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There
are things that we never want to let go
of, people we
never want to leave behind.
But keep in mind that
letting go isn’t the end
of the world; it’s the
beginning of a new life.
unattributed
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My
father once told me of a trick question he used in a college
class
on forest
fire control. If there was a fire coming
from a certain
direction and wind was
coming from another, what was the
best
thing to do? The right answer was,
"Run like hell
and pray
for rain," but few students ever got it. So allow
yourself
the
freedom of knowing there are times to bail out, quit, run,
leave the struggle, and have more time for joy.
Charlotte
Davis Kasl
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You don't realize that if you stop looking
backwards craving the love and
acceptance
which you didn't receive from your parents, then
you might
open your eyes to
what is available for you now. But
you won't let go. If only you could see that
looking back into an incomplete
and imperfect
past, with regret, blame, guilt
or resentment is keeping you
from the treasures
that await you here now. The past has gone. You
cannot rectify
something that is no longer with you.
Leonard
Jacobson
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We
must be willing to let go of the life we have planned,
so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph
Campbell
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Letting
go is the lesson. Letting go is always the
lesson. Have you ever
noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving
and loss?
Susan Gordon Lydon
The Knitting Sutra
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Let
go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing
you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is
not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing
which keeps you from hope and love?
Leo
Buscaglia
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Letting
go doesn't mean we don't care. Letting go doesn't mean
we shut down.
Letting go means we stop trying to force outcomes and make
people behave.
It means we give up resistance to the way things are, for
the moment.
It means we stop trying to do the impossible--controlling
that which
we cannot--and instead, focus on what is possible--which
usually means
taking care of ourselves. And we do this in
gentleness, kindness,
and love, as much as possible.
Melody
Beattie
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Are you
holding on to something in your past? Why not totally
let go?
Letting go is difficult. We resist change and want to
hold on to the past.
We are afraid of the unknown. Yet impermanence is a
truth of life.
Change is a natural rhythm.
Susan Santucci
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The Tao Te
Ching says, When I let go of what I am,
I become what
I might be. When I let go of what I
have,
I receive what I need.
Have you ever struggled to find
work or love, only to find them
after you have given up? This is the paradox of letting go.
Let go, in order
to achieve. Letting go is God's law.
Mary Manin Morrissey |
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Trying creates impossibilities,
letting go creates what is desired.
Stalking Wolf, Apache elder
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We must learn to let go, to give up,
to make room for the
things we have prayed for and
desired.
Charles Fillmore
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As
I started to picture the trees in the storm,
the answer began
to dawn on me. The trees in the
storm don't try to stand up
straight and tall and
erect. They allow themselves to bend and
be blown
with the wind. They understand the power of
letting
go. Those trees and those branches that
try too hard to stand
up strong and straight are
the ones that break. Now is not the
time for you
to be strong, Julia, or you, too, will break.
Julia
Butterfly Hill
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There's
an important difference between giving up and letting go.
Jessica
Hatchigan
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People have a hard time letting go of their
suffering.
Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is
familiar.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only
condition for
happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything--anger,
anxiety,
or possessions--we cannot be free.
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The
harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions,
the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.
John
Seely Brown
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We must learn to let go as easily as
we grasp
or we will find our hands full and our minds empty.
Leo Buscaglia |
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To
let go isn't to forget, not to think about, or ignore.
It doesn't
leave feelings of anger, jealousy, or regret. Letting
go isn't about
winning or losing. It's not about pride and it's not
about how you
appear, and it's not obsessing or dwelling on the
past. Letting go
isn't blocking memories or thinking sad thoughts, and it
doesn't leave
emptiness, hurt, or sadness. It's not about giving in
or giving up.
Letting go isn't about loss and it's not about defeat.
To let go is
to cherish the memories, but to overcome and move on.
It is having
an open mind and confidence in the future. Letting go
is learning
and experiencing and growing. To let go is to be
thankful for the
experiences that made you laugh, made you cry, and made you
grow.
It's about all that you have, all that you had, and all that
you will
soon gain. Letting go is having the courage to accept
change,
and the strength to keep moving. Letting go is growing
up. It is
realizing that the heart can sometimes be the most potent
remedy.
To let go is to open a door, and to clear a path and set yourself
free.
unattributed |
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Our
fear is even stronger when
we think we are responsible
for others--our children,
for example. We want
to spare them pain, and
so we forget to listen to
the Sound of Creation.
No one learns from
someone else's mistake.
