The Six Simple Words That Taught Me to Let Go
Friends, I have a confession to make: I don’t like to let things go. Opportunities. Behavior patterns. My ideas of how things are supposed to be — you name it. In fact, I can often be found clinging desperately to these lovely little intangibles well past their expiration dates for one simple reason: when I’m making decisions out of fear, joy feels like a limited resource. The Six Simple Words That Taught Me to Let Go Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today. — Mark Twain When life gets scary, or I get panicky, I tend to go all Tim Gunn on my life, forcing square pegs into round holes and lipstick onto pigs, all in the name of MAKING IT WORK. And isn’t that exactly what the world expects us to do, after all – make it work? Slap some sequins on a garbage bag, send it down the runway and call it a day? Or a season? Or a life? The problem with all this “making it work” is that somewhere between all the hustling and hoarding we manage to convince ourselves that what we see, in fact, is all there is. And it’s in moments like those that this mantra has saved me: There’s more where that came from. Because the truth is, the sooner we choose to see our world as a place of abundance instead of lack, the sooner we can loosen our grip on the things that are no longer working. The sooner we surrender to the truth that our perspective is limited, the sooner we begin creating space for our faith to grow. And the sooner we allow ourselves to give away the very thing we’re most worried about losing, the sooner we find ourselves open enough to receive what it is we really need. READ: Surrender: Let Go and Allow the Flow So today, friends— let’s choose not to tighten our grip in fear, but to open our hearts in faith. Because whatever it is you’re afraid of losing (or may have already lost), I guarantee you — there’s more where that came from. More opportunity where that came from. More money where that came from. More time, more love, more grace where that came from. The life you seek is also seeking you. It just can’t find you in all the sequins.
Stress Is a Symptom of Our Resistance to Change
Stress. We know it from its crushing grip. We identify it by its crippling weight. Its not-so-subtle waves of exhaustion and overwhelm. Its tell-tale undercurrent of anxiety about the future, mixed with paralyzing fear that the other shoe is about to drop. Stress Is a Symptom of Our Resistance to Change And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -- Anaïs Nin (more quotes) Hans Selye, the Austrian-Canadian physiologist and researcher who first coined the term “stress” in the 1930s defined it this way: “Stress is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand for change.” Put another way, it’s not the events in our lives that cause the stress -- it’s our resistance to them. It’s not our circumstances; it’s our unmet expectations, tangled up in our ideas of what should have been. It’s not the changes, themselves; it’s our refusal to accept them when they arise. It's not that we are powerless; it's that we are choosing to honor the "devil we know" at all costs, even if that means resigning ourselves to a life spent forcing square pegs into round holes. But the truth is, stress isn’t a sickness to manage -- it's a symptom of our greater disease. A sign that our old ways of doing things are no longer working. A signal that we’re being invited to transform in some major (and therefore, uncomfortable) way, but are refusing to answer the call. So today, friends, let’s vow not to ignore these whispers, but to listen for them. To honor them. To choose to see them for what they really are: an invitation to grow. Because stress is nothing more than a sign that our presence is being requested. It’s how we respond that matters.