Learning To Let Go Of Control

In this video, Lou will encourage you to trust in the unknown and surrender the notion of control over your life in order to open yourself up to a deeper, more magical experience of life. Worrying about the future only blocks us from experiencing the present moment and the magic that life has to offer. Surrendering to the unknown and embracing the present moment can lead to unexpected magic and miracles in life.

Transcript

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

Hey there,

My name is Lou Redmond,

Meditation teacher,

Life coach,

And a friend guiding you on your journey.

And the quote that I just shared is one of my favorite quotes by David White,

And it captures the essence of what I want to talk to you about today.

I believe that there is this magical,

Mystical,

Mysterious life that is waiting for us.

It's not necessarily waiting as it's in the future,

But it's in this deeper perception of reality.

And I'm imagining,

If you're watching this,

There's some part of you that can sense it,

That knows that your experience of life can be more vital,

Can feel like it's thriving,

Can feel more connected to something greater than yourself.

And I really want to encourage you to trust your senses.

And so often what happens is we feel like in order to make that a reality,

That feeling that we have,

That we try to control the situations in our life.

We try to control and plan for what will make us happy.

But as David White says,

The life we can plan is too small for us to live.

Michael Singer,

Who's a great spiritual teacher,

He would explain this phenomenon in imagining that you are in a dark room with a flashlight.

A flashlight is our consciousness,

And that is what we're seeing.

And it can only see one corner of a dark room when there is so much more happening in that room.

And so often we are that light that's trying to plan our lives on what is going to make us happy based on only just this tiny amount that we can see.

And so when David White explains that the life we can plan is too small,

It's because there is a lot more in the room.

And so things like meditation,

Things like self-awareness and connecting to ourselves,

What it does is it opens that aperture so that we can not only see more,

But we can allow more to move through us in our life.

And this happens through the bedrock of spirituality.

Letting go and surrender.

And what we let go is this notion that we can control our lives.

I get it.

Our mind wants to feel like it's in control.

But in reality,

The greatest and the worst things in life are often beyond our conscious control and beyond what we could have imagined.

In 2015,

I took a hike that would radically transform my life.

That is the reason why I'm speaking with you here.

I had a mystical experience.

And if you had told me before that hike that 10 years after,

I'm gonna be speaking about spirituality,

I would have said that you are crazy.

I couldn't have planned for that.

And so it's by allowing the mystery to take us over that those great things start to happen that we couldn't have even planned for that that are beyond our minds.

The same thing is often with the negative things.

We spend a lot of time worrying,

But the toughest things in life happen not from things that we could have worried about.

No amount of worry could have saved us from COVID.

No amount of worry can save you from a loss that is really impactful.

No amount of worry could save you from a sudden loss of a loved one.

We can't plan for these things.

So it's often that the best things and the worst things our life are beyond what we can plan for.

And so while that might seem scary,

It can also open us to allowing and to surrendering to letting go that we feel like we need to be the ones that have the control on our lives.

With that letting go of worrying and letting go of planning are kind of two sides to the same coin.

One is trying to make something good happen,

What is trying to prevent something bad from happening.

And when we can come back into this moment,

We can let ourselves surrender.

Letting go of worrying is really a practice of self-reliance of saying,

Okay,

I know that whatever happens in my life,

I'm going to figure it out.

I can trust in my ability to be with the moment.

And guess what,

If you're watching this,

Look to your history.

You have made it here.

Congrats.

You have shown that you can trust what life is giving you.

So I really want to encourage you to see where in your life can you let go and surrender to just what is in front of you to feel the spaciousness that gets created when we do something in the realm of spirit moving through us in the realm of allowing our life to unfold rather than planning and forcing and controlling in a way that we think is going to make us happy.

Another principle that I want to share with you is the idea that when we're attached to something,

Often we are repelling that thing from actually coming in to our lives.

The person who's on a meditation retreat who wants to have the big powerful experience is the least likely to have the experience.

So as we practice letting go and surrender,

We're also practicing non-attachment.

And the irony,

The paradox,

Is that when we let it go,

We get it all back.

Because when we let go of a desire for something outside of ourselves,

We are in some ways creating the fulfillment of that desire within ourselves.

And so when we create the fulfillment of that desire within ourselves,

That thing starts to show up in our life because what's on the inner is reflected in the outer.

And so these are some core spiritual principles that you might already be familiar with,

But I really want you to think about and see where in your life are you trying to plan for some desired future state?

Where in your life are you worrying about some potential bad state?

Some ways to practice surrender and letting go.

I'd like you to think about making goals not to get something that you don't have,

But to embody something that you'd like to become more of.

Another way that can help you just break out of a routine and break out of this control is to actually learn how to practice spontaneity.

To do things that you wouldn't have done before.

Even as simple as going to a restaurant just based out of walking down the street and trusting what feels right to you.

Going to work and going down a different road and just letting your mind kind of break out of its patterns.

That's what this is doing.

We spend so much of our day in habit and routine and that's helpful because our unconscious can kind of move through our life and now it makes life a little bit easier.

But to break out of habituated patterns,

It helps to shift gears,

To do something new,

To go on a hike,

To wake up at a different time,

To just try out a different schedule so that we open up some of those grooves for something new to come into our lives.

And then I'll say this again,

Trust your history.

You've made it here.

You're resilient.

You're strong.

You know that you can overcome whatever it is that life gives to you.

So I want to encourage you to keep trusting it,

Trusting your path.

I'd like to thank you for listening to me rant a little bit about letting go and surrendering.

I love getting a chance to share with you here.

I'll see you again soon on the next video.

Lots of love.