In my previous blog “What does it Mean – ‘Holding Onto’?” I began to explore how the expression ‘holding onto’ came to my awareness, and then started to reveal many things about how we often live as human beings in a world that asks us to adapt and best manage all its rules, challenges, injustices, disharmonies, relationships and ideals on how to live and succeed.
A very early experience in life, a boat that nearly shipwrecked when I was only two years old, left me feeling a tension in my body that later on I could identify as a ‘holding onto’. Yet it expanded beyond a trauma that was held in my body, to a way of living that was about protection, manipulation and control. I learned that we can hold onto nearly anything! Ranging from edges, chairs, muscles, limbs, quarrels, properties, relationships, ideas, pictures, wishes, longings, personalities, resentments, jobs, hobbies, patterns of behaviour and/or anything that can give us a sense of security and identity.
It’s been quite a while since I wondered what it is to be Me without `holding onto´ so many things and just expressing my true self. I can feel how I have spent most of my life immersed in ideals and beliefs of ‘how to be’, desiring charisma and other qualities that would give me recognition and in some way make me ‘more’ than others.
Today, I can clearly see how this is a way of living based on comparison and separation from everyone and everything else.
Thankfully, these ideals and beliefs crumbled after attending three presentations by Serge Benhayon on The Living Sutras of the Hierarchy. These presentations allowed me to go deeper in my comprehension of holding onto and gave me a taste of what it would really mean to live as the true me, by first understanding in more depth the condition of our individuated reality as human beings. But what does this all really mean?
What I understood is that there is a part of human beings, the part identified with the ‘self,’ that works hard in order to keep creating, maintaining and validating itself and cementing its individual identity in this existence, but basically in separation to everything and everyone else.
To keep our individualised state valid and going, we need to dense up, which is to introduce a certain quality to the way we are, in how we move and to the thoughts we have. This is a quality that can be felt when we create conditions, shoulds, buts, pictures, restrictions, strategies and so on, with an underlying intention of satisfying a very personal agenda. I would also describe it as introducing ‘control’ to life and making everything feel more constricted, stagnant, slower and basically in resistance to the flowing and unifying rhythm of nature and the universe of which we are naturally a part.
It can be a difficult concept to grasp because our experience of life as human beings is certainly an experience of billions of bodies separated from each other, each of them representing a seemingly unique and separated world of thoughts, projects, complications, stories, attachments that we are all holding onto!
However, what if all these individuals are not separated at all, but are all part of the same whole? I know we have heard this many times before, but getting to feel in the body what this actually means was truly life changing, as I got to feel the difference between a body of light and a body of denseness.
Even though it can be tricky to put it into words, it was so simple. First of all, none of the common thoughts about myself, my role in the world, what I should or shouldn’t be doing, were present: I was just being and allowing all that was there. I felt boundless and light, as never before.
I can say it was Me, as it had a focus, but it had a very different quality to my daily experience of me when I am in control, or even me in a state of calmness and easiness!
It was Me in the lightest and most natural and simplest versions.
It was Me – but without barriers of protection; it was Me in connection to all. There was no identification with anything and it felt utterly joyful because… there was no holding onto anything! No identity, problems, issues, situations, memories, perceptions, wishes, dreams, anything!
I got to feel how holding onto something is really holding onto denseness!
This denseness is held by me in the body through my choice of contracting the particles in my body, therefore changing the frequency of my particles to where there is less flow, space and allowance for everything to just naturally be, move and express.
When we hold ourselves in this denser way, there is a higher possibility to be recognised, more easily distinguished, and eminent in our segregated state; and to me, one of the things that we, as humans, most seek is recognition and identity, therefore this becomes our ‘natural’ way of being: holding onto and densing up!
All of these I felt again the next day when I woke up feeling that old familiar feeling of being heavy and serious. What immediately became very obvious was how the lightness had been replaced by a holding onto something, holding onto many big and little things. I could describe it as:
- Yes, but first I need to do this
- Yes, but first I need to feel this
- Yes, but first I need to make sure
- Yes, but it is not easy to let go and I need more time
- Yes, but it is complicated and I am not ready
- Yes, but I won’t get the recognition I seek.
I felt completely closed off to my surroundings, and started relating to others as if I was also holding things against them to prevent them from hurting me, imposing on me and making me wrong.
From this, I observed how a life of holding onto and holding tight is really a life based on control, fear, manipulation, anxiety, and anticipation of what might go wrong in the future. It is a life that is the opposite of our natural ability to expand, flow, be joyful and live connected to everything around us.
I now understand that holding onto creates a contracted body of denseness, and even though everything is set up for us to believe that our reality is rock solid, the truth is our bodies are energy, as the rest of the universe is too! Yet we insist on holding onto things to make everything tangibly secure, differentiated and factual, and to assure us that we can control life. This way we get blinded to the fact that holding onto is constantly allowing the density and illusion of our selfish individualism to perpetuate.
Experiencing for myself how simple and natural it really is to truly be connected to all by not holding onto anything has given me a new marker in my body that allows me to let go and surrender more easily to what life presents each day.
I am aware that I will forever be exposed to energy that I won´t like and that I have an ingrained pattern of using my nervous system to get through life while holding tension in my body and muscles, but I now know what it is all about: a holding onto! This is a reaction that is not needed because energy is passing through me all of the time, and holding onto does not protect me or give me control over anything – holding onto only gives me a false sense of control, while separating me from everything else.
