Because the belief in struggle is so strong in our world, I wanted to share with you a dream I had which helped me to realize struggle was a choice. At the time I had this dream, I was in a great deal of emotional pain. I, like most people, believed I needed to suffer in order to grow.

The dream did not change my outside circumstances, but it helped me see my life in a new way.

In my dream, I was in a room with many other people. In the process of moving across the room, we had to crawl through a tunnel filled with bees. It was impossible to accomplish our journey without being stung several times. After I had completed a pass through the first tunnel, I came to a resting place. The people here were recovering from their bites while preparing to enter a second tunnel.

Although I wanted to complete my journey, I was not eager to go through the same painful experience again. I looked around the room and I noticed a man standing by a door. I approached him, asking if there was another way to travel without all the suffering. He smiled at me and said, “Yes, you can go through here.” He opened the door into a beautiful garden. I completed my journey by following the path through the garden, enjoying the sun light and beauty all around me.

As I reviewed this dream, I realized most of us go through life experiencing the pain and struggle of life, never looking for any alternatives. The people in my dream assumed there was only one way to accomplish the task before them. When I got tired of being bitten, I decided to look for another route. The man at the door was not blocking the way nor hiding its presence. He was there to assist anyone who asked for help. When I decided to let go of the struggle, my journey became one of joy and beauty.

Over the years, I have shared this dream with many people. Most people are shocked at the idea that struggle is a choice. It is not a concept they have ever entertained. Their experience of life has taught them to expect to struggle. For some, it is a pleasant relief to release this old concept. Others are not ready to make such a drastic change in perspective.

Struggle is a choice. It is your right and responsibility to choose. As shown in my dream, whenever you decide to look for another path, there is always someone there to show you the way.

Letting go of struggle does not mean I will never again run into obstacles in my life. Challenges still present themselves to me. It is my perspective that has changed. I see these events as opportunities to watch as the power of God is demonstrated in my life.

Consider these ideas about “letting be” and “letting go”:

*Feelings naturally are felt and integrate when we allow them to be there or let them be.

*Feeling will intensify and endure if we try to get rid of them, resist having them or try to move them in anyway.

*Words have different emotional connotations. The phrase to “let go” may have different meanings to folks. Consider these typical meanings of the word “go” In the Random House College Dictionary:

(1) To move or to proceed to or from something.
(2) To leave a place, to depart.
(3) To keep in motion or to be in motion.

With such typical meanings, the word “go” can easily be experienced as moving something or putting something in motion. Viewed in this way “letting go” becomes anywhere from subtle to very pure resistance. Couple this “letting go” with the image of letting an object drop and you are neither allowing or permitting which are the heart of integration, you are trying to move something or put it in motion. Here letting go is resistance.

If “letting go” is understood in the Buddhist mindfulness sense as allowing or permitting it to be there, to “let it be” then there is no resistance. “Letting be” leads to feeling and to integration.

Unless someone understands “letting go” as “letting be” then they are doomed to be resist their feelings in a subtle and often not so subtle way. Any methods that try to move something is teaching resistance. Someone may indeed let go of some surface tension, but that’s hardly the heart of a feeling. The emotional coloring’s projection or the emotional charge remains.

The stuff of the intuitive message remains to be reprojected. Naturally this will reform and before long the surface tension starts to make its way back. In a day or two, a week. When the relaxation is no longer there, then the issue begins it’s return.

By all means let your feeling “be”, allow it to be there, or welcome and permit it’s presence. Your feelings and emotions are valuable bio-messengers, not something to be shunted away because they may feel distinctly uncomfortable at times. Every problem contains its own solution. I may not know how things will be resolved, but I am sure a solution will appear.

I can now flow with the circumstances in my life, trusting that the answer will soon be revealed. This perspective creates a feeling of peace and joyous anticipation. Without trust, I resist those difficult situations, creating a feeling of struggle. The feelings and thoughts of fear create more chaos and pain. I may not be able to choose every event that appears in my life, but I can always choose how I will view those situations.

An Affirmation for Letting Go

I am willing to trust. I know that to the degree I am willing to give up my search for a healthy love relationship, I can have it. I know I can have whatever I am ready and willing to receive. Individual receptivity is everything. Without it, nothing changes. With it, all things are possible. I no longer insist upon my choice.

I know that the only thing I lose when I let go of something I am afraid to live without is the fear itself. I am stronger than anything that frightens me!

I let go of the past, and I am free to think clearly and positively in the present. I am not my past.

Letting go is the natural release which always follows the realization that holding on is an energy drain and it hurts. Letting go happens effortlessly when there is no other choice. Letting go does not mean giving up.

** Love Note. . . A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth — with the fire dead, the laughter stilled, and the light extinguished. – Frank P. Tebbetts

Letting go is a journey that never ends. Never. It only begins — over and over again — each time I can glimpse something higher than my own painful certainty over who I think I am. There is always something higher; a life beyond the limits of my present sight.

To see what is farther I must be willing to lift my eyes from their present point of focus. Release always follows revelation and real revelation is always a glimpse of something that was only just out of sight.

I know that stress in my love relationship exists because I insist! What I resist, persists. I am tied to whatever I avoid.

**Love Note. . . The heart loves, but moods have no loyalty. Moods should be heard but never danced to. – Hugh Prather

It is a mistaken belief that I must push my love relationship in the direction I choose that keeps me in a strained and unhappy relationship with it. Reality has its own effortless course, and I can either embrace its way or struggle endlessly with mine.

I do not need power to flow.

I let go of that part of myself that is certain it is better to suffer and feel like someone than it is to just let go and quietly be no one. I give birth to a new me that never has to hold on to anything because it is already everything.

I dare to walk away from all of the familiar but useless mental and emotional relationships that give me a temporary but unsatisfactory sense of self. My true identity is calling me and to hear it I must be willing to endure, for as long as necessary, the fear of self-uncertainty.

This form of seeming self-abandonment eventually turns into my greatest pleasure as it becomes increasingly evident that the only thing certain about fear is that it will always compromise me. When it comes to who I really am, there is no compromise.

Let go of the past. The past is yesterday. It is irretrievable. When you relate to the past, you relate to no one or any thing. You are literally talking to yourself. No one else is listening. You have already heard all you have to say about that, so, let go.

A Course in Miracles says, “You cannot really not let go what has already gone. It must be, therefore, that you are maintaining the illusion that it has not gone because you think it serves some purpose that you want fulfilled.”

It is certifiable insanity to conjure up your own reality based on the past and relate to it, rather than to relate to the present which is the only reality.

**Love Note. . . Relationships are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which he brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. – Marianne Williamson

I say goodbye to the past and hello to the present.

I am enthusiastic about who I am becoming! I know that no one sincerely asks for a new life until they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the old one. I am and I let go. When I allow myself to let go of what is old, I stay true to what is new.

I believe that as with all insight, higher understanding itself contains not only the instructions I must follow, but the strength I will need to carry them out.

Starting life over again is the key to a new me. I see the beauty and significance of starting over – over and over and over. Every present moment is always new and new is always right now! The new dies to the ever-new in an endless celebration of Life.

This is it!

I live in the present. I never let the past dictate the direction of the present moment. I give my best to my endeavors.

What lies ahead for me can only be good.

True peace and harmony are a part of who I am.

I have come to the realization that what is possible for me to become only truly changes when I am willing to see what is impossible for me to continue being.

My true nature is already fully independent and flying freely. I have found my wings.

I let go and let God. And so it is.