Have you ever been told to ‘just let it go’? To ‘get over it’? Let it be.

There is value in letting go to let it be over with. There is also danger.

When bad things happen in life, letting go does not mean closing your eyes to what happened, accepting the unacceptable and moving on so that you don’t think about it, deal with it or feel it.

Letting go means moving through it. Digging into your emotions and feelings so that you can live free of the emotional trauma of what happened, versus, burying the emotional trauma within and moving on still carrying the debris.

Recently, several events created discord within me. From a mistake that solicited unwarranted feelings of disgrace and embarrassment by someone’s response to what happened (causing me to wonder, what’s that all about?), to a couple of work-related events where I had to face an angry mob (causing me to wonder, what’s the normal here?). The sequence and timing of these events triggered emotions deep within me, stirring up feelings of confusion, unease, unrest…

I have a choice.

Swallow my feelings and emotional responses or face them and free me.

Sure, it is easy to say, those events are done with. They don’t matter — the ‘others’ were wrong and I was wronged and I need to let it go and get on with it.

There is also a place that says, those events uncovered pockets of unhealed spaces within me. I can step lovingly into their midst and find the source of their unease and heal it so that I can grow even deeper in my understanding of how to be authentically me in the world, or not.

I have chosen to not say, ‘Not’ and instead say ‘Yes’ to delving into the opportunity to grow through healing what I did not know was causing inner distress.

It ain’t easy.

In fact, blind submission to the past would be preferred if only… I didn’t know better.

Just as I know that anger that lasts more than 10 minutes is no longer anger about the event but my emotions around past events, when my emotional responses cause me unease that lasts longer than the event warrants, shutting them off by simply rationalizing my way back to an even keel does not lead to inner peace. It simply leads to my walking blindly through life, pretending ‘it doesn’t matter’, everything is back to normal.

You gotta let go of hiding out in normal to get through to what matters most; joy, peace, freedom, love…

I went to see a therapist yesterday. As I told her when she asked me why I was there, “I am really good at bullying me with my own bullsh*t.”

It is a learned behaviour. Self-bullying.

And while intellectually I know that what happened is not a measure of my worth, what happened revealed places within me that lay hidden for a long, long time.

Now that I see them, I get to shine the light of loving compassion on myself so that I can continue to take delight in being me, every step of the journey!

This journey of life is not about getting to the end, dusting off your hands and saying, ‘Whew! I made it!’

It’s about dusting off the path along the way so that every step makes it a journey worth taking.

This is life. We all know where it’s going and none of us are getting out alive.

Making the journey an adventure, exploring every nook and cranny to discover hidden gems and treasures within you creates a journey worth taking every step of the way.