Joshua Benavides explains
Have you been harassed by some thoughts or feelings that come back again and again and again? How do we get rid of them? How can we change that? Well, the short of it is essentially you stop trying to change, fix or get rid of your unwanted thoughts and feelings. That’s the short of it – you essentially let go. You see the only reason you are wanting to change, fix or get rid of it (that thought or feeling) is because you are resisting it- because you don’t want to feel like that. So instead of letting the feeling run its course, we instead try to escape from it through alcohol, drugs, sex, entertainment etc or we keep pushing it down and trying to suppress it.
The murky water mug
When we are trying to change or fix to get rid of our thoughts or feelings in the moment, we are resisting it and you know that whatever you resist tends to persist. Let me use a metaphor to explain this even better. If you would have a mug of water which is kind of murky because of the mud and you want this murky water to clear up, to get to its natural state of clarity, shaking the mug to trying to manipulate the content of the mud in the water is just not going to work. The more you shake the mug, the murkier it will get. So what can you do?
Interestingly enough, you will notice that if you don’t do anything, if you just leave the mud to run its course, if you let it do what it does, eventually you will see that the mud begins to settle on its own, leaving behind the innate clarity of the water. And like this metaphor it’s the same thing that occurs in our mind. When we are so caught up with our thinking or feelings, our minds are murky – we can’t see clearly. So if we simply stop trying to change the content of our thinking, if we stop trying to manipulate it, make it go away or resist it, our thought-feelings start to naturally process and move through us and sometimes literally within seconds we start noticing again our innate wellbeing and our innate clarity and peace. Now this happens very naturally throughout the day – everybody experiences this. In one moment, you may be caught up in your own thinking and feeling, in memories or fearful imagining of the future. Then maybe you go and have a cup of coffee or you go out for a walk in nature and suddenly you start to feel your thinking and feelings settling down again and as it settles you feel great, you feel clear and trusting, you feel like you are not alone in this universe – you feel connected to life. Although this all happens very naturally throughout the day, we can accelerate our healing and transformation when we engage in the continual surrender of all the barriers to love, freedom and inner peace.