If you learn to let go and drop everything that’s holding you back, your life will take off. In his new book, Learn to Let Go: A Guided Journal, bestselling author of The Power of Letting Go John Purkiss guides you through how to stay present, let go of the thoughts that keep you stuck, and tune into something far more intelligent than your brain using the creative exercises, writing prompts and techniques to help you start living a life of freedom and success. John shares his expert advice and top tips with Preneur World on how to let go of the pain that’s running your life.
Letting go involves three steps:
1. The first step is to let go of the thoughts that keep us stuck. These include stories, labels, judgements, expectations, comparisons, opinions, conclusions, and so on.
2. The second step is to let go of the pain that’s running your life. What happened in the past is generating thousands of negative thoughts now. I’ll come back to this topic shortly.
3. The third step is to let go completely. Another word for this is surrender. Please note that this is not the same as giving up. When we surrender, we tune into something far more intelligent than our individual brains.
Let’s zoom in on the second step – letting go of the pain that’s running your life. In order to do this, we need to look inwards. One way is to ask ourselves two questions:
- What do I want to happen in my life that isn’t happening now?
- What keeps happening even though I don’t want it to happen?
Most of us have several answers to these two questions. In short, we have trouble manifesting what we want, and we keep manifesting things we don’t want.
Books such as The Secret and The Law of Attraction have gone some way to solving this problem, by encouraging us to be clear about what we want to happen and focus on that. However, most of us still struggle to manifest what we want, so what’s going on?
I found the answer when I met SPH Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam – known to his followers as Swamiji – in India in 2014. He said, “We manifest our beliefs, not our desires.” If we look inwards, we can see that there’s a big gap between our beliefs and our desires, which is why things don’t happen the way we want. We have beliefs such as “I’m a failure” or “Life doesn’t give me what I want”. We may not even be aware of these beliefs. Then we’re upset when our beliefs become reality.
Fortunately, Swamiji has provided a solution in the form of The Science of CompletionSM. It boils down to a simple instruction: “re-live to relieve”. You can start working on this now. Look inwards and notice what’s disturbing you. How do you feel? For example, you may feel that life is unfair. Now look back over your life and find the earliest time you can remember being treated unfairly. This incident is likely to have been in your early childhood and left you feeling powerless.
The next step is to look at yourself in a mirror. Become a small child again, with the way you saw things at that age – not the way you see things now. Intensely re-live that experience by talking aloud to yourself in the mirror – at least five times. Re-live the incident as a small child and allow all the suppressed emotions to come out.
Now let’s apply the same technique to “I’m a failure”. Look back over your life and find the earliest time when you felt like a failure. This will be an incident that left you feeling powerless. Intensely re-live that experience by talking aloud to the person in the mirror – at least five times. Experience the incident as a small child and allow all the suppressed emotions to come out.
It’s like squeezing pus out of a wound, which then heals. If we re-live each painful incident over and over again, the pain gradually leaves our bodies. Swamiji helps us to do this.
Eventually, we no longer see life as unfair or see ourselves as failures. Then we can replace each old, negative belief with a powerful cognition. In my case, I’ve replaced “Life doesn’t give me what I want” with “Life keeps blessing me”. That belief is constantly being manifested, most recently with the success of The Power of Letting Go and the publication of Learn to Let Go – a Guided Journal.
About the expert
John Purkiss, bestselling author of The Power of Letting Go, studied economics at Cambridge University and has an MBA (Master of Business Administration) from INSEAD. He began his career in banking and management consultancy, in London and Chicago, and worked in sales and marketing in the UK and Continental Europe. John then learned to meditate, which made his intuition much stronger and enabled him to move into executive search. He recruits senior executives and board members and also invests in high growth technology companies. He has lived and worked in France, Belgium and the USA, and speaks French, German and Spanish.
Learn to Let Go: A Guided Journal by John Purkiss is available now at £12.99 published by Aster.
