-- An Interview with Best-selling Author Guy Finley and Psychologist, Dr. Ellen Dickstein --

ED: Guy, you have become well known as “The Letting Go” author after your bestselling book, The Secret of Letting Go came out many years ago. So let’s talk about “letting go” today. There must be a lot of people all over the world who sense that they're hanging on to something that is hurting them, but they may not even be aware of what it is that they're hanging onto, what it is they need to let go of.

GF: It's true. We don't know. We think to ourselves, "When the time comes, I really need to let go of this person," "I need to let go of this career path that I've been on," "I need to let go of this pain that I've been carrying around." But those are always one step short of the real solution.
A nice feature of our spiritual work, of real interior work, is that gradually we begin to recognize that the experience we have of life outside of us is first and foremost a reflection and a result of an interior life, of something that is going on inside of us. We begin to recognize that the condition we blame for our unhappiness is never the cause of the unhappiness, but merely something that shows us a more persistent misunderstanding, a more persistent problem.
How many times have you let go of things, thinking that "when I get rid of this, I'm going to be different"? It's almost endless, isn't it? But the fact remains that we don't free ourselves. If I let go of you, then I get someone else.

ED: I let go of something and somehow I end up holding on to something else.

GF: That's right, and it's indicative of something that we need to understand at the root of letting go. The reason letting go is so hard is because what we have to let go of is not the person, the place, the position, the possession, but the sense of ourselves that is derived from thinking about that person, place, possession, or position. That's the real nut of it. I think my life depends upon something.
When I first meet the man or woman of my dreams, the new job -- whatever it is -- I'm glad that my life depends upon it. "This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me!"

ED: It gives meaning to my life.