Imagine how many times you have had to let go voluntarily or involuntarily of things, pets, people, jobs, family, boyfriend, girlfriend, thoughts, dreams, ideas, ambitions, desires… and the list can go on for many many paragraphs further… Maybe take some time to feel and retrieve the nearest memory of letting go and ask yourself: How did this experience make me feel?

Letting go or forcefully being let go of something or someone that we have grown to live, admire, became emotionally attached or reliant to/on us a difficult life experience. I remember just recently my niece has lost one of her hamsters. It was by far the closest experience for her within her household of loss. She can go two routes: cling onto the hamster and keep wishing it was still there, or, take her time to mourn, accept the fact that the hamster is gone and move forward. But here’s the hack, she can also choose to ignore her feelings, forget about it and pretend the hamster never existed. She can suppress her feelings until one day they resurface in different circumstances, taking different shapes and forms and maybe bundled with other unexpressed and suppressed feelings.

You as an adult can possibly do something very similar. You can choose either routes, or the third one where you carry on with your live without a visible dent. It will come back and resurface at a given point in your life. But as an adult, you get to inform yourself and make decisions on how you want to lead your life, and how your sense of clinging might be another symptom of a possible deeper topic. For example, you might cling onto people because you have a fear of being left alone, left out, left out of the group as a result of a neglecting parent, history of bullying and so on. You might cling into a pet because it has been your emotional support for so many years and you think you are unable to live without it or need to substitute it as soon as possible… and so on.

What happens when you keep running from the one subject of clinging to the other without looking at your own bellybutton? What happens if you keep doing that, without really finding what you are looking for with the outside clinging, within yourself? Maybe it’s worth asking yourself this: how does it make me feel to be reliant on external factors to fulfill my clinging needs? What do I need to find this fulfillment within myself? What traumas do I need to tap into? What memories do I need to retrieve and look at myself with myself (or help of a professional)?

There, you take the first steps to let go of your clinging nature that’s developed throughout the years and start to realizing that you as an individual is capable of loving yourself, supporting and encouraging yourself to live a life that makes you really happy, that you as an individual deserve this happiness from within and that you are worthy of love towards yourself.