I hope you all had a great weekend. I did, except for the fact that poor little Arleen came back with a horrible sunburn. She can’t even wear clothes, and I’ve been dousing her in aloe vera 24/7. Do you remember your first serious sunburn when you couldn’t even get under the sheets? Poor baby. 

Time to pick your brains, peeps. Sometimes I think my posts are too long, but I want feedback from you. Would you mind taking this quick poll?

Speaking of which, here’s one that’s a little long!

Me: Hi there, Ms. Kimberly.

Kim: How are you?

Me: Good, and how are you feeling, today?

Kim: Good. Can you see me and hear me okay? My Internet is so shitty right now.

She chuckles.

Me: No, so far, so good!

Kim: All right, good. I’m going to turn my Internet off on my phone and we’re good. I’m feeling better today.

She had just gotten kicked out of her church of over 20 years because of her channeling.

Me: Good. I hope so. I think we’re going to talk about a topic that I know I need help with, and if Erik agrees—Hi, sweetie, by the way!

Erik: Yeah, we could all use a little lesson today.

He blows me kisses.

Erik: Hey, Mom. What’s up?

Me: Not much. This is one of the things I have the worst time with and that is letting go, surrendering, accepting. To me, that’s like saying, “Don’t think about a pink elephant.” ‘Oh, well all right.’ And—

Kim: Boom, there it is.

Me: There it is. The pink elephant. So maybe you can talk to us first about why it’s so important and then ways in which we can do it.

Erik: There are many ways we can pick this apart.

Kim: He’s showing himself dissecting, pulling things apart.

Erik: If we want to understand how to let go of something or how to surrender, we have to understand ourselves first. So we have to dissect ourselves.

Kim (laughing): He’s funny. He’s going like this with his hands. (She taps her chest.) Sometimes his mannerisms are really intentional and sometimes they’re really sloppy! It’s funny.

Erik: I want to talk about the self and how to truly let go of something, someone must understand how they identify with it first. No matter what it is or what you look at, if you identify with something or define yourself by something, there’s an attachment there. Let’s talk about the definition, first. If you define yourself by something with some sort of label, obviously that’s an attachment, and it’s going to be harder to let go. Let’s take a relationship status. If you define yourself as married, you’ve created an identity that way. You’ve created a self, which is fine because that’s what we’re here for, but to move on from something or to let go, we have to then be able to shed that layer. We have to know how we’ve defined ourselves by it in order to undefine or detach. So, let’s say you’ve been in this longstanding relationship and then it doesn’t work out and you get divorced. You might be trying to figure out, “How do I move forward? How do I let go? It just sucks.” You have to look at the way that you identified yourself as an individual in that relationship. Did you create a dependency on that person as a companion, or did you uphold your own companionship with yourself? Can you be your own companion?

Me: Yeah, are you a standalone model?

Erik: Yeah, a lot of times, Mom, especially in relationships and in religion, too, people lose their true identity in those things. They lose their sense of self.

Kim: He was actually talking about this with a client the other day, and he was actually conveying sadness.

Erik: People forfeit their discernment, their own personal sense of self among different circumstances, and that’s really sad because then they get so affected by the world that they don’t know who they are. Then all kinds of other things happen. So if you want to really surrender, it’s not just about letting go. It’s about being mindful about how you’ve identified with something and how you’ve let that something define you.

Kim: Like yesterday, I know I shared with you that my church pretty much kicked me out. Certain religions don’t appreciate what I do for a living. I kind of saw it coming, but I don’t know, it just hit me weird.

Me: Yeah.

She was really bummed.

Kim: So I talked with Erik and said, ‘Ah, I’m in this funk and I hate when I get in that energetically. What do I do? What am I supposed to think of this’ And he said, “Well, that’s your first mistake, thinking that you have to “do” so just “be” with it. And then he started to tell me, “Unravel the ways that you’ve identified with that religion and how you’ve allowed that certain religion to define you. Now you know you know yourself outside of that religion, so why does it hurt to let that go?” So basically, he was really helping me see how thick that attachment was, how deep that attachment was. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid that was ingrown and under the skin! I didn’t realize that I was that attached.