If we respect others, we
must recognize that they
have a right to their own
dance. Their own spirits
will guide them.
unattributed
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"We
hold fast by letting go." Letting go of our
attempts
to control things, our attempts to maintain control over
every aspect of our life. We've all heard the saying
about if we love something, we should let it go, and then
we'll know whether it "belongs" to us when we see
whether it comes back to us. So much of our discontent
and our dissatisfaction comes from our unwillingness
to let go of trying to control things and trying to
cause just the results that we think should occur.
tom
walsh
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Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go,
of being emptied, of getting
in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it
merges with the
space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into
empty. Births
happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . .
. Let us not
fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to
penetrate
us even as we penetrate it.
Matthew Fox |
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You
hang on to the past hoping for what
should have been but still isn't and
never will be until you let go! |
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Stephen C.
Paul |
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Every
time you let go of something limiting,
you create space for something better. |
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One
wears one's mind out in study, and yet has more mind
with which to study. One gives away one's heart in
love
and
yet has more heart to give away. One perishes out
of pity
for a
suffering world, and is stronger therefore. So,
too, it is possible
at one and the same time to hold on to life and let go.
Milton
Steinberg
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In
the end these things matter most: How well did you love?
How fully did you love? How deeply did you learn to let go?
the
Buddha |
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We
need in love to practice only this: letting each other
go.
For holding on comes easily--we do not need to learn it.
Rainer
Maria Rilke
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Consider
the trees which allow the birds to perch and fly away
without either
inviting them to stay or desiring them
never to
depart. If your heart can be
like
this, you will be near to the way.
Zen
Buddhist teaching
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The clouds above us come together and
disperse;
The breeze in the courtyard departs and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can keep us from celebrating?
Lu-Yu
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The
greatest thing is, at any moment, to be willing
to
give up who we are in order to become all that we can be.
Max
De Pree
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Let go
a little to have a little peace. Let go a lot to have
a lot of peace.
Achaan Chah
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We
believe that it is difficult to let go, but in truth, it is
much more difficult
and painful to hold and protect. Reflect upon anything
in your life that you
grasp hold of--an opinion, a historical resentment, an
ambition, or an unfulfilled
fantasy. Sense the tightness, fear, and defensiveness
that surrounds the
grasping. It is a painful, anxious experience of
unhappiness. We do not
let go in order to make ourselves impoverished or bereft.
We let go in order to discover happiness and peace.
Christina
Feldman
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Once
we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable
and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are
attached to things staying the same, we realize that
relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live.
Letting
go does not mean not caring about things. It means
caring about them in a flexible and wise way.
Jack
Kornfield |
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On
Letting Go
Robert Paul Gilles
To
"let go" does not mean to stop caring.
It means I can't do it for someone else.
To
"let go" is not to cut myself off.
It's the realization that I can't control another.
To
"let go" is to admit powerlessness,
which means the
outcome is not in my hands.
To
"let go" is not to try to change or blame another.
It's to make the most of myself.
To
"let go" is not to care for, but to care about.
To
"let go" is not to fix, but to be supportive.
To
"let go" is not to judge, but to allow another to be a
human being.
To
"let go" is not to be in the middle, arranging all the
outcomes,
but to allow others to affect their own destinies.
To
"let go" is not to deny, but to accept.
To
"let go" is not to nag, scold, or argue, but instead
to search out my own shortcomings and correct them.
To
"let go" is not to adjust everything to my desires,
but to take each day as it comes and cherish myself in it.
To
"let go" is not to regret the past, but to grow and live
for the future.
To
"let go" is to fear less and to love more.
(from his book Thoughts of the dreampoet : vol. 1.)
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We
have come to look upon life as a conflict with death--the
intruding
enemy, not the natural ending--in impotent quarrel with
which we spend
every stage of it. When the time comes for youth to
depart, we would
hold it back by main force. When the fervor of desire
slackens, we
would revive it with fresh fuel of our own devising.
When our sense
organs weaken, we urge them to keep up their efforts.
Even when our
grip has relaxed we are reluctant to give up
possession. We are not
trained to recognize the inevitable as natural, and so
cannot give up
gracefully that which has to go, but needs must wait till it
is snatched
from us. The truth comes as conqueror only because
we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
Rabindranath Tagore |
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Does anything in nature despair except man?
An animal with a foot caught in
a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to
survive. It is all closed
in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key?
Keep
busy with survival.
Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and
remember
that nothing
stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic
pain. Sit it
out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude |
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When
I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
Lao Tzu |
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Learning
to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life
should be
touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it
happen at times,
and at others move forward with it.
