Good Life Project - Stop Grasping: What Might Happen If You Just Let Go?

Episode Date: July 16, 2015

We're all guilty of it...It's something we all do. For some, it's not a big deal, intruding on rare occasion. For others, though, it literally controls your life. It fills each day with what feels like an impenetrable level of suffering and it's often accompanied by a stifling level of hoarding, both emotional and physical. Especially when the that hoarding of things and states helps to delude you into desperately yearned for feelings of certainty and security.What is it?Grasping.We hold mercilessly onto certain pain, rather than release into uncertain possibility.Thing is, we don't often realize the suffering is coming from our own refusal to let go of our death grip on the very thing or relationship or experience that is causing unease until we've been metaphorically and, sometimes, physically hammered into letting go.How this unfolds, why we do this and what to do about it is the focus of today's GLP Riff. And, along the way, you just might learn a thing or two about...waterskiing (you'll have to listen to find out what that's all about).So, I'll leave you with a question...What are you holding onto now that's smothering you under the weight of your own unrelenting grip?Now, go listen now. And if you know anyone this might help, please feel free to share it around. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP. What is it? Well, we're taking over an amazing sleepaway camp about 90 minutes outside of New York City. At the end of August, it will be an incredible blend of about 350 entrepreneurs, makers, world shakers, and just regular people looking to connect, to hang out, to rejuvenate, shakers, and just regular people looking to connect, to hang out, to rejuvenate, to restore, and to learn together, literally from around the globe. If that feels like a pretty cool place to be at the end of August, then go ahead and check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp. On to our show. When I was a kid, I grew up on the water. I mean, literally, the beach was at the end of my block.

So I'm kind of a water kid. And we spent a lot of the summers just down hanging out on the bay, running around, fishing sometimes, swimming, and sailing. Sailing was huge in the town that I grew up in. I actually grew up in the town which, if you've ever read The Great Gatsby, is the actual original East Egg. So East Egg is a town called Port Washington on Long Island, which is just outside of New York City. And that was my town where I grew up.

And so we spent a lot of time in the warm weather down by the water. Now, one of the other things we loved to do was water skiing. And we kind of all learned to do that pretty young. And this was back when the water was a lot cleaner also. So it was more fun being in it. There's an interesting thing that happens when you're learning to water ski that's kind of circled back to me because it's a really powerful statement about human nature and our refusal to let go of what we perceive to be safety, but is actually an anchor in our lives. So when you're learning to water ski, if you've never done this before, basically you put on a life vest and then move to the back of the boat and you strap on a ski or two skis when you're first learning. And then you kind of slide off into the water and you're just kind of sitting there buoyant by the life vest. Then somebody tosses out a rope that's attached to the boat and there's a handle on it.

And then you kind of grab onto the handle and you weave it right into the middle of the skis. And the boat pulls out a little bit. You're kind of sitting there bobbing and showing this on. The line becomes taut and then you're just sitting there kind of in a tuck with your skis facing up in front of you. And then what happens is the guy in the boat gives a thumbs up to make sure you're ready. And you just briefly let go of one hand or just give a thumbs up while you're holding onto the end of the rope. And there's usually a big sort of dowel-shaped handle. And you kind of sit back and you wait. And then the driver on the boat guns the boat, and you hear the engine roar. And then the boat starts to move as the bow lifts out,

the big tail comes out in the water, and then you feel the tug of the rope jerking you forward. And it pulls you up, and you feel the rush of the rope jerking you forward and it pulls you up and you feel the rush of the waves kind of plowing around the sides of the two skis which are facing straight up and then you give the rope a little bit of a tug you lift your chest and you pop up and the skis flatten on top of the water and you start just sailing along it's like pure heaven except that's actually not what happens to almost every person, including me, when you're just learning. What really happens is you're sitting there waiting and the moment the driver guns the engine on the boat, you feel the jerk on the rope

