'Let Go Now'- Detachment is Making No One a Project

Have you ever found yourself intertwined in the chaos of other people's lives, trying to fix them, only to realize you've neglected your own growth?   Inspired by Karen Casey's transformative work, "Let Go Now: Embrace Detachment as a Path to Freedom" and her mediation on how detachment is not making others a 'project',  this episode dives into the delicate balance of codependency, self-esteem, and the courage to ask for what we need without apology by turning to your own needs first. We'll explore the complexities of detachment and the significance of allowing ourselves and others the space to face our challenges, grow, and heal.
 
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Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:47

Have you ever found yourself taking on the people or the situations in your life as personal projects that it's up to you to improve them, to fix them, to make everything better? Yes, we have all done that. That is part of us being people pleasers, us being codependent, us trying to fix and help the people in our lives or the situations that are difficult the people in our lives or the situations that are difficult. And yet when we take on a project that is somebody else, we are trying to control the uncontrollable. For this episode, I'm inspired by Karen Casey's book Let Go Now Embrace Detachment as a Path to Freedom, and her meditation on detachment is making no one a project. What if we let go of making the people and the circumstances around us projects and we turn the attention back to ourself? Enjoy the episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:40

Welcome to the Recover your Soul podcast a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome back to Recover your Soul. I'm Rev Rachel and I thank you so much for deciding to spend your time with me today. I know I say that every episode, but I really really want you to know that I do not take it for granted that you are here choosing to work on your soul recovery with me and in this community. Right now and if you're new to the podcast, maybe you've just listened to this one or maybe just a couple I want you to really know how much this is a community, how much I feel so grateful that my experience of transformation has sparked transformation in others, and we're doing it all together. So your being here means something. It holds energy that we can all feel, that we're in this space together, being seen and witnessed and loved and connected. So thank you so much for being here today.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 3:22

What I want to talk about for today's episode is a little bit of a piggyback on last week's episode, which was around feeling your feelings and allowing yourself to be in that ebb and flow of being in a really good space and then having your heart feel heavy, and not just bypassing those difficult feelings, those emotions, but allowing them to wash through you, to experience them for what they have, to teach you and to really be present with yourself at any given moment. To really be present with yourself, because if we just bypass the parts where we're feeling heavy, we might miss the healing that is available to us, we might miss something that our soul is trying to share with us. Because, ultimately, if we can see that every experience is an opportunity for growth, then we stop thinking that the world is smacking us or that we're being harmed or that everything is hard. We are taking control and empowering ourselves in the only place that we have any control, which is in our own experience. How are we showing up in this? How am I going to feel? How am I going to relate to this? How am I going to heal myself?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 4:43

In the last couple weeks, I've been in a place of heaviness and it's coming up, it's loosening, and it's loosening because I've been allowing myself to be in the sadness, when there is sadness, and I've been asking myself some really, really deep questions. And what I think is interesting is, when I'm in the flow of connection with source, the answers always come, and they come in a lot of different ways. They come in a variety of manners and sometimes it is maybe a conversation with a friend, or I pick up a book and it's exactly what I needed to hear, or I listened to a podcast that just feels like it's speaking directly to me. Maybe it's a song, maybe it is a journaling prompt that helps me to really dig in deeper. When you allow yourself to be in the flow of that healing journey, it's amazing what comes, and this is no different, which is that recently I had one of the community members talk about how she was reading a book called Let Go Now Embrace Detachment as a Path to Freedom by Karen Casey. So I ordered on Amazon, along with Melody Beattie's daily reader, the Language of Letting Go. So I'll probably be accessing both of these books because they're so fabulous in terms of detaching and codependence and how we can continue to strengthen our soul recovery journey and find even more deep peace and healing in our lives.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 6:19

So I just started reading this book, and this particular one, which is the number four, really hit me hard, because I feel like it was part of what I was learning about myself, and it also relates completely to where I am in the spring, and so I thought that it was perfect to share with you Okay. So I'm just going to go ahead and read this page and the way that the Let Go Now book works. It's 200 meditations and each day is its own meditation with its own topic, and then at the bottom there is an affirmation for the day. So this one is detachment is making no one a project. I'll just say that again, because this has been one of my great lessons in life Detachment is making no one a project.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:07

Karen says it's my guess that since you found this book of interest, you're able to relate to some of the struggles I've had over the years. One of these is dancing around, quote unquote, the life of someone else rather than leading my own life. I'm pleased to say that I've made a lot of progress in this area, but for many decades I didn't know there was any other way to live. Boy, do I really relate to that. If someone else wasn't the center of my life, I wasn't sure who I was. What a sad existence. What a sad recollection too.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:45

She says not letting someone else determine who we are or what we think or how we feel is revolutionary when we first encounter this idea. I was introduced to this notion in 1971 in a book titled why Am I Afraid to Tell you who I Am? By John Powell. I immediately embraced the philosophy, even though I knew it was a truth I wasn't yet able to practice. Now, many years later, I realized that we are given the seed of an idea long before we're able to sprout real growth in our lives. The fortunate thing is that we are never the same after that idea presents itself. I loved this and I'll go into it as I'm thinking.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:28

