We all know exactly what it is like to be certain we have let go of something sorrowful or worrisome, only to find ourselves in a similar sad situation moments later. Merely wanting to let go of an unhappy circumstance or nagging emotional ache is not enough. Wants are desires, and desires replace one another like bees waiting in line at an open flower.

Dropping this person and picking up that person doesn’t end the loneliness that drives us into dead-end relationships. This isn’t letting go. We have only managed to put the emptiness on hold.

The truth is that letting go is very simple and, above all, natural; as natural for you and I as it is for a tree to shed the heavy, sun-ripened fruit that clings to its branches. Why? Because both man and tree, in fact all living things, are created to drop what is no longer needed. For the tree, the falling fruit carries its matured seed to the ground. No unnatural force is necessary. In a similar fashion — that is to say, under higher but equally exacting laws –these same friendly forces are waiting to do for you what you haven’t been able to do for yourself. You need only learn to cooperate with these powerful and timeless principles to be able to let go of any emotional bitterness, relentless regret, anxious worry, or troubling thought. The rest will be done for you.

This is what the secret of letting go is all about. First must come the understanding that we are still carrying around the accumulated defeats of a lifetime, and that these weary weights have only served to make us someone sorry, not someone special. This initial shock may shake us, but it is really a major breakthrough. It heralds the first in a series of miraculous self-separations in which we begin to see that we have been living from an unseen part of ourselves: a self that thinks clinging to wreckage is the same as being rescued! Now we understand why all of our past efforts to let go have only left us holding a new problem. But now we also know, at last, exactly what it is that must be dropped. We must let go of this sorry self that is certain it is better to suffer and feel like someone than it is to just let go and quietly be no one. It is the higher part of yourself alone that has the strength and wisdom to gently open your hand so that out of it may drop all that has been making you unhappy.

Believe me, you are on the verge of the single greatest discovery any human being can make. The secret of letting go not only holds the keys for ending what is unwanted, but locked within this same supreme secret is the beginning of your new life — the birth of a new nature that never has to hold on to anything because it is already everything.