Letting Things IN While Letting Them GO

My heart is tender yet greedy; she is sensitive but grips tightly to what she desires. So strange to take captive what my heart admires as free. 

What am I doing? Why do I grip? 

 I admire all that grows, and growth requires change. Pining a person or an event in a static position in my heart is just plain mean – and it flies in the face in what I believe. So why am I holding on so tightly?

I HOLD ONTO FAMILY

I have children. They are grown. They have their own lives and I love them for it. At this stage of their lives I no longer have a “vote”; their health and safety is their own concern. It is not my business how they construct their learning journey, is it not my business what challenges and obstacles they choose, but oh how I make it my own suffering. I wish this and I want that. My heart yearns for the details of their lives so they don’t slip away and become strangers, those who once had everything in common with me. I don’t want to live a life of remembrance and memory; always bringing up the old stories of games played, meals shared and comical situations that had become the fabric of our past. These things are important but I want to increase stories with the tales of NOW. This means letting go – letting go of the attachments to how things were and to allow them to develop into the sweet song of the present.

(Note to self – I am not as bad as I think I am nor as good as I want to be.  In truth, I am JUST RIGHT!)  Clinging onto an image of myself, or my relationship with myself as a static thing is also not useful.   Some days I am on the beam- in the moment, listening well without judgement or expectation; to others AND to myself.  Other days – I resist. I resist the different, avoid a change and wrestle with reality.

The trick is to LET THINGS IN while LETTING THEM GO!  Have a change, feel a difference and allow that to morph and alter as it will.  I practice being comfortable with what IS… as it will surely become “a WAS” if I let it. 

Respecting change, respecting what I love  – the mutability and freedom of life and growth– I let change IN while I let it GO.

Kyczy Hawk E-RYT200 is the author of “Yoga and the Twelve Step Path”, a leader of Y12SR classes, and the creator of SOAR(tm) (Success Over Addiction and Relapse) a teacher certification training she holds with her good friend Kent Bond E-RYT500. Find out more about her, her classes and the training at www.yogarecovery.com