and then you get pulled forward. And instead of remembering to lean back and just ride it out until there the skis behind you with your face and your nose and very often your shorts and your bathing suit filling with water as you get pulled at a high rate of speed, bouncing and flopping along the water. Now, there's an interesting thing that tends to happen, which is that from the outside looking in, if you're on the boat looking at the person, you're generally yelling to that person, dude, let go of the rope. You're killing yourself. And this is before, you know, hopefully the driver is aware of this at some point also, and they slow down and they stop. But very often it's three or four seconds before that sort of chain of communication really happens. And those three or four seconds when you're getting dragged at a high rate of speed by the rope in the water, with water filling every part of your being and dragging the

water skis behind you, then that seems like a whole lot longer than three or four seconds. Kind of miserable in a funny way. Question is, you see, the thing that happens here is that most people don't let go of the rope. If you want to stop the suffering, all you have to do is the moment you flip face first into the water, just let go of the rope and you just sit there. And then the boat driver will circle around and they'll drag the rope by you and you get to try again. But there's this thing that happens to us, which is that as soon as we flip

forward, we find ourselves out of control. And even though we're being dragged forcefully and quickly through the water, we keep a death grip on the handle and we don't let go. So we literally grasp almost violently. And in doing so, we increase the amount of thrash and suffering that we experience until finally somebody yells and we hear it or the boat stops and then we finally let go. And sometimes they still have to tell you, let go of the rope. And we remember, wait a minute, oh, I just caused myself a whole lot of suffering. So why do we care about this? Because that same instinct, that same mad grasping, that same refusal to let go of the

handle that pulls us forward also controls a lot of what we do in life. We have that same experience, right? So we don't let go of the rope because in our minds, in a moment of urgency, the only safety that we know, the only anchor that we know is the feeling of the handle in our hands. Even though the longer we hold on, the more pain we're in. And all we have to do is not hold on. All we have to do is let go. All we have to do is stop grasping. All we have to do is trust that if we let go, we'll be okay. But we don't because we go for the certain option, the one that we know, and we grasp out of fear, out of automatic reflex because we don't even think about it. And that's what we do in life all too much.

When we start out with a certain expectation of joy and an immediate thing happens that we don't expect and it flips us very quickly into our face and starts filling us with all sorts of suffering, very often we don't just let go of that rope. We deepen into it. We grasp fiercely onto it because it's the suffering that we know and because our reflexes hold on for dear life and hope that that thing is just going to stop on its own rather than just let go. Let the suffering go. Just breathe and be and know that you're going to be okay, buoyant in your life, and that boat's going to circle around and you'll have another shot at it. So that's kind of the exploration and it keeps coming back to me. There's this imagery of

the expectation that things will go easily. And then in a moment they don't. And rather than just letting go and saying, oh, okay, well, how do I respond here fresh? How do I let go of that source of suffering and just look at what's happening? We grasp and we grasp and we grasp. And the tighter we hold, the more we suffer. Until finally, we're either forced to let go out of fatigue or that thing just wears itself out. And by then, very often, the thing that we would have experienced as joy, we're so terrified of, we don't even want to try again. So what's the takeaway here? Well, maybe as you move through life, as you explore those

things, the new things that scare you, and you want to hold on to an anchor that you just feel is the one safe place, but it doesn't work out, and you keep holding on as it's dragging you down, let it go. See what happens. Trust in the fact that it'll circle back around, and you'll be okay. I hope you found this interesting, useful. Maybe just plant a little bit of a visual in your lives. What are you grasping onto now that's pulling you through the water and making you thrash and suffer? What's the handle in your hands that you're grasping fiercely on that's causing you pain? And what might happen if right now you just let it go? I hope you found this helpful. I hope you found it interesting. If you enjoy the conversation, as always, be so grateful

if you just jump over to iTunes and maybe share a review and share it with friends. As always, great to be hanging out with you guys. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.