Ray Bradbury |
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Today I am amazed at the things our children have
done and their
wide range
of interests.
They are all living their lives and not the
ones I
would have planned
for them.
But I have learned that their
lives are theirs, not
mine, and in living
their own lives they have
given me
experiences and an education I would never
have had if
I’d
been fool enough to make them do what I thought they should
do.
Bernie Siegel
Prescriptions for Living |
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Forgiveness
and the release of the past open the creative flow of
life,
supporting all levels of mind, heart, body,
emotion, and spirit. This
energy flow determines
the state of our health, our desire to create and
procreate, our willingness to develop our gifts, and how
we use or deny
the life force that we are given as human
beings. . . . by choosing to
let go of the past, our
fears, and our negative patterns or reactions to
life,
we are suddenly funded with a resurgence of life force,
which propels
us into a newfound way of being and a very
different
way of understanding the world.
Jamie Sams |
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Periods of change are full of
paradoxes. They're difficult but exciting,
frightening but freeing. Letting go of old patterns
that
no longer work for us is exhilarating.
Sue
Patton Thoele |
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In
examining our own lives, we might be able to spot the heavy
weight of yesterday's deeds that we persist in carrying
around with
us. We might be carrying bitterness and resentment
because we may
have felt betrayed by a friend. We might be carrying
anger and a
feeling of injustice because we lost out on something we
really wanted
while someone else got it. We might be carrying hurt
feelings because
someone we liked criticized us. But continuing to
carry harsh and
negative feelings from the past can be like picking up a
pebble in
your shoe while you are out walking. You can stop and
remove the
pebble, or you can continue to walk and let the pebble
irritate your foot
and cause pain. The choice is yours. You can
release your anger and
hurt feelings, just as you can remove the pebble from your
shoe.
John
Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life |
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The
more you let go the more you accomplish.
Stephen C. Paul
Inneractions |
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I defined ten “guideposts” for Wholehearted living that point to what the Wholehearted work to cultivate
and what they work to let go of:
Cultivating Authenticity: Letting Go of What People Think
Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of Perfectionism
Cultivating a Resilient Spirit: Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness
Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark
Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison
Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth
Cultivating Calm and Stillness: Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle
Cultivating Meaningful Work: Letting Go of Self-Doubt and “Supposed To”
Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance: Letting Go of Being Cool and “Always in Control”
Brené Brown
Daring Greatly |
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quotations
- contents
-
welcome
page
-
obstacles
the
people behind the words
-
our
current e-zine
-
articles
and excerpts
Daily
Meditations, Year One - Year
Two - Year Three
- Year Four
Sign up
for your free daily spiritual or general quotation ~ ~ Sign
up for your free daily meditation
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To let go means to give up
coercing, resisting, or struggling,
in exchange for something more powerful and
wholesome which
comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting
caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the
intrinsic
stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Wherever
You Go, There You Are
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Letting go doesn't
mean that you don't care about someone anymore.
It's just realizing that the only person you really have
control over is yourself.
Deborah Reber
Chicken
Soup for the Teenage Soul |
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It has been stupidly difficult to let go, but that is what has been needed.
I had allowed myself to get overanxious, clutching at what seemed sure
to pass, and clutching is the surest way to murder love, as if it were a kitten,
not to be squeezed so hard, or a flower to fade in a tight hand. Letting go,
I have come back yesterday and today to a sense of my life here in all its
riches, depth, freedom for soul-making. It’s a real break-through.
May Sarton
Journal
of a Solitude |
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We find by losing. We hold fast
by letting
go.
We become something
new
by
ceasing to be something
old. This seems
to be close to the heart
of
that mystery.
I know no more now
than I ever did
about the far side
of
death as the last
letting-go of all,
but now I know that
I do not need
to know, and that I do
not need
to be afraid
of not knowing. God
knows. That is
all that matters.
Frederick Buechner
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I
surrender my anxiety and my sense of urgency. I allow
God to guide me
in the pacing of my life. I open my heart to God's
timing. I release my deadlines,
agendas, and stridency to the gentle yet often swift pacing
of God. As I open
my heart to God's unfoldings, my heart attains peace.
As I relax into God's timing,
my heart contains comfort. As I allow God to set the
tone and schedule of my days,
I find myself in the right time and place, open and
available to God's opportunities.
Julia
Cameron |
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The only things we can keep are the things we
freely give to God. What
we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure
to lose.
C.S. Lewis |
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