 Dear Friends,
First of all, a huge and heartfelt ‘thank you’ for all the greetings cards and good wishes you sent us during the last few weeks. May we take this opportunity to wish you, too, a New Year filled with light!
Letting go
If our experiences over the last month or so are anything to go by, our new year, it seems, is beginning with a letting go of the old. The subject of ‘letting go’ started coming up a few weeks ago, when I was sitting in the kitchen with a friend, chatting about how important it seems at the moment to let go of the ‘old’ – all our old conditioning, emotional scars, controlling behaviours, illusions, mistaken beliefs, in short, our ego – so that the ‘new’ – the higher, the divine – can come through.
I muttered darkly that, well, there were some scars from my past I’d been trying to let go of for years, that I’d tried every mental contortion known to man, but without success. I could also have mentioned that I'd tried every spiritual contortion, too, and that when I say ‘tried’ I mean tried!
Our friend responded that she’d worked quite a lot on ‘letting go’ over the years, but that there were some issues which, while she’d let go of them mentally and emotionally, still seemed to be affecting her physically, and that she felt she had to work on removing those last vestiges now.
So we thought it would be worthwhile just to ponder over that question for the next few weeks: what, actually, is ‘letting go’? Trite, ‘straight off the top of the head’ answers, it seemed to us after years of trying and testing, were not enough.
Trust
The question of ‘letting go’ came up again a couple of nights later, when Geoff and I were listening to Doreen Virtue's Manifesting with the Angels CD. On this CD, Doreen explains that, in theory, it should always be possible for us to have, within and around us, all the help and support we need to fulfil our true destiny on earth. In practice, however, our fears, doubts and negative conditioning are often stronger than our desires for the things we know we need, and this is what prevents our needs from being fulfilled. The solution, then, is to develop a confidence and trust – stronger than any doubts or fears we may have – in the helping energies of the universe and their infinite power to provide our every need. Then, says Doreen, when we have clearly and confidently visualised our needs being met in every way, we need to ‘let go’ – to hand over the whole situation utterly to the angels.
‘Hmmm’, thinks doubting Thomas, aka A Napier. ‘I may think I have let go, but if I look deeply at myself, have I really? How easy is it, really, to let go of something you’ve wanted and needed for years? Old habits die hard. Ah well..... all will be revealed.’
Consulting the runes
Meanwhile we continued pondering. Then, a few days later, we were looking at the Relationship Runes and trying them out as we always do with divination tools we are considering including in The Cygnus Review, to see if they really ‘deliver the goods’. ‘Right ho’, I thought. ‘Haven't got all day. Let me choose the one rune that will tell me what I most need to know at this moment.’ And of course you already know what rune I picked. You’re right, it was ‘letting go’.
Having duly read the blurb on the ‘letting go’ rune and decided that The Relationship Runes would indeed be a good kit to include in our magazine, I forgot about it, turning my attention to the next book.
A gift
Then something really odd – well no, not odd, it was wonderful actually, happened. It was as if – well no, not ‘as if’, because I’m sure it was real – some angelic presence came and stood beside me and lifted away all the burdens I’d been humping about for so many years, fretting over why I couldn't let go of them properly. I actually felt physically lighter. And I had such a strong sense that, ‘All is well. There's nothing we (the angels) need you to do any more, ever, about any of these situations that are past. We are taking care of all of them, and everything is fine.’ And I realised (at last!) that the reason why I hadn't completely let go of all those past issues was because somewhere inside me was the idea that perhaps there could still be something, some small thing, I ought to do about it, or that the divine plan required me to do about it, but that somehow I had been too dumb to know what it was. Can you imagine how – literally – relieved I felt, to realise that this was not so after all?
For two days I walked around with that amazing lightness of being, but gradually, as these things often do, it began to wear off. And as it did, the regrets and frustrations over events long past began to creep back into my thinking. Remonstrating with myself that I didn't need to worry about these things any longer because higher powers had taken over made no difference at all. ‘Oh dear, what on earth is wrong with me?’ I couldn't help asking. Such a wonderful opportunity, and I fluffed it.
And do you know – well, you probably think I'm completely daft by now, or at least very slow-witted - it actually took me several days to work out that, after all, I hadn't fluffed it? Slowly it dawned on me that the experience of lightness was given as a help, a demonstration: ‘This is how it feels to have let go.’ But, like every child, I was still expected to learn to walk myself, on my own two feet.
A paradox
And that resolved another paradox I'd been puzzling over for years. If everything we wish for, spiritually, is already within us in the here and now – ‘instantly available’, so to speak, as I know it to be – why do some spiritual teachers say (assuming they are not just plain wrong) that we have to work on ourselves and follow a spiritual ‘path’?
Well the answer is that, although of course the light is there all the time, the habits which so often block it out of our minds and lives – habits of thinking, believing, feeling and behaving – are woven into the very fabric of our being. They are even woven into the structure of our physical bodies, and into our state of health or disease. As esotericists teach, these habits are also woven into the fabric of our etheric bodies; indeed, one could say, they are our etheric bodies. So it follows that the only way we can permanently undo this whole collection of habits that no longer serve us is by replacing them with new ones – by building a totally new structure, in other words, a structure based on the divine in us, and not on illusion.
How is it done?
So how do you create a new habit, a new structure? You practice! And if, like any child learning to walk, you fall down, well that doesn’t mean you’re a failure or you’ve got it wrong. It just means you have to get up and try again..... and again, and again. Until in the end, you do it, and you become so practised at it that it happens without you even thinking about it. A habit!
So what habit are we developing, to replace the old habit of regretting past events, or indeed to replace any old habit based on illusion and not on the truth? It’s simple. Whenever an attitude appears in our minds or hearts that we know we need to let go of, we ask ourselves, ‘How would the divine view this situation?’ (For ‘the divine’, you could substitute any other label you like for a being you revere and consider to be ‘Only Good’.) We always seem to know the answer to this question – and why wouldn't we, since All-Goodness is our deepest, most fundamental nature? – and once we have made it conscious, we choose that – ‘the new’ – instead of the old attitude, knowing that, even if ‘the new’ hasn’t yet percolated through to every layer of our being, sooner or later it most certainly will, if only we persevere.
So let’s ring out the old, and bring in the new. Or, as Don Miguel Ruiz so eloquently recommends in The Four Agreements, let’s dream the New Dream – and live it this year.
With much love from all of us at Cygnus.
Geoff, Ann, Martyn, Sarah, Jackie, Jacqueline, Eileen, Catherine, Graham, Alison, Cherry, Penny, Belinda, Brian, Phil, David, Naomi, Chris, Saijai, Derek, Eddie, Shane, Matthew, Jon, Sam & Pat
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 18-Oct-2005
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