Letting go.  Oh such a familiar subject for me.  Do you ever get the sense that our struggles and tests just keep coming back? Funny how you think you’ve overcome something and then the next challenge that appears looks so suspiciously familiar, right? And then I harrumph and say: “oh man! not this again!”

But this it is.  Letting go of control.  I had a run-in with my old friend control just this past month (well I would love to say it happened just once, but this is just an easy example!) when my (notice the attachment there) old classes in Lugano began again for the fall.  Now despite the fact that I wasn’t kicked out of Switzerland, but in fact made the decision to leave myself, I am struggling to really let go of it. That. Being there.  So when I say my classes, it’s because in my head, even though I know I’ve left them in the very capable hands of someone I love and trust, I am still clinging, and grasping for control.

Now we are trying to buy a home, our first home ever actually, and I am scurrying around trying to DO everything just right so that it all doesn’t fall apart. Terrified that we will lose somehow, I am acting as though this were a math test and if I show all my workings perfectly and answer each question presented I’ll get the prized ‘A’ at the end of it.

All this attachment stuff, all this clinging is all about little (m)”e” (ego).  It is the misconception of control.

I recently read something about how letting go is like putting ourselves through a sieve and allowing all the excess to fall away. How can I accept? How can I find detachment? How can I let go of the reigns, or rather, the imaginary reigns that I believe control my life, and just be?

Control is an illusion. It is how we comfort ourselves and trick ourselves into a false sense of safety. If I just line all the ducks up in my life in just the right way, nothing will go wrong. Everything will be fine and work itself out as I want it to.  And because we do it in our lives, of course we do it on the mat.

Here’s the perfect example of how control comes up in our yoga: have you ever come into a balancing pose and started to grip tighter in your muscles? Like you are physically trying to pull all the bits of you together so much, so that you don’t fall apart or away? You hold your breath, literally stopping that flow of life to your body, in the hopes of staying standing? And now answer this: does it work? Do you find stability and balance in that place?

Years ago I had a profound shift in my balancing poses.  I gave myself permission to soften and even more so, I gave myself permission to fall.  I told myself it wasn’t so serious, the world would not end should I stumble out of the pose, and neither would I. As I shifted to a more playful and curious spirit, I gave up the illusion of control. And once I did that, whether I balanced or fell didn’t matter so much.  That’s the thing about control. It makes us want to hold on and grip tighter to our ideas, our thoughts, our things, our time, all in the hopes of minimizing damage and avoiding pain.  If we applied the balancing idea to life, and we allowed ourselves the grace to fall, and to feel discomfort, and understood this to be a natural, and even an essential part of life, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In fact, the by-product may just be a deeper sense of belonging in the moment or place we are in, which may result in a sense of overall contentment. Perhaps freedom can be found when we recognize that we are not the designers in this grand and spectacular universe.

What if we take that novel idea to soften and to even to fall seriously and trust that we will not break, but we may find that we need less than what we thought we had to have. That when we are distilled down, sifted through, the core of who we are is not all these things, or circumstances that we are trying to direct, change or keep the same.  And in fact the universe, the greatest power, is directing us in just the perfect way, molding our spirit, just the way a potter would on a wheel – sometimes through pressure, sometimes through squeezing, and sometimes just a guiding finger. Helping to guide us into the unshackled spirit we are capable of being.

My mantra for the week (oh who am I kidding – this is my daily staple, and has been for years!):

“Whatever God hath willed hath been, and that which He hath not willed shall not be.” – The Báb