a few things I've learned about letting go

With my divorce a few months away, I realize in the last 20 months, how much I've had to get through mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Here are a few things that I believe has helped me as well as biblical truths.

Let Go Of Frustration with Yourself/Your Life

1. Change your perception—see the root cause as a blessing in disguise.

2. Channel your discontent into an immediate positive action—make some calls about new job opportunities, or walk to the community center to volunteer.

3. Engage in a physical activity. Exercise decreases stress hormones and increases endorphin's, chemicals that improve your state of mind.

4. Focus all your energy on something you can actually control instead of dwelling on things you can’t.

Let go of Anger and Bitterness

4. Feel it fully. If you stifle your feelings, they may leak out and affect everyone around you—not just the person who inspired your anger. Before you can let go of any emotion, you have to feel it fully.

5. Remind yourself that anger hurts you more than the person who upset you, and visualize it melting away as an act of kindness to yourself.

6. Put yourself in the offender’s shoes. We all make mistakes, and odds are you could have easily slipped up just like your husband, father, or friend did. Compassion dissolves anger.

7. Remind yourself these are your only three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it. These acts create happiness; holding onto bitterness never does.
Let Go Of Past Relationships

8. Identify what the experience taught you to help develop a sense of closure.

9. Write everything you want to express in a letter. Even if you choose not to send it, clarifying your feelings will help you come to terms with reality as it is now.

10. Remember both the good and the bad. Even if appears this way now, the past was not perfect. Acknowledging this may minimize your sense of loss. As Laura Oliver says, “It’s easier to let go of a human than a hero.”

11. Un-romanticize the way you view love. Of course you’ll feel devastated if you believe you lost your soul mate. If you think you can find a love that amazing or better again, it will be easier to move on.

12. Visualize an empowered single you—the person you were before meeting your last love. That person was pretty awesome, and now you have the chance to be him or her again.

13. Replace your emotional thoughts with facts. When you think, “I’ll never feel loved again!” don’t resist that feeling. Instead, move on to another thought, like “I learned a new song for karaoke tonight.”


Let Go Of Stress

14. Consider this quotation by Eckhart Tolle: “Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.” Questioning how your stress serves you may help you let it go.

15. Replace your thoughts. Notice when you begin thinking about something that stresses you so you can shift your thought process to something more pleasant, like your passion for your hobby.

16. Take a sauna break. Studies reveal that people who go to sauna at least twice a week for ten to thirty minutes are less stressed after work than others with similar jobs who don’t.

17. Laugh it out. Research shows that laughter soothes tension, improves your immune system, and even eases pain. If you can’t relax for long, start with just ten minutes watching a funny video on YouTube.

 Can you think of anything to add to this list—other areas of life where you need to practice letting go, and other techniques to start doing it right now?