Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about where we tend to go wrong with letting go.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so there's a bit of a semantic issue with letting go because it immediately implies moving away from something.

And what happens there is that we end up creating often subconsciously, sometimes very consciously, an oppositional relationship to the thing that we want to release. Now, the reason that's tricky, and anyone who's tried to

let go without success knows this already, is that it's not quite that easy. You can't just say, don't want this, push it away, and then it goes.

The reason we hold on to things is much more complicated and intricate and deep

than just simply, oh, this thing is here, let me push it aside so that it's no longer here.

And so the way we tend to go wrong with this is by pushing away something that we actually first need to move closer to.

We need to see why we're holding on, what it is serving, what the positive intention is,

how the part of us that is holding on believes that this is still serving us in some way,

an aspect of our identity, not having to face something,

or even not having to feel perhaps the sadness behind letting go of our anger as an example.

So if you really want to let go, if you're interested in that journey,

then you have to first move closer to that which you're trying to push away and not just

closer to the thing but closer to the part that is holding on take a moment to drop in be still

feel the energy of this thing that is still in your life that you don't want to be in your

life this pattern this thought this emotion just give it space and then drop in the question.

And your awareness says, how is it serving me to hold on?

What do I fear I would need to experience if I let this go?

See what arises.

When you make peace with that,

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