For the last several months I've been listening to a nighttime meditation by Dr. Joe Dispenza. My favorite part of it comes in the very beginning. He says, "Now as you exhale, let go of the day."
For the first few weeks of this it seemed matter of fact... it was the end of the day after all. But over time I began to really look forward to those words. Each time I heard them the exhale got deeper and deeper as I began to really let go of the day, the whole day, without retaining any parts of it. It is now my second best part of the day. The first is waking up to a new day.
My spiritual director asked about my prayer life recently and this singular moment at the end of the day sprang to my mind first. I had never spoken to anyone about my meditations and I was surprised to hear myself talk about this nightly ritual and how much it had come to mean to me. I was hearing myself tell myself what it knew at a deep level but not at the surface level of everyday conversation. I observed myself saying out loud: "Do you know what a relief it is to have someone give me permission to let go of the day?"
Somewhere in me a habit on holding on to parts of a day, good or bad, and replaying them for days or weeks or longer into the future had become the norm. I had no idea the weight I was carrying around. But to let go of the day means to let go of it, all of it. That is, to release it into the infinite cosmos and to start anew tomorrow. To choose not to "cling," as Michael Singer says, allows us to be fully present in this moment of this day, free from the attachments of the past.
One of my teachers says that when we go to sleep at night all momentum stops on all subjects. So that when we awaken, we truly wake to a new day, a new creation, and we are new, and everything is possible regardless of what came before because we are starting at a brand new place. If we chose to pick up on yesterday's stuff then it carries forward and maybe that's really good. But if yesterday brought unhappiness or anxiety, then it can be left in yesterday. We make the choice to bring forward whatever we want. We also choose to let go of whatever we want. There is no rule that requires us to drag around our memories of the past, good or bad, like a ball a chain.
Take a deep breath... and with this exhale, and let go of the day.
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