Letting Go

By Jennie Marlow

Question: I’m having a hard time getting over a break-up. She’s moving on and I’m still hurting over it. I gave my power away in this relationship big time. It’s a pattern I have had with previous relationships. Possibly life in general. Any advice in regaining my power? Thanks- Mark

Mark, the first thing I want to do is applaud you for seeing that giving away your power is part of a much larger pattern in your life, going all the way back to childhood. In this way, you have allowed your pain to become an enormous opportunity for healing.

Spotted Eagle teaches us that our losses must be grieved, and he urges us to use these times in our lives to cultivate patience. The process of grief takes time. We need to go all the way through our pain to get to the other side, where we finally accept what has happened. Once we have accepted our loss, we can then move on. While we are in the throes of grief, part of what we resist is that the loss happened. The mind is desperate for what is painful to not be so. But it is so, and our pain over the loss then becomes the doorway through which we must go to find healing.

Often what makes us resist is that the loss triggers deep-seated issues and unresolved pain from the past. This burdens our present moment with a flood of emotional reaction that is not in response to what is actually happening. The flood of emotional reaction is coming from the mind’s emotional charge on whatever the issue may be. That emotional charge gets expressed every time we go through experiences similar to other painful experience we have had in the past. If we do not undergo the present moment trigger-event consciously, the result is that we add more emotional charge to what is already there. The reaction surges and subsides, but the issue and all of its pent up charge remain intact.

One thing you might want to consider is that we don’t really give our power away to people and things. Instead, we give power away to our own fears, judgments and fantasies. The person, circumstance or thing to which we appear to give away our power is really just a reflection of the uncertainties we fear so deeply. The bottom line is we don’t want to feel our emotional pain, so we sacrifice authenticity to avoid loss. When we sacrifice the authenticity that is our true power, we are motivated to avoid the threat of loss that being authentic might pose.

Spotted Eagle reminds us that the past can only be experienced as a memory which the mind weaves into a story line, distorted by our perceptions. The future does not yet exist, and so we need to realize that whatever the mind predicts about the future is pure speculation, very likely distorted by what has happened in the past. Spotted Eagle encourages us to learn how to feel our authentic pain that is real in the present moment:

Anger at the way this is affecting us in the now
Grief over what has been lost
Confusion about the things we may never understand about this
Uncertainty about how this loss will affect the future.

In other words, feel your now-moment pain.

Mark, your best approach to feeling your pain is to work on a moment-by-moment basis to bring yourself back to the present where your authentic pain can be felt. You will need to have patience because the process takes time. You will need to remind yourself that getting your power back will result from nothing more than simply anchoring yourself in the here and now. At first, you might have to bring yourself back again and again. As time passes, you will find that you are able to remain present for longer and longer periods. Eventually, through simply allowing yourself to feel your authentic, now-moment pain, that pain will move naturally to a conclusion of peace and acceptance. And instead of building up more charge on your issues, you will discover that you have reclaimed some of your power to be authentic.

Contributed by Jennie Marlow