Me: Ah!

Erik: And sometimes when we go through those situations, even if it’s the loss of a loved one, no matter what you’re going through to let go, it may be brutal and it may be rough and intense, but that shows you the level of attachment you’ve created, and it’s also needed because it’s pushing you to a higher awareness of your true self.

Me: Well, should we not even make attachments? Should it be like, “Well, I’m married, but that’s not going to be a part of my identity. I just happen to be married, and I have this little certificate that says I am,” or “Well, I’m going to this church, but it doesn’t define me. I just happen to be going to this church to enjoy their company and their sermons?”

Erik: Exactly. First of all, the fewer “selves” you create and the fewer labels you put on yourself, then the less limited you’ll be and the less attached you’ll be. That makes it easier to float through life and not have to worry about how to let go. So like in a relationship, you’re married; you have that certificate, but as long as you can maintain a sense of self in anything, that’s the key. You need to know yourself in anything. In a relationship, know yourself as an individual. If you do go to a certain church of a certain religion, still have your own discernment. Don’t ever forfeit that because that’s when you open up the world of evil. What I mean by that is the ego. That’s where you really start to battle with yourself and struggle with emotional distress and all that stuff.

Me: I’ll give you a perfect example. I remember after Erik died, I tried to go back to work for a while, but it just didn’t work out. I felt like I could help more people doing what I do now, so I retired. And this neurosurgeon friend of mine said, “How can you retire? I mean, being a doctor, that’s who I am! That’s how I define myself!” So I thought, ‘Wow. I’ve never defined myself as a doctor.’ I happen to be a doctor, but it was never attached to my identity. If I attached anything to my identity, it’d be being a mom and a wife, but never a doctor. That was just a calling that I happened to have, so retiring wasn’t so difficult for me at all.

Kim: That’s interesting. He wants me to share and example real quick of another client who’s a blog member. She was basically suffering from her own addiction, and she was addicted to her work. Erik told her, “Take away your work. Take away everything you do for work. Now who are you?” And she said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what things I like to do. I don’t know—“ She didn’t have any hobbies, and she was so identified in that one little box that she didn’t know herself.

Me: Poor thing.

Kim: But she knew she was enslaved by it. She just didn’t know how to get outside of that.

Erik: This thing that happened to Kim yesterday at her church was a lesson in resistance because she was definitely in this place of resistance where I and so many others are opening her mind so much more than religion.

Kim: I’d go to church like as a routine.

Me: Right.

Kim: We had gone for so long, and then it became to where I had to force myself to go> I felt like I just didn’t align with what was happening there, but I still went with the family. Basically, I was living inside my own resistance.”

Erik: You manifested that whole experience.

Kim: So I wasn’t surprised that it happened. I’m still a little bit shocked, but what can you do?

Me: Yeah.

Kim: And everyone was like, “Well, you should tell them that what you do is good,” but it really doesn’t matter. To remain in a place of surrender, you don’t put up resistance in any way, shape or form like, “Yeah, but let me prove my point.” I’d rather foster the peace. If they’re not comfortable with me there, then I don’t want to disrupt their peace that way. I’d rather just surrender to the whole thing and be completely transparent.

Erik: Now it’s just a matter of you really being honest with yourself and surrendering the identities you created. All of these little false selves that we create in our heads is like the good talk and the bad talk. Sometimes we talk good to ourselves and create this happy little person in our head. Other times, we talk shitty to ourselves and we criticize and we blame. We create all these different levels of ourselves and identify with aspects of them. Like characteristics.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: We can stop doing that and let go, becoming more transparent. Being just in the moment with everything and accepting it is how you surrender.

He shrugs his shoulders.

Erik: And knowing how you define yourself. That can be a limiting thing.