A Practical Tip to Help Shed Emotional Baggage

Identify your main trigger areas.

There are myriad strategies for traveling the spiritual path. We can focus on nonattachment. Or impermanence. On not clinging or resisting. On not wanting or fearing. We can emphasize letting go. Or being present. And others, I’m sure.

But whatever they are, they all seek to achieve the same thing: Shedding our conditioned, egoic, mind-dominating selves. The more we shed, the more awakened and conscious we become. This manifests as an inward feeling of peace and an outward flow of love and compassion toward others.

Mickey Singer gets it right

My favorite among the above is Mickey Singer’s focus on letting go of our conditioned selves. He teaches that we all have good and bad experiences as kids and adults. The problem is that instead of experiencing and then letting these things go, we hold onto them. The massive collection of all this emotional baggage is another way of describing this egoic self.

So Singer teaches that the point of our lives is to consistently and persistently let go of this baggage/self. How? Each time we notice that one of our buttons has been pushed, i.e., we feel our ego rearing its ugly head, we immediately relax. All over. Then we let go of that feeling. I like to visualize a small bubble of emotion traveling from my stomach up and out of my head.

The previous two paragraphs sum up the one and only course Mickey Singer ever created. It consisted of eight fantastic, mesmerizing hours of talks (you can find it at soundstrue.com).

My letter to Mickey

I was so moved by the course that I wrote Singer a letter thanking him for it. But my letter also contained a suggestion. Something I thought he should emphasize more than he did. What is that suggestion?

Well, it has to do with one of the three steps in his technique which are: 1. notice 2. relax 3. let go. And the winner is…

In my letter, I urged Mickey to place more emphasis on people noticing when a piece of emotional baggage (which he calls the Sanskrit word samskara) has arisen. Why does that need more emphasis?

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