Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara, 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

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