached some perfect stage of letting go. It is enough to make a little progress each day. This is a more encouraging and productive goal than attempting achievement.
I have often used the following story to illustrate the effects of responding from wholeness as compared to responding from conflict.
Running in the Hall
Gayle and I were leaving a gymnasium where we had just watched our son Jordan play basketball. As we walked down the long hall toward the exit, three eight-year-old girls came running past, animatedly talking and laughing. As they passed the man in front of us, he harshly yelled, “Don't run in the hall!”
This slowed them almost to a stop. They were obviously confused about why they couldn't run in this virtually indestructible hallway.
When we caught up to them, the man was almost out of sight, and Gayle said, “He didn't say you couldn't skip!”
The girls immediately started laughing and skipping down the hall. We could hear them say, “No, he didn't say we couldn't skip!”
Gayle, as she so often does around children, saw these girls' core of innocence and fun and simply responded from her whole mind. If she had been judgmental of the man and said to them, “What a grouch. I think you should run if you want to,” the girls might have started running again, but they would have run defiantly or fearfully and not with the lightness of heart they had before. Although their speed would have increased, their minds would have been conflicted and uncertain.
In practical terms, responding from our whole mind means that the problems that are important to others, especially our loved ones, are important to us. For instance, a parent who loves a child does not look down on or dismiss that child's fear of thunder. If we consistently felt our oneness with our partner, we would never look down on our partner's money fears, driving or flying fears, aging fears, or fear of embarrassment. If your reaction to your partner's fear—or any other form of distress—is disdain or irritation, you do not want oneness or even friendship with your partner at that moment.
To claim that our desire is to nourish our bond with another and then to turn around and act from separateness is simple hypocrisy. First we have to admit that we cherish our separateness and look long and honestly at that fact. Then we have to find that place in us where our feelings are deeply our own. It is a place of oneness and happiness, and from there we extend outwards what is changeless about us.
Letting Go of Problems
It has taken longer to describe the process of letting go than it sometimes takes to do
