“Houston we have a problem.”
And the problem is not the ending of a relationship, but the moment when one has no intention of letting go. And by letting go I don’t mean keeping the loved one in a locked room — this is called kidnapping. Not letting go is obsessively thinking that this love will never pass, that this person was the only One and that someday you will conquer their heart again.
Maybe it’s true. In history we have plenty of examples of unfinished or eternal loves being revived and (re)lived. But for the sake of the moment, this way of thinking has the power to get you further away from yourself. And you don’t want to lose yourself. Your self is everything you’ve got. It’s hard to accept. And it’s hard to embrace the change of living without the one you love(d) so much. But, the stubbornness of not accepting the loss will make the grief more intense by adding a sense of despair.
It’s almost impossible to let go. It’s the day-by-day hard work of clearing your mind, expressing your feelings, and canalizing your vital energy in a different way. Letting go is like being in a coma, waking up and realizing that you have to learn everything over again. There are a lot of recommendations about how to get over and how to survive a broken relationship. Everyone has her/his own path and manner to deal with it. Nevertheless, accepting the reality is what gives you the strength to deal.
Surrender. Just like in aikido…
“Some who have studied its physics consider it the hardest of all the martial arts to learn, in part because it gets the body to do what thousands of years of conditioning has trained us not to do — relax when we feel threatened, so as to maintain access to our internal resources. Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power. In aikido, a “uke”, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or “nage”, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending.”
-Sarah Lewis, The Rise
Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, what if this is the only way out?
