What Babies Can Teach Us About Letting Go

Zebras too…

What Babies Can Teach Us About Letting Go

On Wednesday, I jumped into the Lion’s den to travel by train in the UK in-between days of industrial action over pay.

Welcome back to the summer of discontent as trade unions all over the UK put themselves first, before realizing there have been two years of a government bailout to keep them afloat. And a certain mad Russian Tsar and a little bug called Covid are the real reasons that they can’t afford to go on holiday this year - not greedy bosses.

Oh, hold on, they can’t go on holiday anyway… that lot are striking now too! Rant over.

It was fun. Not the struggling to get a train into London because there weren’t enough staff (even though it wasn’t a strike day), no… the event with Michael Neill and Dr. Dicken Bettinger in Holborn called: ‘One Thought Away'.

A refresher of the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Or put simply: We’re alive, we think and we feel our thinking - and this gives us our experience of life.

This process is descriptive and NOT prescriptive.

If you have a brain injury, it works the same way. If you are high on methadone or are Bi-Polar, intent on wiping out a neighboring country or are being bullied at school. Same process. You’re alive. You think. You experience thought and the world is delivered to you in all its glory or gory detail by this process.

As Syd Banks said: “Thought is not reality, yet it is through Thought that our realities are created. It is what we as humans put into our thoughts that dictate what we think of life.”

This is why babies can teach us a thing or two about letting go. Zebras too, for that matter:

It’s the stories that we attach to these thoughts that get us into trouble, rather than the thoughts themselves. If we lean into the process and accept it, good or bad, we’re less likely to react and do things that don’t go well like: freak out, take drugs, invade Ukraine, or commit suicide.

Our ability to use language to describe feelings is what gets us into trouble as we replay the experience over and over.

But there’s the thing. The past does not exist. The memory of the past can only exist in the present moment, which is all there ever is.

No past. No future. Just the present. And this is the real gift because new thoughts are coming to replace the old ones. No need to adjust the process, it’s going to happen regardless.

This is why babies are so good at going from happy to sad to happy in the blink of an eye. And zebras don’t get ulcers.

UK version

US version

Have a great week, lean into the feeling, and know that it's temporary... learn heaps, love loads and then pass it on….