how a typical workday looks and feels for too many people. We wake up, drag ourselves out of bed, and, even before we get to the bathroom, we begin worrying or planning what will happen during the day ahead. We are already spending what little energy we have stored up from our night’s sleep—if we were lucky enough to have had one. Many of us then commute to our jobs, which puts additional stress on us due to traffic, or mass transit crowds, or just the frustration of “wasted” time. Once we arrive, we’re not excited to be there and we are dreading the things we must get done. As we push ourselves through the day, we look ahead to lunch or the end of business. We have various interactions with coworkers—some satisfactory, many not. Since we believe there is nothing much we can do about anything that happens or how we feel about it, usually we simply stuff down our emotions and barrel on forward.
By the time we’re done for the day, we’re exhausted from bottling up our feelings. Maybe we drag ourselves to the local bar to hang out with some friends and eat, drink, and watch the news on TV—which adds its own layer of stress—hoping our feelings will just disappear. Even though we may feel a little better afterwards, in truth, the feelings have only gone underground. We are now like human pressure cookers with plugged stopcocks, and it takes us tremendous energy to keep the lid on. When we finally get home to our husbands or wives and children, and they want to talk about their days with us, we have no energy left to listen. We might try to put on a happy face only to lose our tempers over the smallest things. The family eventually zones out in front of the TV until it is time to go to bed. And the next morning we get up and start the whole scenario over again.
Kind of bleak, isn’t it? But isn’t it also kind of familiar?
Your story may be a little different; hopefully it’s brighter than this picture. Perhaps you’re a stay-at-home parent with young kids. Maybe you’re an independent contractor and handle most of your daily affairs over the telephone and/or internet. Perhaps you’re an artist. Still, the trend is probably quite similar. The ruts that we tend to find ourselves in seem to get deeper over time, until we can feel like there is no way out.
Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a way out.
Letting Go
One of the main ways that we ourselves create disappointments, unhappiness, and misjudgments is by holding on to limiting thoughts and feelings. It is not that “holding on,” in and of itself, is inappropriate. Holding on is perfectly appropriate in many situations. I wouldn’t suggest, for instance, that you not hold on to the steering wheel of a car that you were driving, or not hold on to a ladder that you were climbing. Obviously, the results of such choices could be unfortunate. But have you ever held on to a point of view even when it didn’t serve you? Have you ever held on to an emotion even though there was nothing you could do to satisfy it, make it right, or change the situation that appeared to cause it? Have you ever held on to tension or anxiety even after the initial event that triggered it was long over? This is the form of holding on that we will explore throughout this book.
What is the opposite of holding on? Well, “letting go,” of course. Both letting go and holding on are part of the natural process of life. This fundamental understanding is the basis of the Sedona Method. No matter who you are, if you’re reading these words, I can guarantee that you’ve already frequently experienced letting go, often without being aware that it was happening—and even without being taught the Method. Letting go, or releasing, is a natural ability that we’re all born with, but which we get conditioned against using as we mature into adulthood. Where so many of us frequently get stuck is that we don’t know when it is appropriate to let go and when it is appropriate to hold on. And most of us err on the side of holding on—often to our detriment.
There are a few synonyms for holding on and letting go that will probably make this point much clearer: closing and opening, for example. When you are throwing a ball, you need to hold your hand closed around the ball through much of your arm motion. But if you don’t open your hand and release the ball at the appropriate time, the ball will not go where you want it to. You could even get hurt. Other synonyms are contraction and expansion. In order for us to breathe, we contract our lungs to force the used air out, and then we expand them, filling them with air. We can’t only inhale; to complete the breathing process we must also exhale. Tensing and relaxing our muscles is another example. If we could not do both, our muscles literally would not function properly, as most muscles work in pairs of opposing partners.
“One of my big gains so far is my experience of not having to involve myself in so much unnecessary ‘thinking’ about certain destructive emotions. I can release them. The energy previously spent on anger, fear, and envy can be used very well in my already demanding projects as a professional, and for my family.”
—Per Heiberg, Norway
It is interesting to note the emotional component of holding on and releasing, and the degree to which our bodies are impacted by our feelings. Have you noticed that, when people are upset, they often hold their breath? In the process of breathing, both inhalation and exhalation can be inhibited by holding on to unresolved emotions. Most of us also hold residual tension in our muscles, which never allows us to relax fully. Again, it’s the unresolved or suppressed emotions that are the basis for these forms of constriction.
But why do we get stuck? When we suppress our emotions, rather than allowing ourselves to experience our feelings fully in the moment they arise, they linger and make us uncomfortable. Through avoidance, we are preventing our emotions from flowing through us, either transforming or dissolving, and it doesn’t feel good.
Suppression and Expression
Have you ever watched a very young child fall down and then look around to see if there is any reason to be upset? When children think no one is watching them, in an instant they just let go, brush themselves off, and act like nothing has happened. The same child in a similar situation, on seeing the opportunity to get attention, may burst into tears and run to the arms of a parent. Or have you ever watched a young child get furious with a playmate or a parent, and even say something like, “I hate you and will never speak to you again,” and then, just a few minutes later, the child feels and acts as though nothing at all has happened?
This natural ability to release our emotions was lost to most of us because, even though we did it automatically as young children, without conscious control, our parents, teachers, friends, and society as a whole trained us out of it as we got older. In fact, it is because we were unconscious of our ability to release that it was possible to train us to hold on. Every time we were told “no,” told to behave, to sit still and be quiet, to stop squirming, that “big boys don’t cry” or “big girls don’t get angry,” and to grow up and be responsible, we learned to suppress our emotions. Furthermore, we were often seen as an adult when we got to the point where we were good at suppressing our natural exuberance for life and all the feelings that others convinced us to believe were unacceptable. We became more responsible to others’ expectations of us than to the needs of our own emotional well-being.
There is a joke that aptly illustrates this point: for the first two years of a child’s life, everyone around them is trying to get them to walk and talk, and for the next eighteen years everyone’s trying to get them to sit down and shut up.
By the way, there is nothing wrong with disciplining children. Children need to learn boundaries in order to function in life, and they need to be protected at times from obvious danger. It is just that adults can unintentionally go overboard.
What we are referring to here as “suppression” is keeping a lid on our emotions, pushing them back down, denying them, repressing them, and pretending they don’t exist. Any emotion that comes into awareness that is not let go of is automatically stored
