Questions & Answers
with
Stuart Wilde

Wilde About Letting Go

Q: In your tape series and book Infinite Self: 33Steps to Reclaiming Your Inner Power, you discuss the courage of letting go in Step 3. When people tell you to "let go" of pain, anger, guilt, fear, and so on, exactly how do you do it? I've tried letting go in visualizations and meditations, but I find that I still haven't really let go in my everyday life. What practical things can I do from day to day to let go?

A: Letting go is a hard one. Every part of humanity is designed to hang on. We hang on to our family connections, to the certificate we got at school, to our money, we embrace and hang on to our children, we lock our car and hang on to it. I think the whole definition of letting go is to stand outside the emotion. I talk about it a lot in my books, especially in Weight Loss for the Mind.

Letting go by visualizing and meditating is tough, because you have to concentrate on the thing you're trying to let go of. So it's a bit self-defeating. I think it's important to understand that you are not the character who is going through the emotion.

A technique I used in my meditations was to visualize myself spinning away. First, I would see myself in my mind's eye, so I'd be looking at my face. I'd see myself doing "angry" because of, let's say, a business situation. Then I'd visualize myself spinning away from the angry energy, or away from the upset. That helped me create the feeling of being able to detach myself from it, observe that it wasn't me, and recognize that it was just a reaction I was going through.

All emotion is reaction to opinion. I talk about that a lot in my books. In order to feel any emotion, positive or negative, you have to first have an opinion. Usually the way to go past it all is to change the opinion. In other words, life isn't necessarily going to go the way you want it. It's not necessarily going to be in this way, on that day, at this time, in that format, and so on. The most important thing is to hang loose and go with the flow, bro'.