But while my heart is just filled with all of this truth in that paragraph and then the affirmation is I am my only project. Fully embracing this idea gives me so much freedom to do the things I was born to do. Others are in our lives for a reason. Others are in our lives for a reason, but they are not present as our works in progress. Part of what's been going on with me in the last maybe month since I got back from the trip is part of.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 9:03

It is just, you come back from a vacation and I think there's a little bit of as I said in the podcast a little bit of vacation blues and that in my life what I realize is how much energy I've put into other people and I'm still uncovering that. It's like layers that are continuing to be revealed to me in ways that I couldn't quite see, and these aren't things that I look at and I think, oh, what was wrong with me? What am I doing? That's judgment, and in soul recovery, what we're doing is we're letting the judgment go and we're starting to just look at what is. We're starting to have clarity, without a lot of the fog of projection, the fog of guilt, the fog of shame, the fog of oh my gosh, just this part of us that is covered through all of the thoughts that everything gets pushed through, because of course it does. That's what our brains do. This work that we're doing is slowly, slowly, slowly allowing us to uncover our eyes from the way that we have chosen to see it, and so when I start to look at these situations and I give myself compassion and I see them in new ways, there's this incredible healing that comes and this amazing amount of learning and stepping into myself.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 10:36

If you're ready for soul recovery, as a spiritual coach I can support your healing to help make real changes that will bring you a life of peace, happiness, connection and abundance. You can also work in smaller groups by taking a deep dive in a Zoom workshop or with me in person at a retreat or an event. Join others on the Soul Recovery Path once a month for the free Zoom support group or daily on the private Facebook page support group or daily on the private Facebook page. Visit the website recoveryoursoulnet to book coaching sessions with me or find all the information you need about soul recovery dates that are coming up and how to register for those groups and workshops. To support the podcast and the community, check the links in the show notes to make a small monthly donation or a one time donation of your choice. That will make a huge impact to support this community and the soul recovery mission. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 11:34

So of course, when we're younger, we are conditioned and socialized to be certain ways and I went into that in other podcasts and I went into that last week. But what I think about in this situation is from a very early age, something in me learned how to dance around other people and their needs and to put myself as the behind that. Luckily for me, there is some aspect of myself that is pretty confident in who I am and always has had a sense of myself that has a strong self-esteem, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But that self-esteem didn't relate as well to the place that said I can ask for what I need, that it's okay to actually ask for what I need, and so my identity became wrapped around this sense of myself that I felt good about myself. But feeling good about myself meant that somebody was a project, that I was there to fix and take care of other people, and this idea of a project means that somebody needs improvement.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:48

A project means that there's something to do, and I think that for us to realize that, of course, we are doers, there's some piece that really feels good about having success, and I was just having lunch with a couple of girlfriends and we were talking about how, when things get tough in your family maybe it's finances, maybe it's relationship that we do this piece where we we're the ones that pick up the strings and we say, okay, well, we're going to figure this out and we're going to take it on ourselves and we're going to make this happen and we're going to figure out how to solve these problems. And there's actually nothing necessarily wrong about being fabulous at action. But what we're talking about is this concept that this project is ours to have as a project, and oftentimes it's not entirely ours and a lot of times, if you're talking about people, they are not a project that we need to be taking on and we need to be able to be coming to a place where we're looking at why do I feel like this is my responsibility? What part of me feels like I am the one that has to fix everything, do everything, have everybody else come first. We may not know for a long time how to even know what we need or want.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 14:14

Detachment is this concept of unraveling ourself from others. It's around loving from a way that gives them space to be themselves, loving them enough to let them find their own way, even if their own way is difficult, and somehow it's like it's okay for us to have to go through hard times and be able to get out the other side with learning or understanding, but we don't want anybody else to do that. We think we're the ones who are supposed to take that on somehow, and that's somebody else being a project. What I also love about this is this concept that we're afraid to tell people who we are. That's been so big for me, and it's even, in a way, that's so fascinating because I like who I am, I feel comfortable in who I am and I've been surrounded by people who want me to be exactly who I am, who want me to be exactly who I am. I've never been diminished for being who I am and yet, even at 54 years old, even sitting here in front of this microphone, even with the work that I've been doing, I realized there's still some part of me that is afraid to really just stand in the truth of me, because I've put so much time and energy into being there to protect and serve and help and fix and do for others that just standing in my own right as me feels strange, feels strange, it feels selfish, it feels like I'm asking too much to be able to be in this space where I can just ask for what I need.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 16:13

The other thing that I think is interesting in this reading is just this morning was the monthly sacred circle that we have here in Colorado and 20 amazing, mostly women. Every once in a while a guy shows up. These amazing women come together and we talk about spirituality and we have topics, and today was around cultivating your own garden and we actually had pots and we planted seeds and we did a ritual around tending your own garden. And so this is really foundational that she says. We often are given a seed of an idea long before it's able to sprout real growth in our lives. And we were talking this morning about how, when you plant from seed, it is a while until those sprouts come up. And then you have to tend to them attentively, you have to nurture them, you have to water it, you have to put the right amount of sun, you need to make sure it doesn't get too cold, you need to make sure it doesn't get too much sun. You really have to be kind to it for it to truly grow and blossom to its fullest.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:24

