Imagine you were floating down a river. Life is going well and you move along with the currents. Now imagine that you stood up and said, “I don’t want anything to change, I want to stay right here!” The river would push against you and you would suffer.

Attachments are like this; we want what we want and once we have it, we want it to stay the same. We say to ourselves, “I need this” or “I have to have this or else I’ll be unhappy.” Any attachment we hang onto that we insist can’t change will cause us to suffer, whether it’s our health, our beauty, or our relationships.
This is why it is so important for us to let go.

Spiritual Aspect of Letting Go: Meditation
One of the key benefits of meditation is learning how to live in the present moment. Meditation teaches us to quiet our minds and diminish negative attachments.
When we meditate, we follow our breath, our prayer word, or our mantra, and a thought arises. What do we do? We go back to our prayer word, our breath, or mantra. Again, another thought comes. And we go back to our breath, and so on.

Over time, meditation teaches us to observe our thoughts even when we’re not meditating. When we witness a negative attachment, we identify it, and then we just get back to living life. When the attachments kick in, the key is to just get back to living life. Be with your friend, do your work, watch nature—whatever it may be. When we learn to live in the present, to flow with life, life goes well.

Mental Aspect of Letting Go: Therapeutic Approaches
Many years ago psychologists developed a theory referred to as ‘cognitive dissonance’ that refers to ‘the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time’.

Essentially our minds are drawn to make sense of things in a way that is familiar to us to avoid an experience of anxiety even if the familiar beliefs are unhelpful to us. We hold on to the past to avoid the possibility of future pain but by holding on we often end up experiencing far greater pain because we don’t open ourselves to new possibilities.
There are many therapeutic approaches and they all help clients let go of the past in different ways.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: helps clients develop mindfulness skills which directly enhance their ability to stay in the present moment and let go of painful thoughts and feelings
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: helps clients to develop a more meaningful life by focusing on their goals and values and being able to follow the path they choose in their lives without being obstructed by difficult feelings

Schema Therapy: addresses past experiences and traumas and how they have shaped the way we see the world and different aspects of the self.