Theresa Lear Levine picture

Is It Even Possible to Let Go of Our Past?

Hey there! I want to talk today a little bit about the act of letting go and what our capabilities for that look like. This is something that I talk a lot about with clients within groups that I run and just within the EFT community as a whole because I think we all have different feelings and opinions of what letting go is supposed to be, what it means or how it affects the people or situations that we are trying to release.

And I think a lot of things get misconstrued there. so when I ask people oftentimes, I’ll say, how are you at letting go of the past? or are there things in your past that are still top of mind for you still bothering you? still, really causing a lot of resistance and struggle and challenge for you in your present day?

And those are the things that we want to look at and think about letting go. so let’s say you’re carrying around a past situation with you and your energy only has so many places that it can go. so our energy is kind of finite. There are only so many places we can plug it into so many directions, we can allow it to go before we kind of tapped out 100%. if we think of ourselves kind of like a battery.

So in the present moment, we want to be plugged in as much as possible if we’re plugged into the past, we have no power there anyway. and it’s draining our energy at the present time.

So there’s a whole scale of emotions. when you’re thinking about your sadness, your powerlessness, things like that, and then you’re thinking about elevating to a place of just true joy.

And when we’re carrying around baggage from our past and things were not able to elevate up that scale the way that we might like to progress. so a lot of time people might think that if they let go of something, that it lets the other person off the hook, if it’s a situation that it involves another person or if they let go of something, maybe it’s, the grief of a loved one dying or something like that, that somehow it means that loving memory is being forgotten.

And those are times when I think that the concept of release or letting go can get misconstrued and people feel like they have to hold tight to those things because they are somehow honoring something, defending something, upholding something, or trying to just kind of keep a little piece of something that might have been really dear and meaningful to them or that they feel they have to defend somehow because it was such a wrongdoing or such a hurt.

But that really low place on our emotional scale is fear, grief, depression, despair, and powerlessness. we really can’t get lower than those emotions.

And that highest place on the scale is going to be joy, appreciation, empowerment, freedom, and love all of the other emotions that we feel rise us up through that scale. so when I’m asking if you can let go of something, it may only be for a minute or two, it might not be forever.

A lot of times if i’m working with somebody and they have something really heavy like that, I might ask them to imagine it like a physical object, like what is carrying around that trauma or stress.

Like if you were to put it in terms of a handbag or backpack or a £50 weight or something that you can put into a visual physical term and think about what that feels like to you that physical weight.

And then also think of how that’s draining you carrying around that much weight every single minute, a second, hour of the day. because you haven’t figured out the process for releasing and transcending above that. Transcending literally means ending the trance.

And oftentimes when we’re stuck holding the past baggage in a trance, we are not in the present moment, we have not transcended. so for some people, they can’t even imagine what it would feel like to put it down and that’s okay. there’s no right or wrong here. I’m just explaining different scenarios that could apply to you.

Maybe not. for other people, they can put it down and they can kind of mentally kind of visualize that and feel that freedom for a little bit, but they might feel really uncomfortable putting it down and feel the need to pick it right back up a minute or so later.

But during that time we can usually do some eft tapping and try to work through some of that. try to not just transcend, transcend up that scale of emotions to the next place.

Because let’s say that you know, you are that really low place and there are really low emotions that I described. Step up becomes things like jealousy, things like rage, things like anger.

Those things are more elevated up the scale of emotions than despair and hopelessness. things like worry and doubt take you up even further and you know things like overwhelmed, you’re up the scale even further. Those are actually steps in the right direction.

So as we do energy psychology with eft, we are moving up that scale closer to joy, closer to emotional freedom, and closer to that release. it’s not ever saying that you’re intended to forget what happened or anything else.

But the other main thing that happens with the emotional freedom technique is that the charge gets taken out of it because any bad feeling that we’re having from past traumas, bad situations, bad memories, all that kind of stuff, they represent an energetic blockage in our system.

So when that happens the energy is either not flowing. oftentimes energy is flowing in the opposite direction that it needs to be flowing.

So the EFT therapy helps to undo that blockage so that the energy can flow properly which means you haven’t forgotten what happened. but it no longer has that zapping feeling on you that it would have had with that blockage still there that may sound little but it’s huge.

I mean you can think about it in so many ways, whether it’s that situation that’s been bothering you think about when I work with people, like on fear of heights or things like that a lot of times and I know this because I’ve had a fear of heights myself. when I even think sometimes about that edge, that place to tie up, you get that *bzz* feeling like you want to kind of come back from it.

And that is the energy in your body, that is the blockage. so when you’ve worked on that and transcended it, you have a more rational feeling about what might actually happen or not happen in a place of greater height and you can think through it better, you can make more breakthroughs, you can make more rational decisions, you can think more clearly and you’re not controlled by that zapping feeling that is irrational in nature.

So that’s just an example. but it applies exactly the same way to bother some memories, past traumas, things that you’re having a hard time forgiving or moving past, all that kind of stuff, and all of that translates in one way or another to an ability to let go. buy some degrees.

So that’s more of what I mean, and more of what I work with when I’m talking about letting go, I’m never asking anybody to forget something happened or to shove it down. that’s the last thing you want to do. what we really want to do is be able to fully feel what happened and then process that emotion the right way so that we don’t end up with a blockage and remove any created blockage in the process of that.

I hope that helps make a little bit more sense because sometimes people think that we’re trying to remove emotions, we’re trying to not feel things, we’re trying to get rid of things when I say let go.

And that is the furthest thing from the truth.