I am reading David R. Hawkins book “Letting Go, The Pathway of Surrender”. It comes at an ideal time for me. This whole time period is about staying connected to the present and boy are things being revealed.

If someone told me I would be “happy”.., while doing this, I might have thought them crazy! In my mind, I want to make this hard. I want it to be a major challenge. Mainly because my mind wants something to work on. It wants a project it can really sink its teeth into. Something that has to be chewed into submission.

But that is not what is happening. As a result, my mind doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Here is where this book has been helpful. I am sure I have heard or read this before, but there is a way that Mr Hawkins has helped to crystallize it and make it more clear. He says… you can’t work with your thoughts to surrender or let go.., you have to work with your emotions. His perspective is (all paraphrasing based on how his writing hit me…) that we have 100s of thousands of thoughts per day, and to focus on the thoughts, just creates more of them.

His premise is that all of our thoughts, we consciously or subconsciously attach to our emotions. And if we want to shift or change the impact of the thoughts, then we should focus on the emotion(s). AND when we successfully let go and surrender these emotions, we alter, eliminate, or shift tons of thoughts we have attached to them at the same time!

The best part about this for me..? I can use my mind, to query or assess the underlying emotions associated with whatever story, collection of thoughts, or string of thoughts I seem to be tugging on! So I get to use my mind to ferret out the emotions that are bubbling or working just below the surface.

Score! My mind has something to do!

He also references some of his earlier work that I have heard about but not read myself. The resonance or scales of emotions and their associated levels of consciousness. It is only summarized at a high level in this book, but conceptually, it makes sense to me.

In fact, while reading these chapters, I could look back at different times in my life and define where I was operating from (predominantly) during that time. Based on his descriptions, I could also understand why.

With this new (to me) information, I found I naturally feel more compassionate toward myself and others…. Mostly because of the understanding that much of what I have created and experienced was because of not knowing what I didn’t know!

And isn’t that how we are with ourselves. We learn something new.., and then become critical of ourselves because we didn’t do something, we had no awareness or knowledge of before. Yet we, or at least I have, held myself accountable to a standard I was not even aware of!

I don’t want to make it sound like this book is for everyone. But in the spirit of writing about what is having the greatest impact in my life each week… I can honesty say, Mr Hawkins’ book and I, have become good buddies!

With Light, Love, and Laughter
Charles