And so this idea that here we are in the spring, that what is the seed that has been planted in your life, what is the seed that in your life you realize that it was given to you maybe in the past, maybe it's a seed that's been in one of these podcasts or another podcast that's just sparked some change in you, that's opened your eyes just enough to be able to begin to look at detaching with love, to be able to realize that you've been dancing around other people and their personalities and the need to have others be your project, and you've lost sight on who you are and how you can be in your life that if you aren't having to take care of or fix or manage them. Who are you and what do you want to be doing? What is your calling want to be doing? What is your calling, what is your fullness, what is your greatness? And, as I have been working on this in my life, it means that sometimes I have to step forward and I have to ask for help. I have to look at parts of myself that don't think that I'm deserving to receive, that is uncomfortable in receiving, because I never had the energy to receive.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:46

I was always the one who was providing, providing the care, being the peacemaker, being the helper, putting all of my energy that I was so proud of who I was. I was giving it, giving it, giving it, giving it. And this isn't about all of a sudden stopping that and standing on your own side of the street and saying everybody take care of themselves and I'm not making anybody any dinner and you can fend for yourself. That's not what I'm saying. This is about us learning how to be comfortable in our own skin and to realize that there's no need to dance around anyone and that our needs, our wholeness, our full expression is the number one thing. That we need to feel comfortable within ourself first, and then to step into the world and live from that fullness of who we are, making ourselves our own project. Healing myself has been the greatest gift that I could have ever given my family. Healing myself has been a way that I'm showing up in every situation in my life as the kindest, nicest, most open, connected, present person.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 20:11

And in the past I was so obsessed with everybody else being the project that I wasn't even present for them in the moment. I couldn't hear a conversation and be with them in that moment without already thinking how I'm going to fix it, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to make that better? What is mine to do here? How can I make that better for you? How can I solve this? And now we're learning. Oh, I don't need to have you be my project. I can detach with love and just allow you to be exactly exactly who you are. I can allow that to be exactly who you are, and I can allow myself to be exactly who I am, and if I don't know who that is yet, that's my project. That's my project is to begin to discover and be curious about who we are and be curious about who we are and uncovering, uncovering. Uncovering these parts of ourselves that feel lost, that feel alone, that feel tired, that feel exhausted, that feel overwhelmed, and to tend to that part of us, to nurture that part of us, to come into that part of us. That is our project on ourselves.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 21:47

Soul recovery is about freedom. It's about letting go of control of everything around us, understanding that we are actually powerless over everything outside of us, and instead of feeling like that's something terrible, we realize it's a freedom. So I want to read this last affirmation for you as a close. I am my only project. Fully embracing this idea gives me so much freedom to do the many things I have been born to do.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:22

Others in our lives are here for a reason, but they are not present as our works in progress. What were you born to do? What fills you up? What gives you joy? How can you use this beautiful meditation on detachment to stand in the strength of who you are unequivocally yourself, knowing the incredible gifts that have been given to you and you've heard me say it before that if you have something that you are passionate about, something that sparks your interest, something that lights you, have something that you are passionate about, something that sparks your interest, something that lights you up, that is a gift that's been given to you to explore, to learn more about.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 23:07

We tend to reject what, I believe, the universe has brought to us, and it comes from all of our old patterning, and part of this in our own project of ourself is to stand in this truth and know, and know the beauty of who we are and how we can begin to put that as our number one priority, to discover that so that we can be our fullest selves. And as our fullest selves, we can show up that way for everyone around us, regardless of where they are on their journey, that when we can be our best self, there's only love and goodness and kindness and forgiveness and grace and compassion to hand back to them in reflection. If you need help with this or any other questions on soul recovery, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm here to help you on your soul recovery journey. I hope you'll go to the website and check out recoveryoursoulnet for more. Until next time.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 24:10

Namaste, thank you for listening to the Recover your Soul podcast and if you loved what you heard here, every Friday we have a bonus episode and you can access this by becoming a subscriber through Apple podcasts for only $3.99 a month, or become a Patreon member, and on this platform, you can choose $5, $15 or $25 a month to show what you want to support the show with On both of these subscriber platforms is an entire catalog of back episodes intended to inspire and support you on your soul recovery journey. I really want to invite everybody to attend the free once a month, every first Monday of the month support group. This is on zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend and by giving a like or a review and sharing this with your friends and family really helps us to share the soul recovery message with even more people.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 25:05

We are on social media. We are on all the platforms. I am on TikTok. You can listen to Guided Meditations by Rev Rachel Harrison on Insight Timer. Thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for being part of the community. To find out more about soul recovery and everything that's being offered, visit the website wwwrecoveryoursoulnet. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.