The Art of Letting Go

In a lecture I gave recently, someone asked me this question:

“Serge. Could you give me any advice as to how one may best let go? I am making some new year resolutions for myself and I realize that in order to carry them out effectively, there are some things I need to surrender and I am finding this process quite difficult.”

Here was my reply:

Yes, letting go is always challenging. The Art of Letting Go - Serge Beddington-Behrens, PhDIt is much harder to let go of things – be they possessions, people, values, beliefs, habit patterns – than to take them on, as that first process often happens spontaneously without our even being aware of it.

A relationship, for example, is always much easier to get into than to get out of, but as you say, often we cannot move on to the next phase in our lives unless we start divesting ourselves of what it is inside us that stands in its way. Continue reading

The Challenge of the Spiritual Path – Celebration of the Quest

SBB. Today, I would like to explore some of the general challenges that a person may encounter if they make a commitment to following a spiritual path and seek to live a spiritual life. I am not going to be specific and deal with the many different kinds of individual problems that the seeker can face. In other words, I am not going to look specifically at spiritual emergencies or go into detail over the many different kinds of trap which can beset the seeker, especially as he advances along his path. This is the subject of a further dialogue. Here, my focus will simply be on what it means to embrace spirituality in an essentially secular culture and what the spiritual journey means and what it might be asking of us. Continue reading