What are the best Letting Go book quotes? Do negative emotions stop you from reaching your full potential?
According to David R. Hawkins, most of us carry unhelpful emotions because we fear them. He argues that the best way to handle unhelpful emotions is to completely release them.
Read below for the best quotes from Letting Go.
Quotes From Letting Go
Are you often bogged down by negative emotions? Does this keep you from getting what you want from life? In Letting Go, David R. Hawkins explains how to move from feeling stuck to being happy and at peace. He argues that if you release negative emotions and welcome positive emotions, you can improve your mental and physical health, strengthen your relationships, and invite greater success in all areas of life.
Below we’ll look at four Letting Go book quotes that explain Hawkins’ main ideas.
“Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind, and everyone has experienced it on occasion.”
Hawkins says that the best way to handle unhelpful emotions is to release them, a process that we’ll explore in this section. Once you learn how to do this, you’ll feel less attached to external experiences and objects. You’ll be free to enjoy things without depending on them for joy and fulfillment—if something goes how you want it to, that’s great; but if it doesn’t, you know you’ll be all right. This means you’ll no longer rely on anyone or anything other than yourself to feel happy and at peace.
Hawkins’s advice for releasing an unhelpful emotion is to recognize the emotion and allow yourself to feel it fully. As you experience a feeling, don’t try to alter it, push back against it, or ascribe moral value to it. Fighting the emotion is what gives it power and allows it to grow. When you release all your opposition toward and associations with an emotion by recognizing that it’s no more than a passing feeling, you allow the energy of that emotion to leave you as well.
If you start experiencing the same emotion later on, it means that you’re still holding on to some of its energy. You may require a continual practice of release to free yourself from the emotion because you’ve spent most of your life ignoring it or burying it. Alternatively, especially intense emotions are sometimes made up of lesser emotions, and you have to release the lesser emotions until you get to the root. In this case, continue releasing the layers of emotion until you get to the root.
“We have the opportunity to choose whether we want to hang on or let go of emotional upsets. We can look at the cost of hanging on to them. Do we want to pay the price? Are we willing to accept the feelings? We can look at the benefits of letting go of them. The choice we make will determine our future. What kind of a future do we want? Will we choose to be healed, or will we become one of the walking wounded?”
According to Hawkins, most of us carry unhelpful emotions because we fear them. Instead of confronting them, we avoid dealing with the emotions, so they stay with us. This harms our mental and physical well-being.
Hawkins says that every emotion has an energy frequency, and the higher the frequency, the more positive the emotion. Furthermore, similar energy frequencies are attracted to each other. Therefore, if you’re constantly avoiding or feeding negative emotions, those emotions will attract more negativity. You’ll be unhappy and less successful in all aspects of life: relationships, finances, and health.
Hawkins says these are the three most common—and ineffective—ways we avoid confronting our emotions:
- Distracting ourselves from our feelings
- Burying our feelings
- Sharing our feelings with others
“Chronic, unrecognized anger and resentment reemerge in our life as depression, which is anger directed against oneself. If pushed further into the unconscious, it can re-emerge as psychosomatic illnesses. Migraine headaches, arthritis, and hypertension are frequently cited examples of chronic suppressed anger.”
Hawkins argues that anger can be useful, though it’s still an ultimately destructive emotion. You might bury your anger because you feel guilty or think it’s undesirable. However, keeping anger inside leads to long-term health problems and harms relationships. Even if you don’t express your anger, it draws negative energy toward you.
Anger isn’t all bad, though—it can energize you and propel you to action, and you can direct that energy toward a good purpose. Instead of subduing your anger or unleashing it on the people around you, use it as motivation to improve your situation or yourself. For example, say you hold a lot of anger against your parents for the ways they treated you as a child. Instead of holding that anger inside or lashing out and damaging your current relationships, use it as motivation to go to therapy and learn to treat others better than your parents do.
“‘Like attracts like.’ Similarly, ‘love promotes love,’ so that the person who has let go of a lot of inner negativity is surrounded by loving thoughts, loving events, loving people, and loving pets.”
Hawkins argues that releasing unhelpful emotions can also improve your relationships. As we’ve discussed, this is because your emotions affect the people around you, regardless of whether you consciously express them. Therefore, the things you feel about another person affect how they feel about you. To avoid negatively influencing someone’s feelings toward you, you must release the emotions that might invite that person’s negative energy.
For instance, pride is a common unhelpful emotion that can hurt relationships. When you’re prideful—feeling like you always have to be perfect, or like you’re superior to others—it’s often because you have an unconscious desire to gain others’ respect and approval. Instead of getting the respect and admiration you desire, however, you most likely get jealousy and competitiveness from others in return. When you can release your pride, you recognize that you don’t need the approval of others to feel worthy, and others will naturally come to appreciate and respect you when you respect yourself.
