Letting Go of Expectations

Letting Go of Expectations

WORDS BY MARINA SHAPIRO-ELBERT

Our mind is trained to build expectations. We’re constantly in a state of expecting (positive and negative), trying to subconsciously control the future according to our ideas of how things should be. We expect our spouses, children, parents, friends, co-workers and even strangers to behave based on our own perceptions of right and wrong, or situations to turn out according to what fits our personal desires. And, when they don’t – we end up feeling disappointed and frustrated.

Expectations always lead to disappointments. Often, we are so zoomed in on the pictures in our head of how we want things to be, how we want people in our lives to act that we can’t cope with the outcome when it differs from our ideals, whether it exceeded our presumptions or failed to match them.

The pictures we carry and build our expectations upon are a sophisticated mechanism of our ego, protecting us from what might hurt us, essentially guiding us to avoid pain at all cost. These pictures are almost always based on our childhood experiences, those moments we encountered lack of love and internalized the belief that we are not worthy of love. Through those experiences we feel loss of power and give birth to voices and ideas in our mind that will perpetuate and play out situations to confirm that belief throughout our entire life. These voices often find an expression through a sense of entitlement, self-importance, pride and arrogance, where you feel that others somehow are obligated to delivering that love to you in whichever form you demand or expect.

Our relationships are a perfect ground to trigger these voices and pictures that come from a place of hurt inside, constantly feeding situations in which we re-live the disappointments and feel worthless and unloved. It may seem as minor as expecting your partner to take out trash when it fills up and getting upset when they don’t do it time after time or expecting friends to say “thank you” for things you do for them, expecting your child to be polite or a parent to do a good job, and so on. As long as we feed the pattern, we will experience hurt and disappointment, because the pictures we form in our mind can’t find realization in people and events in our life.

Letting go of expectations is a continuous process, a path that can lead you to recognizing and healing your patterns and replacing the inner projector which feeds and replays the feelings of a hurt child within you. This change cannot happen unless you’re willing to go a few layers deeper than the mind. As Albert Einstein said: “You cannot solve a problem from the consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew”. So is the mind cannot heal itself, only the heart can bring love into it. This truly requires courage and willingness to look inside the pain you carry, bringing unconditional love and forgiveness to the parts of your psyche that are hiding behind the need to prepare yourself for the worst and build expectations from that fearful place.

The practice of letting go is truly the practice of surrender and acceptance. By surrendering your fears and the need to be in control of life, you’re opening the door to the realm of love, where miracles and serendipity are in charge of the best possible outcomes in your life.

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