The Worst Advice I Ever Got: “Just Let It Go!”
There is an old teaching story from the Eastern tradition in which a guru instructs his devotee, “My child, sit in meditation, but whatever you do, do not meditate on a monkey.” Of course, the thought of a monkey comes to awareness and the disciple discovers he can focus on nothing else as long as he thinks his meditation should be different. Meditation teachers are familiar with this phenomenon of "monkey mind," yet, contrary to the story, many teach that it is necessary and even possible to bypass the mind.
During the years that my depression felt never-ending and at times crippling, I received the same advice. Many well-meaning advisors—from friends and family to doctors and spiritual teachers—assured me I was a strong, smart and resilient person and that all I really needed to do was to “let go” and “move on.” The same directive came in many different forms.
- “Feel your feelings”: “Go back to being four years old and mad at your daddy,” some practitioners suggested. “Yell, cry, hit the wall, stop skimming the surface; if you deeply re-experience and express those emotions you can get free of them.” (As if feelings alone ever resulted in self-knowledge!)
- “Snap out of it”: “Stop being a victim, pull up your socks,” admonished friends who had spent weekends in various “awareness trainings” where their trainers publicly shamed them into “getting off it.” After all, it’s only a “story.” (As indeed what is not, including the story, “I’m over it,” which feels true until the supposedly dropped, uninvestigated “it” gets triggered.)
- Meditation: “Watch your thoughts and don’t get involved in them, don’t believe them, let them go. If you stop paying attention to them, they’ll go away and you’ll transcend (i.e. move on from) this world of illusion.” (“But isn’t it a thought to say I have no thoughts?” “Ssh! Stop thinking!”)
- Affirmations: “Replace that negative thought with this positive one, repeat it ten times on the hour every hour for 30 days, and watch your life transform beyond your wildest dreams!” (Then, if your life does transform, you get to tell the “story” of how you moved on…or the one about what b.s. it all is if you don't get what you want.)
- Manifesting: “You created your problems—maybe even in a previous life! Why would anyone choose this hell? Well, you did! So set an intention, get really specific, ask for everything you want—the sky’s the limit—and create the life you want!” (Translation: You can’t possibly be happy in this tired, old, imperfect mistake of a world—God really messed up big-time, eh? —so rather than working within it and seeing the beauty of it, simply drop it and make a new one; you’re that powerful!)
- Crystals: “Wear this amethyst over your anahata chakra, it will heal your broken heart (i.e. you need to get over him/her and move on). Oh, and if you don’t feel better, don’t worry, we have another crystal for that.”
- “Neutraceuticals”: “Therapy won’t help you because if you’re this unhappy, it means there’s something wrong with your brain or your body. This pill (herb, vitamin, “superfood”) will fix you and help you to move on. And this one here will boost the efficacy of the first one...and here’s another to counteract the side effects of the other two.”
You may be laughing with recognition by now, though I am of course exaggerating and having some fun here. I believe that “it’s all good,” and would never recommend that anyone stop something that is working for them or that their healthcare professional prescribes. In fact, after it became clear that antidepressants weren’t right for me, a supplement I used to take helped to get me out of bed in the morning when I didn’t have another way; I benefited from therapy enough to stay in it for about 20 years; there are times when I enjoy sitting for meditation; affirmations and intentions certainly can’t hurt; and crystals are beautiful expressions of nature.
However, none of these things has ever gotten me to “let it go and move on” in the long run. We may see a counselor or go to a self-help workshop to help us deal with the pain of a broken heart or an unhappy childhood…we may exercise, diet, take a remedy or take a vacation when we don’t feel well…and these are all excellent things to do. But just as a bandage covers a wound and may in fact protect it from further injury, it cannot heal the wound at its source. For that we must go deeper.
During the years of my most intense suffering, I, too believed I ought to let go and move on…and berated myself for not doing so. Thoughts like, “I should be over this by now,” “I know better than to feel or act this way,” and “I’ve been over this a million times and I just don’t get it” only added to my suffering before I learned how to deeply question my painful beliefs. Prior to using and facilitating self-inquiry regularly, I’d never touched upon the source of my unhappiness: confused thinking.
What I have learned since that time is that we do not create our thoughts—and therefore we cannot drop them or un-create them. Thoughts appear, Byron Katie says, like the clouds, or the rain. Does it stop raining just because we think it “should” stop? “Hey, rain, just move on!” Seems silly, doesn’t it? But that’s what we do to ourselves.
So what if there's a monkey in our meditation? What if we not only accepted it but saw it as a friend? Maybe the monkey has something to teach us! This idea has never occured to many of us: we assume the "monkey" is an annoyance at best, a character flaw at worst.
So what is the best advice I ever got? My mentor, Byron Katie, says “Wake the baby.” Stress in the moment is the “compassionate alarm clock” that lets us know we’re caught up in a bad dream. Would you drop a baby that screams in the night, or would you hold it tenderly and soothe it, letting it know all is well in the moment? What about an older child who “knows better?” You don’t shake her awake and say, “Snap out of it and move on!” Why, then, would you do that to yourself?
Instead, we can listen to the confused mind…and get to the source of that confusion. “My father neglected me.” That is a stressful thought, and as such, it merits investigation even if the whole world would agree with you. You have all the proof, you think: he was rarely home, he wasn’t affectionate when he was home, he spent his evenings locked in his study, he didn’t pay for your schooling. How does “feeling” that and “moving on” heal our lives? What if we dared to defy the whole world in its great wisdom and asked ourselves if it’s true we were neglected? In what ways were we not neglected by him and, in fact, well cared for? How was this “neglectful” father a gift in our lives, providing us with the perfect path to our freedom from suffering today?
We can’t awaken to truth until we see the nightmare for what it is. “There’s a monster under the bed. (Or a monkey in the mind.) Is it true? Sweetheart," we might ask ourselves, "Can you really know that it’s a monster? Let’s take a look.” The best advice I ever got was to hold the mind as you would an innocent one who is frightened. Met with understanding, we don’t have to let go of anything. Rather, that which we are trying to let go of, lets go of us.
Find out how to “wake the baby” here.
" Out of The Work I did with you in our last session, I had the idea to make a list of 60 ways my father has positively impacted my life and include it with his 60th birthday card. I quickly came up with 45, and have only 15 more to go! No matter what he thinks of my list, it was good and reassuring for me to write it so quickly and notice all the ways he helped me; my negative thoughts about him are simply louder than the others. My sister has many of the same 'stories' about my dad that I had, and she is astounded at my complete turnaround."—A.J., Alexandria, Virginia
