One of the things that we hear about all the time in the self-development world is the idea of letting go.

Kind of everywhere you look, people talk about letting go of emotions, of reactions, of conflicting feelings that are rising for you, or even certain things that you're attached to, certain ideas about you, yourself, or situations.

And this is a really good advice to let go of these things, because of course if we're grasping onto these things or holding onto our reactions, it makes us approach the world in a negative way.

It keeps us caught in the story of what's happening in reality as opposed to actually engaging with the truth of what's happening.

And it causes us to often react in negative ways, because we could stay attached to some negative emotions or something like that.

And when we hold onto that, that then influences how we act throughout the rest of the day.

And that's really good. And the idea of letting go, ultimately, we're to track it back before it turned into a self-help bullet point.

I would say it tracks back to Buddhism, probably, intertwines with the idea of impermanence, which we won't go too deeply into that, but essentially impermanence is the idea that all things come and go in life.

Everything is here, and then it passes, and new things come again. You know, you can look to nature for that.

Flowers bloom, trees grow, and then maybe they create fruit, and that fruit falls, and then so forth, and then the tree turns into winter, or it loses all its leaves.

And then spring comes around, and the tree starts growing to leave again, and then new fruit, and so forth.

You know, just the idea that all things in nature, whether they are nature itself, or even if they are our thoughts, all things are here, and then all things pass.

That's the idea of impermanence. And really, if we look at that in the context of how it's applied to, you know, mindfulness and Buddhism, that is then applied to your thoughts and your negative reactions, and anything that you're attached to that's causing you suffering.

So, if we intertwine those ideas of letting go and impermanence, we could say, use those effectively by saying, okay, I'm feeling this way now, and as a side note, this is kind of like a distancing technique in some way to gain perspective on yourself and what you're experiencing in the present moment.

So, if you're feeling some negative reaction, and it's controlling how you feel, and it's making you more frustrated, and it's making you kind of act in a way that you would rather not.

By remembering the notion of impermanence, you can then remember like, oh right, this feeling is momentary, it's going to pass.

I'm not going to feel angry forever. I'm not going to say you, you know, you get out of a relationship and you're mourning the loss of this relationship.

You know, by remembering this, they're like, all right, I won't feel, you know, heartbroken about this relationship forever, maybe in a couple more days or a couple of weeks, I'll start purking up and looking and moving forward,

but I certainly won't feel this way for the next 50 years.

So, it's a good thing to remind yourself about, you know, just the negative things we experience are only here for a moment,

and keeping that in mind in the moment helps you gain perspective on those feelings and not become possessed by them, which can then lead to further negative actions.

Now, if we've fast-forward again back to the notion of letting go, and I just wrote a newsletter about this, by the way, that people enjoyed, which is why I'm going further into it in this episode.

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