I used to preach that if something was troubling us, we just had to let it go. I believed that for myself, and I believed it for others too.
If you shared with me that you had a deep resentment toward a friend or family member, I would tell you that you simply had to let it go. If I had a resentment or anything else that I invested a lot of emotional energy into, I'd tell myself that I just had to let it go.
Unfortunately, the things that I thought I let go of never really went anywhere. They would resurface, and I'd have to let go again.
And again. A few years ago, my daughter Taryn started to talk in her yoga classes about the idea that we must go through things before we let them go.
A light came on for me listening to her words. As she reminded us, believing that we can just let go of things is a form of spiritual bypassing, as if we could avoid the bumper-to-bumper emotional traffic by going around the problem.