Skipping Learning Life’s Lessons by Releasing

The question has been coming up repeatedly the past few months: If I let go of all the emotional turbulence surrounding my issues by using techniques such as EFT, TAT, The Sedona Method, surrender, or any other technique that literally dissolves all the emotion that’s tied into our problems, will I no longer learn life’s important lessons?

To find out the answer to this question, I’ve experimented with all of these techniques personally and repeatedly had great results from each and every one of them, sat down with a whole group of therapists who teach EFT and picked their brains to learn about their experiences and results with their patients and with themselves, tried a variety of other techniques myself for comparison, and leaned into my own fears both with and without applying these techniques.

Here’s my findings, with a little foundational background first.

The Traditional Way of Going Past Your Fears

The way that most of us are familiar with getting over fears is to literally face your fears head-on. Jump into a situation that scares you, get your adrenaline flowing, your blood pumping, and push past your fears.

On the other side of your fear is a larger, more powerful, and more capable you. You can then simultaneously handle bigger problems AND bigger rewards. This is part of the process of growth and development. This is personal expansion.

Great. Awesome. This, we could say, is a hands-on path to overcoming fear.

Altering Beliefs through Affirmations and Belief Replacement

Another popular technique in the personal development community is to basically reprogram your mind and your conscious and subconscious programming to install a new blueprint that works in your favor, rather than against you.

So you choose a new set of beliefs which you feel will serve you better and then begin repeating the beliefs over and over with passion and verve, basically reprogramming your brain to work with you instead of against you.

Now when you’re ready to dive into what scares you, you are a much more powerful person, with a stronger driving force behind you. As many of us have found, this can be an extraordinarily powerful technique. We learn that we are much more capable of overcoming obstacles when we “put our minds to it.”

When we use this technique, we often jump into life with a sense of courageousness and bravado. I am a warrior! I am strong and powerful! I can overcome any obstacle!

Those are the words looping through our minds and when we go out into the world and walk through our fears, we find out that we ARE strong and powerful. We learn the lessons well, without as much struggle as we had before when we were blindly walking into our fears.

Letting Go of Negative Beliefs in the First Place

There is a third option: Literally dissolve all the accumulated emotion that surrounds various thoughts, circumstances, and activities. It’s like sitting back and allowing all that emotional momentum to come to an end on its own. From there we find it’s so easy to go into the world and do what you want.

In my experience, you become fearless. It’s not that you’re mentally overriding fear with courage, but that the fear has literally left your presence. You walk around in a state of peace, love, and freedom, naturally doing what needs to be done without going to the mind to first worry about what might happen or what to do. It’s a natural flow.

By walking this route, we find that our fears were basically unfounded in the first place. We were so afraid of XYZ happening, but when we release on it, we suddenly realize that it truly wasn’t a big deal. At all!

Learning Life’s Lessons

Now here’s where the previously mentioned question arises:

If I’m no longer caught up in needing to give my illusory fears a reality and then overcome the “problems” that don’t really exist, will I not still go out into the world and learn the lessons?

It certainly can be taken that way, but in my experience, that’s not the case at all. That’s missing the point.

It is definitely true that in many cases, when you release on your fear, you’re basically done with the issue. You have healed that aspect of yourself and it’s finished.

How wonderful!

What happens then is since you’ve expanded, you’re that much freer to choose love instead of fear, without hesitation.

So now when you find yourself in “the heat of the moment,” you don’t have the same inner emotional turbulence arise. You act from a place of freedom and openness. Life then tends to show you that when coming from a place of freedom, things tend to work out quite well, often times better than you expected, and you find yourself not tied to any particular outcome, open to any possibility.

Of course when actually doing things you’re scared of, you learn a whole variety of other lessons that you wouldn’t have picked up simply by letting go of the emotional issues and then moving on to the next thing. There’s a lot of value in actually doing the things you used to have an issue with. No doubt about it.

Rather than feeling what it’s like to head-butt your way through your fears to experience the freedom on the other side, you learn what it’s like to walk through life with a sense of freedom the whole time.

It is a different lesson, yes. A different experience, that’s for sure. It seems to be a higher level of a lesson.

You’re showing yourself that by letting go of granting your fears a reality in the first place, you can much more easily flow through life without all the restrictions that used to hold you back.

Yes you CAN choose to release on fear and not actually need to go into life and prove to yourself or others that you are right, and this too is but one expression of freedom. You see, ALL options are open to you, including the choice to not do.

One of the main points of applying techniques like EFT, TAT, and the Sedona Method is that they simply aid you in moving through life more easily, without all the suffering that used to come along with it.

Being in life is a given. Suffering is entirely optional.

THAT is the key lesson that these tools help you learn.