Weekly Tidbit: More on Letting Go and Making Room

[Charly Hill]

In her book The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chodron discusses the Buddhist concept of renunciation in language that invites new perspective and application.

"Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation......When we sit in meditation, we feel our breath as it goes out, and we have some sense of willingness just to be open to the present moment ........Every time we are willing to let the story line go, and every time we are willing to let go at the end of the out-breath, that's fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back."

In these times of rapid and often frightening changes, the williness to let go of the past seems to be the lesson of the day. We need to let go of old ways of doing things and especially old ways of thinking about things. A lot of really good ways of doing things were appropriate in their time, but no longer fit or are necessary in today's world.

One of my clients told me a story about a family holiday ritual. Every Thanksgiving, the generations came together and ate an elaborately prepared meal that had a baked ham at its center. One Thanksgiving, as she was preparing the ham in the traditional way by cutting off the end before she seated it in the baking pan, her young daughter asked, "Mom, why do you always cut off the end of the ham?" She replied, "Well, I don't really know. My mother always did it that way, let's go ask her why." So they went to ask Grandma, who told them, "I guess I did it because my mother always did it that way". Fortunately Great Grandma was still with them and she told them, "Well, my mother always did it that way......... but come to think about it, I think she did it because her pan was too small."

Abundance is not about holding tight onto what you have, or what you have always done, but rather more about allowing the natural flow to make room for new blessings and paying attention to the choices you make. So clean out the closets, the ones in your house and in your mind, and notice what shows up to perch in your newly opened space.

May you be well,
Charly
www.conversationsforchange.com