this story for me summarizes how i hold onto things that really are for my detriment. i am practicing two new ways of thinking whenever i am presented with a dilemna and can't seem to find the answer:

1) what's the payoff? why am i doing/not doing this continually?

2) what would love do?

when i get those answers and sit still awhile, it is clear what action (or inaction) i should take.



Letting Go

I'd been involved for a couple of years in a struggle over a house. It was a house I didn't want but couldn't let go of. In fact, it was a house I'd never wanted to buy in the first place.

Carol, the woman I was with at the time, had taken a major fancy to it, but I thought it was ugly and too expensive. I eventually gave in to her wishes, mainly because I wanted her to be happy.

In those days I was under the woefully mistaken impression that things like real estate could make people happy. Later I would come to see that buying an ugly house I didn't want was a way to avoid facing an even uglier truth lurking inside me: I didn't want to be in the relationship anymore. Finally I left the relationship, but the house became a source of conflict that dragged on and on.

When Carol and I split up we had accumulated an amount of equity well over $100,000 in today's money. I wanted her to buy my half or sell the house so I could get my money out. She wanted to keep living in the house but only had $10,000 of the $50,000 she needed to buy me out.

Stalemate.

And so it dragged on for months, then a year.

Each month I'd go through one of life's least fun experiences: having to make my half of the payment for a house I didn't like and didn't live in. I felt the pinch even more as my relationship with Kathlyn deepened. When we began living together, all we could afford was a tiny rental; from the moment we moved in, we couldn't wait to move out of it. The only person that seemed to be happy was Carol. She got to live in a house she liked and only had to pay for half of it! As time wore on, the minor satisfaction of making Carol happy dwindled and devolved into a bitter envy.

Bitterness and envy were two emotions I hadn't spent much time feeling in my life, and I didn't wear them well. One day I was full of angry thoughts about Carol and the house, and to soothe my fevered mind I sat down to meditate.

During meditation I was visited by a revelation. An image popped into my mind of a river flowing around a boulder. In that image was embedded a powerful insight: money is really only a form of energy. I realized that my attachment to "getting what I was entitled to" was a massive energy block, a boulder in the flow of my river. I was holding onto a house I didn't want until Carol came up with the full $50,000. By doing that I was blocking my own energy flow and, in a twisted sort of way, staying attached to Carol.

A radical question formed in my mind: What if I simply gave her my half of the house for whatever she could pay? I wondered if this act of giving would free up the energy flow, so that the money would come my way through some other means. It seemed like an outrageous idea when viewed through the filter of logic, but it seemed so intuitively right that I decided to act on it. Later that day I told Kathlyn what I'd realized.

She gulped when I told her I was going to let go of the house, because it represented my only tangible asset at the time. However, she immediately understood the money-is-energy insight and agreed that letting go of the house was the right way to go. I called Carol's attorney and asked him if she still had the $10,000. He said she did.

"Okay," I said, "I'll give her my half for the ten grand."

"You will?"

He sounded astonished and skeptical.

"Yep," I said, "She likes the house and deserves to live in it. I'll make the $40,000 some other way."

He asked me what I meant, and I explained my insight about money and energy. He listened politely, although I imagine he thought I was either crazy or on drugs.

"I'll draw up the papers right away," he said.

Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the deal, I began to experience a new level of abundance in my life. A book contract came through, along with a substantial offer for a long-term consulting contract with (believe it or not) the U.S. Army. They wanted me to help bring innovative counseling to the staff of their drug and alcohol treatment programs.

When all was said and done, I ended the year with well more than the $40,000 I'd given away in the house deal. Best of all, Kathlyn and I found a wonderful new home in the neighborhood we wanted to live in. All ended well for Carol, too: she got married to a man who liked the house just fine.

The most important part for me was receiving the gift of a miracle that had lasting consequences in my life. In addition to understanding how the world of energy actually works, I also got a powerful tool for navigating through this new world. I learned that any significant incompletion acts like a boulder in a river. The river has to flow around it to get where it wants to go. One or two boulders may only hinder the flow, but pile up a few more and you start to dam the river. It doesn't take long for that dammed river to overflow its banks and get diverted toward a completely different destination.

The way to get the flow going in the right direction again is by completing any significant incompletion. The act of completing something, particularly if it has an emotional charge, is a remarkably powerful way to increase your abundance of love, money, health, and anything else that's important to you. You really have to see it and feel it to believe it.

Gay Hendricks