Let Go and Trust – Is that IT?
By Kristen N. Fox
“Let Go and Trust” is something you hear a lot if you hang around reality creators for even a little while. Sometimes it seems like this is the best answer to all the questions we think up about how something’s going to manifest or why something seems to be taking so long to come into form. After a while it can also seem like the answer we give when we really HAVE no answer to give.
But I learned that “Let Go and Trust” is not the ultimate answer, but just one step in the journey. Usually it’s the best thing to do when we want to release “manual” control or forceful manipulation of physical reality, which is based in fear, fear of change. This step is about opening to more than who we thought we were, opening to an expanded sense of self. When we try to control something, we are limiting our ‘creating’ to that which we have already done, we are limiting ourselves to what we already KNOW. And most of the time, we are afraid that if we release control, things will go to hell in a handbasket faster than you can say “Let Go and Trust”.
In learning to trust our own creative, spontaneous energy, we have to learn to NOT KNOW and to open to the unknown, to what wants to be born, like an artist at an easel. For instance, if all you know is lack or verbal abuse, then you’ll need to open yourself to another option, another vibration, in order to create something different – but accepting the feeling of vulnerability of NOT KNOWING for a while, without closing down and going back to what’s familiar, takes a certain amount of strength and determination, and maybe even, practice. That’s what the whole “Let Go and Trust” thing is about, and why you hear it so often.
One of the things that always bothered me about the “Let Go and Trust” idea as THE ULTIMATE ANSWER was that it seemed to want to completely bypass ME! Was I just an empty vessel through which “god” was supposed to create? While that’s definitely one viable way of experiencing physical reality, it didn’t seem to be the right one for me.. I knew about all of these neat things I wanted to create and experience! I had IDEAS! And even though I knew and accepted this about myself, I still found myself being faced with situation after situation that actually FORCED me to let go and trust, situations where there was absolutely NOTHING I could DO to affect an outcome. Situations that had no precedent, and where I couldn’t fall back to past experience for answers. I started thinking that perhaps I was wrong about the whole empty vessel thing?
Instead, what I finally realized is that my resistance to the idea of letting go and trusting in these cases was me actually trying NOT to give up control! How clever of me! So, with continuous effort and conscious reminding, I stopped TRYING all the time, I stopped worrying. I trusted my impulses when they told me to do something and when they told me to go watch TV or play games. I trusted my inner guidance when it told me that there was nothing to be done and when I should take immediate action. I stopped KNOWING so much about my situations and, for the first time in a long time, allowed myself to LEARN again. To learn a better, easier way. And to learn that I didn’t have to give up my visions, just hold them differently within myself.
And what came of it all? You can call it “control” if you like, and you can say that I rediscovered “control” on a new level, from a new part of ME. Perhaps another way of looking at it is that instead of trying to force my surfboard in a certain direction, I was learning to let the wave do the work for me. For I felt the confidence that I had when I really believed I was “in control” but I no longer felt an almost compulsive need to worry and monitor every little detail as I did then.
I had been a natural with this in some areas of my life. For instance, I have always trusted my ability to create good friends – never worried about it at all, even when I moved to new places, and they always showed up. What I was starting to experience was this sense of confidence and ease in the areas where previously I had known only struggle and lack. Suddenly I was really FEELING new possibilities and inspirations and trusting THEM instead of the old, limited beliefs. “Oh, yeah!” I thought, “I remember this now!”
Truth is, we cycle through this process with every creation, but without necessarily even noticing that we are taking a moment to “open to the unknown”. An idea spawns the channeling of creative energy and the translation of this energy into physical form. Newness happens. CREATION happens. Otherwise, we are just letting fear of the unknown close us down to re-cycle old ideas until they’re threadbare.
The fact that I was aware that there was something MORE than just letting go and trusting (even as I felt I had to take the step in itself) was actually the kind of thing that clued me in to begin with. I had awareness of something beyond what was just in front of my face, something that was not yet in form. Should I not have this awareness? Was it just a flight of fancy that had no relation to what I was “really” in physical reality to do?
Bringing dreams into reality. That’s what I’m here to experience. In this way, life really is a work of art. Being aware of what I want to create, for me, is part of the deal. Not only do I get to trust that vision, that inspiration, that KNOWING, but I also get to trust the path that unfolds in front of me as I channel that energy into form. And now it’s actually rather funny to me that I once EVER thought that “Trust and Let Go” meant I should let go of my dreams and ideas and just be a permanently blank slate!
[Originally published in The Edge, April 2000.]