03. Step 2 - Allow Yourself To Experience It Fully

Allowing Experience of Sensations

  • Embrace your sensations: It's crucial to allow yourself to experience various sensations fully in your body. Recognizing these feelings is a key step towards mental clarity and emotional release.

  • Resist the reflex to act: When experiencing new sensations, the instinct is often to change or eliminate them. Avoid this impulse—there’s nothing needing alteration.

Letting Go Concept

  • Redefining letting go: Letting go does not signify fixing, changing, or getting rid of something. It involves accepting and fully experiencing those sensations.

  • Avoid labeling: Labeling sensations as negative creates resistance. The resistance leads to attachment, hindering the true process of letting go.

Acceptance vs. Understanding

  • Letting go requires acceptance: Rather than seeking to understand sensations, one must accept and embrace them without the need for mental comprehension or justification.

  • Sensations are valid: All feelings and sensations are valid because they exist, not because they possess intellectual meaning.

Disconnecting the Mind

  • Separate thinking from feeling: Disconnect your mind's analytical nature when addressing sensations. Avoid the need to decipher the meaning behind your feelings before accepting them.

  • Fear and guilt: Do not fear or feel guilty about emerging sensations. Suppressing them often exacerbates the issue.

Practicing Presence in Feelings

  • Be fully present: Experience feelings unconditionally—without an agenda or desire to control them. This presence allows sensations to change organically.

  • The transformation of feelings: Notice that allowing feelings to exist naturally leads to changes in sensations; often, they will shift on their own without intervention.

The Fallacy of Always Acting

  • Challenge the need for action: A common trap is the belief that one must always act to change their feelings. Traditional self-help often reinforces this erroneous notion.

  • Experience instead of change: Instead of seeking to change a feeling right away, allow it to be felt deeply. Sensations are transient—they will come and go if you relinquish resistance.

Impermanence of Sensations

  • Sensations are temporary: Remember, nothing is permanent. Feelings and sensations evolve, including their direction, intensity, and nature.

  • Providing room for change: Give sensations the opportunity and attention needed for them to develop or dissipate in their own time.

Open-mindedness About Change

  • Let go of expectations: Avoid setting expectations regarding how sensations should change—they might not work out as predicted. Enter with openness and allow feelings to unfold in their natural course.