Today is the first day of posting daily updates, so I thought it would make sense to talk about something I’ve been practicing recently.
I’m calling it Day One: A Practice of Letting Go (literally just gave it this name).
The term “Day One” is often used in a motivational context, but I first heard it being used by Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.
However, the way I see it is that we only get this day today, I can’t live for tomorrow and I certainly can’t live for the past.
My life used to be all about the future, thinking that it was smart to always be planning and having a vision. But, I realised my motivation behind it was a deep disappointment of the present moment. More specifically, the disappointment in myself.
This stemmed from wounds of the past that I couldn’t let go of. If I let go of them, then who would I be? So I held on for dear life.
It developed into an obsession with past failures, mistakes, and an even deeper fear of loss than I already had.
But this is the very nature of life. We cannot experience this 3D reality without loss. Obviously, that doesn’t make it less painful, but that’s the nature of loss, it hurts.
However, it doesn’t always have to be as painful as it sometimes feels. It only feels unbearable when the mind latches onto the pain or makes a story out of it.
Often the holding on phase is an attempt to keep something alive or experience again in the future. But the version of ourselves that held on in the first place did so from a place of fear.
That doesn’t invalidate our past, it awakens a potential future (a paradox for sure). One that honours pain but embraces something new, more, and different.
Practice
The practice goes like this.
Every morning, I take some deep breaths, and get into the observer of thoughts.
If there are thoughts like:
- “What must I do today” or
- “I wish I could have done things differently”
I simply say “Thinking is happening and I choose to let go of these thoughts for now.”
I focus on the body and scan it for any tension. Then I breathe into that area, thank it and give it love.
When I first started doing this, I had to replace any thoughts that came up with:
“I let go of these thoughts. Today is a new day and I get to choose how I feel.”
Within about 10-15 minutes, my body gets into a deeply peaceful state and past and future just fade away.
If you try this, I’d love to hear how it went.
Thanks for reading.