I know living in that feeling is not yet my daily experience. However, it is now my choice to remain spacious by making a permanent commitment to SURRENDER and LET GO of every little or big attachment that creeps in, to breathe gently, keep the permanent connection with my body and to remember this experience that can be well-described as: Me enjoying the Me that is not me but Me knowing it is not me!
Forever in appreciation for the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom brought through by amazing Serge Benhayon.
By Luz Helena Hincapie, Bogotá, Colombia
Further Reading:
Who I Really Am
Judgment, The Way of The Livingness and the Power of Letting Go
What to wear … you’re not wearing that, are you?
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
I love what Luz shares in this brilliant blog, I still have much to heal with respect to ‘holding on’, ‘I now understand that holding on creates a contracted body of denseness, and even though everything is set up for us to believe that our reality is rock solid, the truth is our bodies are energy, as the rest of the universe is too! Yet we insist on holding onto things to make everything tangibly secure, differentiated and factual, and to assure us that we can control life. This way we get blinded to the fact that holding onto is constantly allowing the density and illusion of our selfish individualism to perpetuate.’
It is a beautiful way to live, being light, open, and connected, ‘It was Me – but without barriers of protection; it was Me in connection to all. There was no identification with anything and it felt utterly joyful because… there was no holding onto anything! No identity, problems, issues, situations, memories, perceptions, wishes, dreams, anything!’
A much needed read this morning! along with another realisation that the denseness reminds me of when I was in the ’emo’ phase at school. I want to stand out and be different, believing that I can’t fit in with the majority. But when you get a whole bunch of people dressed in emo we all look the same and are far from individual. Letting go of denseness is no different however there is far more joy to experience once it’s dropped.
I realised today a denseness I have held onto was for protection because in the dense emotion I was ‘safe’. But that me that finds safety in emotion is not the me I want to identify with anymore. It is not the true me at all so why should I invest in it’s safety anymore?
Luz, this part is brilliant, ‘Me enjoying the Me that is not me but Me knowing it is not me!’ Learning to not even hold onto our identity and that everything that we do, say and think is not us but an energy coming through us helps to let go of identification and a whole lot more.
Appreciating ‘how simple and natural it really is to truly be connected to all by not holding onto anything’ is an amazing realisation for it is the holding on of hurts, expectations and the like that actually blocks us from connecting to the all.
Our hurts make us individual – the more I understand this – the more I see the responsibility I have to not hold onto things and to always know that being individual is me withdrawing from life.
Our hurts make us individual and our individuality hurts us! It really does ache when I feel the connection and love I have separated from.
We are not individual, but can at times think we are, ‘the ‘self,’ that works hard in order to keep creating, maintaining and validating itself and cementing its individual identity in this existence, but basically in separation to everything and everyone else.’
On a day to day basis, it can be very difficult to surrender and let go because we may have so much going on in our life. Sometimes everything might seem complicated and overwhelming but the tools you shared Luz, at the end are super supportive, like the Gentle Breath Meditation and being open to our awareness. I have been simplifying my life, embracing simplicity and being super gentle and caring with myself has supported me immensely in letting go of denseness. I realise that life is not meant to be hard but we choose to make it so, then that is what we will have.
Wow, the amount of effort and complication that goes into holding up this type of existence and keeping it going is just astounding.
When we become lighter, that can initially be unsettling – almost feeling like anxiety, except that there is nothing to be anxious about.
‘….a life of holding onto and holding tight is really a life based on control, fear, manipulation, anxiety, and anticipation of what might go wrong in the future. It is a life that is the opposite of our natural ability to expand, flow, be joyful and live connected to everything around us.’ And we are the ones at the helm, we can choose to become exhausted because of the effort we have to put in, in what is not love, or we can choose vitality and joy because choosing love is effortless.
I have recently been taking a good look at my holding onto my control and the effect this actually has not only on me, my body and my life, but more so what it means for others and where this actually affects them. A very uncomfortable exercise I have to say, for it exposes the absolute arrogance of the spirit who doesn’t give a thing about others, connection to God and the universe, but only thinks about itself/me and want to keep me in separation.
Spot on Monika, the spirit certainly can cause a lot of harm, ‘it exposes the absolute arrogance of the spirit who doesn’t give a thing about others, connection to God and the universe, but only thinks about itself/me and want to keep me in separation.’
When I contemplate what it would be like to let go and have no protection, I think of the young child just being itself, not worrying about other people and things, Just getting on with life.
It is a great example of how I was and how I can be.
Beautiful Ken, I love what you’ve shared. It shows us that we are capable of being deeply loving, light and playful just like when we were a young child. I am learning to return to that joyfulness and embrace the light and playful essence that has never left.
Holding on to anything causes tension and is exhausting but letting go offers the freedom to know truth.
Absolutely Mary and we can connect to our multidimensionality and grandest when we let go of denseness. Any sign of denseness is simply avoiding who we are, multidimensional beings.
Holding on to things does not feel great, ‘I got to feel how holding onto something is really holding onto denseness!’
Holding onto denseness is holding onto the familiar and not being dense can bring up all sorts of unresolved items in our life.
‘Holding onto only gives me a false sense of control, while separating me from everything else.’ So true Luz, your powerful blog exposes how we continually separate ourselves if we hold on, as it protects us and stops us from connecting to the grandness of love and universality.