Letting go of regret

It's tempting to look back on one's life when you're in a slightly pensive mood and start identifying all the mistakes you feel you've made. It's a trap I fall into more than I would like to... One of the things my mind likes to fixate on is past relationships. It says “How is it that your grandmother managed to have just one relationship over her whole life and you have a string of painful, fruitless failures.” Yeah, my mind's pretty nasty like that!

It also says things like:

•    You always pick men who are wrong for you

•    You're not mature enough to have a healthy relationship

•    You're going to ruin every good thing that comes along, you know you will!

What a bitch!

Looking at my past relationships in this way makes me mistrust the one I'm in now. Even though there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this love, or the man I am with, I look for things that could be signs that things will turn bad in the future. I am mistrustful and suspicious. I expect the worst.

How can this kind of attitude ever lead to anything good!?

Considering my past in a more positive light leads to a very different result. If I let go of the idea that I made mistakes, and instead accept that each and every person who has come into my life has taught me important lessons, made me stronger and led me to circumstances that helped to heal my woundedness, then I can see my present situation as the opportunity that it is. Then, instead of looking for faults and expecting things to go wrong in my relationship, I can relax and enjoy it :)

Letting go of regret allows us to trust our ability to make wise decisions in the present moment. And besides, those mistakes we think we made, they're in the past and there ain't nothing we can do to change them now! Regret make us heavy and like any burden it slows us down, makes everything more of a challenge. Letting go of regret sets us free; we become light. We move with ease and grace, even in the most challenging of situations.

What do you regret most in your life? What would it mean to let go of that regret right now?

Letting go of our need for 'roots'

One thing that’s always been distinguishable about me is my lack of roots. It’s not that I’m in any particular way a rootless person; it’s just that my life’s circumstances have been such that I haven’t really had the opportunity to settle down, or become attached to any place or person. I have no hometown, no childhood friends that I catch up with every year or so, no place to go back to. My mother and father both live many miles away from the area where I grew up and my brothers and sisters are scattered all over the country. I live a nomadic life, staying in a place for a year or two before moving on. At this point I’ve lived in more houses than there are years to my life!

But throughout my life there have always been a few things that remained stable, anchors in what was sometimes a tumultuous sea of experience, and one of these anchors has been my grandmother. On many occasions I’ve returned to live with her after some adventure in my life ended or went a little more pear-shaped than I could handle. Because we share many of the same values and perspectives on life we have a wonderful relationship that is very enriching and her support and unconditional love has nourished me and made me the person I am today.

Now she is 1000's of kilometers away from where I live. Letting go of her is perhaps the hardest lesson in surrender yet.

Roots are different for everyone: they include family, childhood friends, cultural traditions and customs, a piece of land where one feels at home, learned ways of looking at the world. Many would argue that letting go of these things is not desirable, that roots are essential and beneficial to our wellbeing. I agree that roots provide stability, a firm foundation. They are nourishing and grounding. But here we need to distinguish between enjoying and benefiting from our roots and needing them, which is where attachment comes in. If we ask ourselves ‘what would happen if I didn’t have that person/place/idea/thing in my life?’ the answer should be ‘I’d be okay.’ You can be happy and creative, free to go with the flow of life, either with or without that connection. 

Two situations illustrate an unhealthy attachment to roots:

1. Your roots feel inhibiting. They hold you back from following the natural flow of synchronicity in your life, from taking up the opportunities that come your way and from using your gifts. You are like a pot-bound plant that needs more space in order to grow.
2. You feel great about your roots. They provide the foundation on which you’re able to be creative, to explore and to grow. However when those roots aren’t there you fall down. You can’t seem to be happy and at peace without them.

The first situation is not so relevant to me, as my family is supportive and encouraging of my choices, never judgemental or clingy or manipulative. But for many people family roots equate to disapproval, guilt, secrets, game playing and other unhealthy attachment-based behaviour. In these cases letting go of one’s roots can be very freeing.

In my case I have learned very well to do without roots and the freedom this has allowed me has enhanced my creativity, my courage and my growth as a human being. But still I feel a great fear in my heart when I think of my grandmother’s passing. It’s as if the constancy of her presence has allowed me to explore so boldly, knowing that if anything were to go wrong I could return to her, that if I became lost she would always be the reference point by which I could reorientate myself.

I suppose that letting go of my dependence on her for this sense of security will push me to find my own inner anchor point, my inner roots. So that in dark times I may find light within, in times of tumult, peace, in times of confusion, clarity. To do I must remain aware of the petty day-to-day attachments that divert my attention, pull me away from my centre and stifle my freedom of expression. Meditation remains the best tool I know of to achieve this clarity: as I sit, allowing my thoughts to pass by without my mind grasping onto them, I learn to let go of the frustrations, the fixations, the passions that occur in my daily life.

Once you’ve found your inner roots you can begin to nurture them, tending them with care and attention, watering them with love, so that they grow deeper and stronger, providing a stability that is far more real than any security you might find in the outside world. Such outer security is subject to change: the lover dies, the house burns down, the business fails and where are you left? Letting go of our need for roots allows us to become strong, to act with freedom and to grow into the highest expression of ourselves.

Letting go of our ideal world

One of the things I find most difficult to let go of is my vision of an ideal world.

For many years now I have worked as a social and environmental activist trying to bring about change through education and community development. At first this work came from a sense of outrage: how could people be so greedy and selfish, so blind to the suffering of others and so ignorant of the beauty around them? After a while I began to realise that people do not mean to cause harm. Mostly people act out of fear, or out of a desire to build a secure, happy and safe little world for themselves and their families. So my work began to be about developing awareness, building connections and demonstrating a better way of living.

But of course no matter how noble our desire for change may be the world does not conform to our ideals. If we are too attached to this ideal then inevitably we will begin to feel as though our work means nothing, that nothing is changing. And we think that we cannot be happy while the world is the way that it is. At this point a feeling of hopelessness sets in. Even though we realise that we cannot change the whole world we still cling to our precious vision, we still refuse to accept the way things are even though we can see that we are struggling against the current.

Image: Copyright AD-Passion.

Letting go of how we want things to be is easier if we are able to acknowledge that we cannot always see the full picture, that reality is a much more complicated place than we can comprehend. It's useful to use the metaphor of a camera lens to see this more clearly. We can zoom in close and then our little world and our concerns about it are very real, or we can zoom out and see, perhaps for the first time, that our planet is a tiny speck of dust in the immensity of a vast universe, and that our human species has existed only for a second in the larger timescale of universal ages. We see more clearly that these things are not our responsibility to fix and we can let go of our struggle to change them, our need for things to be a certain way.

In reality the polarities of hot and cold, dark and light, good and evil are necessary to sustain the dynamic equilibrium that makes our world the wondrous, diverse and magical place that it is. The universal laws that govern life are constantly working to keep these polarities in balance but this is not a static process; there is a continuous movement from balance to imbalance and back again. From our limited perspective we cannot see this very long-term, very large-scale process. We see only that things look out of whack to us and so we panic.

Ironically by letting go we are freed to act in ways that we may not have seen from our narrow perspective. When we are tethered to an ideal we quite often also tie ourselves to all sorts of dogmas that prevent us from making a wise and loving choice in the present moment. We are too busy scheming, too caught up in our strategies and plans to see the potential for change right here and right now. Usually this change is what we social engineers might see as insignificant: perhaps it involves correcting a prejudice we've been carrying unconsciously in our minds, or maybe it's a simple connection between two people. Yet if we use our telephoto lens again we see that small acts such as these can change the world too: because the microcosm is just as significant as the macrocosm. It just depends on how you look at things.