It’s important to understand the difference between the feeling of wanting your desire, and the feeling of whatever your desire is. For the sake of example, I’ll use having a home of your own.

The feeling of wanting a home of your own has a particular nature. It feels like yearning, pining, longing-all those incomplete, reaching-for things. Wanting anything means you don’t have it. Wanting is a state that confirms itself. The feeling of wanting is like a void that no objects can fill. When you are in wanting you are like an empty bowl; you are always asking to be filled.

The feeling of having a home of your own, however, might include feelings of safety, warmth, comfort, happiness, sharing with friends, being anchored in the world, relaxation, authority over your own environment and many other things. This would be the “why” of wanting a home and would be the things that you want to focus on in order to create one. These aspects of your desire would have a particular resonance when you see them in your mind’s eye. You’d feel at rest, settled, completed, or energized, euphoric and happy-some kind of what I can only call receptive feeling. It would be a feeling of having done it, in a certain way.

The letting go is about letting go of the wanting. It’s about releasing the wanting energy and embracing the having energy. Wanting is a way that we can pinpoint our desires. It’s an energy that tells us what next. It’s like a message from our body or mind that says, do this next. Once that message is received, there’s no more need for the wanting; it’s time to create and then receive. Once you let go of the wanting state, there is room for receiving. Wanting, though, takes up all the space so there’s no room for manifestation.

As far as “how” to let go: The first way that I heard this explained was as a visualization exercise (or a physical one, you could actually do this). The process was this: Imagine your desire in full rich detail. Whatever it is that you want, visualize it as completely and fully as possible, using all your sense. When you have the full feeling of it, enclose it in a thought bubble and attach it to a balloon. Then let go. Let the balloon take it aloft into the sky, up into the universe and watch it disappear.

The other thing to consider with this idea of letting go, is that our desires are often just our best approximation of what we think will be the best thing for ourselves. A relationship? A particular person? A new job? THIS new job? We try to come up with just the very thing that will make us happy, or complete us, or take us on to the next step of development. But we don’t know all the details, all the wonderful things that are available, all the people, objects, experiences and so on that are just down the road for us. When we are dead set on getting just this particular thing (and notice how curious it is that we call it “dead set”), we narrow ourselves down to something that might be less than what is possible for us at any one time. Perhaps that great job we think we want has aspects to it that will be harmful to us; perhaps there is an even better job right down the road, that would be the perfect thing for us and we’d only have to wait another week. The universe’s ability to create the perfect thing for us is infinite. But we have to LET IT.

In order to let it, we have to let go of our idea of how it should work out.

This is the deeper meaning of “letting go.” We need to let go of how things will happen, to the extent that we almost let go of the WHAT happens, too. What we are asking for, usually, is just another level of “how”. We want a car, a house, a partner, a job, health, travel….whatever it is, is just our idea of what it will take to make us fulfilled and happy. But it’s ultimately the happiness that we are looking for, and when we can let go of our idea of what we think it will take to get there, we can allow the universe to work in the most miraculous ways, bringing us fulfillment beyond what we’d even thought of asking for. It is in this way that letting go really applies on a deep level. We are saying that we trust the universe to bring us what is best.