I love the change of season to Autumn. It’s my favourite time of year. Where I live in Australia our climate is temperate so the days are slightly crisper yet the temperatures have not dropped too much. I look forward to opportunities to head further south to cooler climates and to witness the stunning natural colour change before the trees shed their leaves.
Autumn is a perfect time to think about letting go of what no longer serves you. It allows you to bring something new into your life. It may be around work or lack of purpose. Your health. Feeling a sense of loneliness and difficulty finding people to connect with who’ll support and understand you. It may be an attitude or self-belief that is impacting your confidence and contentment.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
How can you think differently about yourself or the situation that’s bothering you? What meaningful actions can you take to let go of the past? What can you control that will allow you to move forward?
“Summon all your strength to let go and start heading in a new direction because it’ll lead you closer to your true path”
Niki Banas (Walk the Earth)
Let’s identify a few things you may want to let go of.
Letting go of focusing on the past
The past can be a challenging place to move forward from. It’s a safe place that we know well. It’s become our sense of identity (even though we tend to strongly identify with the worst incidences of our past – trauma, grief, illness and betrayal). Unforgiveness and resentments are also hard ones for us to shift.
The past is the source of many of the stories we tell ourselves. If they are trauma based, they can become crutches to provide comfort and receive pity from others. Ultimately these stories become unhelpful and limit us moving forward.
The past is also a place we can no longer access. It has framed how we understand life, given us life lessons and helped create who we are, someone who is continually evolving. Although we may have regrets about our past actions or misgivings about decisions we previously made, it’s important to find a way forward and seek peace within ourselves.
There is a growing body of evidence that our mind and body are deeply interconnected. Experiencing PTSD, repressing anger, struggling to forgive and people pleasing sit alongside unhealthy physical factors in the development of chronic health conditions (Dr Rangan Chatterjee and Dr Gabor Mate are useful resources for further reading).
Please don’t blame your ‘past self’. The patterns you formed to keep safe and survive life’s difficulties may have come from your early life. Those responses can also form following particularly traumatic events you’ve lived through. None of us come through life unscathed.
The thing is to recognise the patterns of your behaviour and do the work to heal and move forward toward your own version of optimum health.
Letting go of worrying about the future
The other side of the coin is our concern about the future. Something that in reality is also outside our control. No matter how much worry and anxiety we infuse into our being, it will have little influence on what we will eventually experience.
When we are anxious about the future we can benefit from taking practical action in the present moment. That may look like fully accepting what is and having gratitude for what we currently have in our lives. To also recognize that we’ve been able to navigate through changes before in our lives and come out the other side. There is probably a toolkit of strategies we’ve learnt to help us move forward effectively.
Brad Stulberg in his book ‘Master of Change’ talks about developing a rugged flexibility around life. Building a strong sense of self that allows you to also be flexible to navigate life’s changes as they present themselves. It’s a type of moving renovation we make that takes into account each life transition from a solid base of understanding ourselves and life.
“We have a better chance of feeling and doing good if we set realistic expectations – including that things change all the time, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse”
Brad Stulberg
Bringing your focus to the present moment
The work of letting go happens in the moment you are living right now. Ekhart Tolle in his book ‘The Power of Now’ would say it’s the only moment that truly exists and that we can influence. The beauty of that is that we can use the knowledge and life lessons of past experiences but we are not bound by them. By consciously letting go it’s possible to imagine a different future.
So what can you let go of right now?
- The need to be constantly busy and feel validated through being needed by others.
- Suppressing your emotions rather than processing and expressing them.
- Comparing yourself and your life to others (often in an unfavourable way).
- Having limited beliefs of what is possible to achieve in your life.
- The desire to endlessly acquire things.
- Difficulty and discomfort receiving support from others.
- Wishing life was different rather than appreciating the life you are actually living.
- The need to know what is going on in the world, especially through social media. Many have a fear of missing out if they disconnect from technology.
- Outdated ideas of what it means to be a woman and your place in the world. This can influence how you see yourself in your relationships, community and workplace.
As you read through the list, do any of these resonate as habits or attitudes you’d like to change? Just by recognizing they exist you are taking the first step of reflection which will enable you to look for ways to act or view things differently.
By examining what you need to let go of in life, you create space for something new. Something that is more aligned with the person you are becoming, rather than who you are now or who you have been. It’s a process that requires time to ponder the presence of behaviours and attitudes in your daily life. Noticing the impacts they have on yourself and those around you. Then it becomes possible to create and implement small steps that move you forward.