How to Control my Inner Control Freak

I took this picture during a yoga retreat in Sulawesi. Yoga in the morning, volunteering and feeding the animals in the afternoon!

“Just let go”, how simple does it sound, but why is it so difficult for us to actually do it?

What would happen if you didn’t have the urge to control things? You would have to trust for the good to happen, right? Control feels safe, it’s also the perfect recipe for stress as there are so many things you might think to have control over, in the end, you simply don’t. Control is an illusion.

Monkey see monkey do
In Indonesia, hunters have a special way of catching a monkey. They put a banana under a large upturned urn with a hole in the bottom. The monkey smells the banana. It puts its hand through the hole and grabs the banana. But the hole isn’t large enough for the monkey to get its hand out with the banana.

The persistent monkey continues to pull and pull, never realizing the danger he is in. While the monkey struggles with the banana, the hunters simply stroll in and capture the monkey by throwing a net over him.
As long as the monkey keeps his fist wrapped around the banana, the monkey is trapped. Just by letting go of its hold on the banana, it would be able to free himself but it chooses not to.

The ‘monkey trap’ serves as a metaphor on many levels.
Desire and greed leading to destruction are widely used and in my coachings, I often use it to illustrate letting go of control.

Controlling means trying to make people, places and things the way you want them to be.  Most of the time, they’re opposites.  The more controlling you are, the less powerful you become. And worse, the more captured, trapped, stressed or burned out you will feel.

Leaving the aspect of how others see you, out of context here.
Someone ever told you that you’re a nag? They could say this because they feel controlled. Auch, read on…

The only thing you can really control is yourself. And if you change, in time, this will make your environment and people around you change as well.
So you can have your influence but it works on completely different levels.

All good, all nice but very practically, how the heck do you let go?

Through insight.
By truly realizing and feeling that control is an illusion of your mind, you start to understand that letting go is the only option. It’s our mind that gives us the idea we can control stuff, so it’s not the mind we need to address here.
This part usually doesn’t even want to change anything by the way. Hello, resistance!

It’s our body we need to address. Via yoga, meditation, silence; anything that will make us ‘feel’ again and trust ourselves and the (can I say this here?) ‘universe’ again.
The more you trust in yourself, the less need there will be for control.
The more confidence in yourself, the more you will open for the unexpected.
The more confidence in yourself, the less fear there will be for making the wrong decisions.

Or going back to our monkey: let go of your banana and be free.

Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself. – Deborah Reber

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Namaste,
Rachel
www.revealingvajra.com