How To Release

A Refresher On Letting Go Of Negativity

Releasing can be finicky, not because it’s difficult, but because it’s a major departure from the way most people typically handle their emotions. I get a lot of questions along the lines of “I understand what you’re saying about letting negative feelings up without resisting them, but after I do that, how do I actually let go of my limiting belief.” So, some clarification is in order.

First and foremost, let’s acknowledge the fact that we all know how to release, and we do it all the time. You and your friends go see a horror movie, you’re scared the whole time, then you go out to dinner afterward and are laughing and having fun — the fear doesn’t stick with you. You’re out on the street and you see somebody crying — you recognize their sadness, maybe you empathize enough to go help them, but once you walk away from the situation you walk away from the sadness too. You watch a video of someone doing something embarrassing, you cringe and feel their embarrassment, then you click to a different page and leave the embarrassment in the past. I could come up with a million examples.

So what’s the difference between negative emotions that we experience secondhand — either because we intentionally agree to experience them like with the horror movie, or because someone else is experiencing the negativity and we recognize and empathize — and our personal negative emotions?

Well, our own negative thoughts and feelings happen to us. That’s an easy answer.

Or is it?…

Do your negative thoughts and feelings actually happen to you? Or maybe that question is better phrased as, “To whom do your negative thoughts and feelings pertain?”

You are the aware element of your experience. The conscious part. If you weren’t conscious/aware, negative feelings couldn’t bother you because you wouldn’t actually experience them. There’d be nobody to be bothered — that’s undeniable. But it raises an issue.

Awareness can’t be afraid. It can’t be angry, or upset, or ashamed, or guilty, or any other feeling you can think of. In the same way that the sky remains unaffected no matter how many clouds form within it, consciousness remains unaffected no matter how many thoughts and feelings arise within it. The sky can be completely covered in the darkest, stormiest clouds imaginable, and still, nothing happens to it. Eventually, the clouds will pass, and the sky will remain exactly as it was before they arrived, and while they were present. It’ll be completely and totally unchanged.

So when we ask, “To whom do your negative thoughts and feelings pertain?” the answer cannot be awareness. Awareness is unaffected by your thoughts and feelings regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. Consciousness is just the unchanging background in which all thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions arise. From the point of view of consciousness, there’s no difference between the transient experience of fear you encounter while you’re watching the horror movie and the gut-wrenching fear that you feel for weeks and months and years when you’re worried your partner is going to leave you. Both fears arise in awareness, and neither fear affects consciousness.

But still, we have to acknowledge that personal thoughts and feelings make us suffer, while second-hand ones pass us by without leaving a mark. What then makes a thought or feeling personal, if no thought or feeling is “personal” to consciousness?

Hmm. You’re having trouble coming up with an answer, aren’t you? Or maybe you’re shouting at your computer screen, “My thoughts and feelings affect me! They pertain to me, you idiot! Me, me, me! That’s why personal thoughts and feelings make me feel so bad, but a scary movie or seeing someone cry doesn’t make me suffer — because my thoughts and feelings are mine.”

Who is “Me,” though?

“Me” isn’t awareness — we’ve already covered that. Awareness can’t suffer. So who is this “Me,” you speak of?

Are you starting to see the bigger picture now?

The “Me” to which we refer when we say “Thoughts and feelings that make me suffer do so because they apply to ‘Me,’” is just a collection of other thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, and conceptualizations. It’s a construction of the mind.

Someone asks who you are and you tell them, “I’m Jane Doe, I’m 26 years old, I’m 5’3,” my parents are from South Korea, I grew up in Los Angeles, when I was 7 I fell out of a tree and broke my leg so now I’m afraid of heights, I’ve been a part of a couple of toxic relationships, I struggle with feelings of anxiety and jealously because my last boyfriend cheated on me, I’m insulted because my friend Megan told me my new haircut is way better than my old one, etc., etc., etc.”

None of that information is factual: Meaning, none of that information actually pertains to you, awareness. It doesn’t describe anything about you, the conscious element of your experience.

Awareness doesn’t have a name or an age. It doesn’t have parents, and it doesn’t come from any specific town or country. It doesn’t get jealous or angry. It doesn’t get upset. It is completely and totally unaffected by anything that arises within it.

Again, Jane Doe is just a collection of thoughts, feelings, memories, concepts, etc. You might even be compelled to say, “There is an idea of Jane Doe, but there is no real me.”

So now we arrive at the main point of all this — how it applies to releasing.

When you resist a thought or a feeling, essentially what you are saying is, “I don’t like this thought or feeling and I want to get rid of it.” But the “I” of which you speak isn’t what you actually are (Consciousness), it’s your conceptual self. It’s the idea of you.

Your conceptual self is invented by resistance. When fear arises, it just arises as fear — as an impersonal feeling. Awareness isn’t affected by it, because the fear doesn’t belong to awareness. When you resist though, you invent and identify with the “person” who is afraid.

So, if you don’t resist a feeling — if you stop inventing and identifying with the idea of who you are, as opposed to who you actually are — feelings cease to make you suffer. There is no “you” to suffer anymore. Suffering becomes an impossibility without the creation of the imaginary sufferer.

This is why day after day on this blog I shout from the rooftops, “You don’t have to do anything to release! Just stop resisting and the feeling will release on its own!”

What you’re “doing” now is resisting. Actually, you aren’t even doing that. Awareness can’t “do” anything — it can only be as it is. So when you resist, you’re inventing the person who suffers and the person who resists. If you stop resisting, that person disappears — you reidentify with consciousness, and the “negative” thoughts and feelings cease to affect you.

I know this stuff is kind of mind-bending. It’s okay if everything doesn’t make complete sense to you yet. But just remember, when you start to wonder, “What do I actually do to release my feeling or belief once I uncover it,” the answer is nothing. Only a person has to do anything. You aren’t a person. You’re consciousness.

As always, good luck.