Therapeutic Unrequited Love.
The ‘Let Go’ method is a therapeutic technique and a powerful path to personal development. Basically, it teaches some easy steps to forgiveness. It is a path of practical spirituality. It helps you in your self-improvement; in fact, it can be used as a personal development plan in itself! It does not have anything to do with organized religion. It is a state of mind which allows you to go home to happiness, silence, spaciousness, unconditional love and complete inner peace. You can use the method all by yourself at any time. As discussed in my blog Inner Peace in Unrequited Love, you can also have someone else like a coach, a trusted friend or a guide in consciousness help you; which makes it more powerful.
It is important to know that no method dealing with our consciousness works on someone who doesn’t have complete faith in it. A conscious awareness and respect for the process is required for any healing process to be successful. Learning how to adapt to the situation and working on it is helpful. Certain methods have been helpful in successfully completing the process of ‘letting go’, ensuring smooth exit from a situation or relationship and offering opportunity to heal the underlying issues. In many cases, you will grieve like someone who is experiencing the loss of a relationship and only time will heal the wounds and change your perspective. At first, you will have to make constant effort to refocus your energies by controlling your thoughts from wandering to that one person, but eventually this will become easier.
Letting Go – in Practice
Letting go involves letting go of an unpleasant thought, person or situation. Let go of them for greater benefit, better life and personal development. Tell yourself that anything that is limiting you and giving you an unpleasant experience is not worth keeping. This includes unpleasant versions of your feelings, thoughts, habits, beliefs, needs etc. The deciding factor is unpleasantness. Any kind of unpleasantness should warn you that it is time to let go. When it comes down to it, letting go is simply – a decision.
However, the decision is easy to make, but not-so-easy to follow or practise. The things that bring us the most unpleasantness also happen to be the things that we really, really want to hold on to! For some reason, we think we need them. An unrequited lover does not want to believe that his love will never be reciprocated and hence, keeps holding on to faith, and keeps hurting himself. Even in other matters of life, things that we need to let go of, in order to be at peace with ourselves, are the things that we mostly continue to hold on to. A good example of this is the unpleasant feeling of jealousy. To explain this, let’s assume that we’re talking about obsessive jealousy. Subconsciously, we keep denying that we are jealous of someone who has what we probably don’t, or not as much. The fact, however, is that jealousy is an extremely destructive emotion which may well take away even what little we have, such as, driving our partner away. Countless relationships have ended because of one partner’s jealousy. Clearly, jealousy is a prime subject for the ‘let go’ concept. Once an unrequited lover starts feeling jealous of someone who has more access to or is closer to their beloved, they keep holding on to the feeling and it keeps growing; while subconsciously, we keep telling ourselves that we are not jealous.
Furthermore, the feeling of obsessive jealousy is extremely unpleasant, but you cannot do anything about it until you accept that you are jealous! Accepting it requires a lot of courage, and mostly you are not even willing to do it. Hence, you continue to be jealous, making the situation worse, like driving your partner farther away. Apart from jealousy, there are several other situations and feelings that we need to let go of. This requires delving into the unpleasantness of our emotions and learn our own secrets. Ask ourselves some questions and get some unpleasant answers.
I am going to write about this in detail in my next post. Please share your experiences in the comments section and I will add them to my future blogs.