Letting Go as the Portal to Freedom

Letting Go as the Portal to Freedom

There are times when the world grows small. The walls close in and the landscape looks like a maze of dead ends with miles of tortured searching before an exit to freedom can be found. The sense of this place is of feeling trapped, lost, in despair, having to continue on in the midst of exhaustion and unknowns, of believing that there is a way out by reasoning alone, or of fixing it and figuring it all out; of trying to control the way forward and manage the pain and confusion of it all while searching on endlessly.

Oh Mind! What prisons you make! Fences made of concepts, flimsy as a passing thought, become steel bars in your imagination, and you are trapped within yourself longing for liberation!

_Dorothy S. Hunt, (excerpted from the poem “Longing and Liberation”), “Only This!”

Yet, I know when I have found myself in these places there is a better way forward. Maybe it is because I have been here so many times before and now know that my own efforts just bring more suffering, and so I relent. I just breathe. I let go. Even against my inner protests and fears of surrender – I let go.