Jason Silva is, in my opinion, a brilliant mind who thrives on voraciously consuming information and delivering stream of consciousness talks that challenge the viewer to use their own minds, reflect on their personal experience of life, and ponder how we are all a part of the same cosmic bubble.
In this video, Jason speaks about his ‘control-freak’ tendencies and how he finds himself often in a conversation with people who insist that he should, ‘just let go, just surrender, just submit’.
In an uncharacteristic fit of seemingly frustrated passion, Jason surmises that there is a balance in life that calls for a desire to control, create to-do lists, focus, plan, and have due-dillegence on one side, and submission, release, and ecstatic surrender and revelation on the other side (the spiritual idea of Yin and Yang comes to mind for me).
However, Jason clearly takes issue with the idea of letting go when he says, ‘You can’t meditate yourself into where you want to be in this world’.
This made me pause and reflect on what one may be trying to communicate when they say, ‘let it go’.
I often hear people say, “I can’t just pretend everything is OK.” or “How is releasing and letting go going to fix my problem?”
….and I get it.
The challenge is, if we mistakingly equate letting go with sitting on our ass and eating bonbons, we will most certainly take issue with anyone who tells us to ‘just let go, surrender, or submit’…especially if we are a self-professed control freak.
So, as it seems to me, there are two important points to put a light on in this conversation.
First, if we have a desire to control, it may be helpful to ask ourselves, ‘what is driving that desire?’
Many of us fall into the trap of looking for something outside ourselves to produce feelings of happiness, joy, fulfillment, etc. We strive, grind and push for achievement and success only to find out that the money, status, or material object is not the source of our wellbeing. Nor is it what we have been truly searching for. What we’ve been searching for is a feeling, and feelings are a result of what we think and believe. Therefore, your psychological wellbeing is innate and independent from anything you might accomplish or possess.
Secondly, what does it mean to let go or surrender? Does it mean that you are throwing your hands in the air and giving up?
I believe that letting go is about recognizing that you are the one producing the feelings…the sadness, anger, frustration, guilt, as well as the happiness, joy, and love…as a natural result of the ebb and flow of your thinking. No person, place, or circumstance can make you feel anything. It’s always an internal production.
The way it looks to me is that letting go is about releasing the tension and anxiety that can be created from over-analyzing and thinking incessantly about something, and then reflecting on the fact that our feelings are truly always and only a result of our thinking.
It’s from this space of reflection that we are more open to our innate wellbeing, inspiration, and creativity, and in that space we may create a to-do list and conquer it, we may go for a walk, or we may do an infinite number of other things…
The point being is that what ever we do, it will be coming from that place of inspiration rather than a place of, “I must do this thing to be happy, worthy, successful, etc.
Thus, it is taking ownership of our ‘stuff’ through meditation, reflection, and addressing, releasing, and letting go of the old stories, that we become more productive, in the flow, creative…in fact our lives can improve all-around.
Then suddenly, ‘letting go’ may become, perhaps, a top priority. I know it has in my life.
In fact, the inspiration to write this article popped into my head in the last 10 minutes of an hour meditation.
But I did not meditate to get the idea. The idea was a spontaneous result of my meditation.
It was a result of letting go of the desire to control all of my thinking.
So, you might even draw the conclusion that the ultimate control is…letting go.
