The Art of Letting Go:  Part One- Sometimes it is best not to let go.

I struggle with the concept of how we talk about letting go.  This is probably because I have had some new insights when thinking about my past, and I am probably watching too many Super Soul Sundays or Iyanla’s Fix My Life on the OWN network.  Each week on Super Soul, Oprah shares with us the latest spiritual teacher/writer/thinker and the lessons they have learned about living.  Many of them say the same thing; the present moment is all we have and they provide tips on letting go.

I am not Oprah bashing at all, and I have respect for her intention and all of the good she has brought into my life and the world.  I personally think that it is very difficult to do justice to healing complex life issues across a medium like television.  Although I do believe that these types of TV shows point us in the right direction.

The problem is that we live in a quick fix society and TV, as well as Facebook and Twitter, has a way of truncating the richness and beauty of emotional tone.  Twitter, Facebook and television brings us more trauma more quickly than any other time in human consciousness.  Because we are brought more trauma more quickly, we will have to develop new ways for conceptualizing how to treat the impact of fast fed trauma.

When we face traumas from all over the world in rapid succession, or we become overwhelmed when wrong things happen, like children being shot by stray bullets, or the killing of Trayvon Martin, we are faced with different choices of healing.  Of course we want answers and we want the painful feelings to go away.

The problem is that we often have an implied outcome that we subconsciously build within our healing conversations.  Perhaps the goal of these conversations should not be “talking about it in order to let it go!

The reason why civil rights progressed as far as it has, is because we as African Americans and our allies chose not to let it go.

Next up: The Art of Letting Go:  Part Two- Sometimes the personal is not political at all