What Actually Happens When We Let Go of Our Emotional Baggage?

It’s about converting energy from low to high vibration.

Photo by ROCCO STOPPOLONI on Unsplash

First, an apology. I’ve written over 500 articles on all manner of spiritual topics but have yet to tackle arguably the most important concept of all.

What is this super-important concept? It can be described in one word, which I’ll get to.

Before doing so, we need to summarize the path to liberation, as taught by my favorite teacher, Michael Singer. There are several ways to express the path to liberation; this is just the one that makes the most sense to me.

Our natural state is clear and present

The starting point of any expression of the path is this: We’re already there! That high state of being is our natural state.

So what the heck happened? If this wondrous state exists within us, why are we all so uptight and “off” so much of the time?

It’s because starting in our youngest years, we had experiences that we either really liked, so we clung to them and want them to repeat, or really didn’t like, so we resisted them. In both of those scenarios, we held onto those experiences.

That manifests inside as energy. Stuck energy, unfortunately.

How stuck energy runs our lives

Why unfortunately? Because that stuck energy, which collectively comprises the ego, runs and ruins our lives. How?

Let’s take a difficult experience. Let’s say you were madly in love with your first girlfriend in college. She’s all you thought about, day and night. Month after month.

Then one day, out of nowhere, she dumps you. You’re in shock. But the next day it gets exponentially worse. You find out through the grapevine that she’s been cheating on you for most of your relationship.

Your world is shattered. Unsurprisingly, this experience leaves you with oodles of that stuck energy I mentioned above.

Never trusting women again

And how does that stuck energy run and ruin your life for years thereafter? You find it nearly impossible to trust any woman in a relationship. You want to, but that energy down below is simply too strong and won’t allow it.

So that’s why we’re all some level of crazy. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there’s something we can do about it. Something very few people do because they don’t even know what the problem is in the first place!

And that something we can do is let go. Which is a pretty big deal, right? Why, you might ask?

The logic of it all

Think of the logical progression. The natural state we start off with is liberated. Enlightened. Then we have myriad experiences that we hold on to that manifest as stuck energy that runs and ruins our lives.

Well, what happens if we let go of that energy? In the inimitable words of the great singer Maxine Nightingale,

“We’re gonna get right back to where we started from…”

And where we started from is precisely where we want to be. Clear. Present. Our consciousness able to experience life as it was meant to: Not distracted by our minds.

How to let go

How do we let go of stuck energy, AKA emotional, egoic baggage? When that baggage is poked or stirred, Michael Singer teaches us first, what not to do, which is either suppress it (“Oh, he didn’t mean to hurt me when he slapped me in the face for the third time this week.”) or express it by grabbing a butcher’s knife and trying to stab your wrong-doer.

What we need to do is relax, lean away from the feeling and do our best to simply observe it.

Some of you may be thinking right now,

“He’s written about the letting go thing many times. I don’t get what’s new here.”

What’s new is this concept I mentioned at the outset that I should have written about years ago. Why is this concept so vital to the spiritual path?

Because it explains what actually happens when we let go.

What is that concept? In a word…

Transmutation.

Ding, ding, ding. There it is.

What it is transmutation? To change something’s nature or condition into something else.

What we’re interested in is the transmutation of energy, specifically the emotional energy/Samskaras we’ve held onto. Here’s how my AI pal describes that:

“Transmuting energy is the conscious process of changing one emotional or energetic state into another, often transforming negative emotions like anger or anxiety into positive, constructive, or higher-vibrational outcomes.”

So when a low-vibrational emotion like anger is stoked inside us, what Singer is saying is that merely sitting with it, observing it and not suppressing or expressing it, allows that energy to transmute from low to high-vibration.

The solar energy analogy

Here’s an analogy given me by my brilliant friend Dr. Dan Fisher, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University.

[A personal aside having nothing to do with this article about what a good guy he is/was: We took a class together in my major, history. He took it pass/fail and I took it regular graded. He told me he got a C (passing). I ended up with a B-. Ten years later he told me he’d actually gotten an A! He didn’t have the heart to tell me then. Twenty years after we graduated, he was an usher in my wedding. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.]

Here’s Dan’s analogy. Think of solar energy. It consists of dangerous, electromagnetic radiation emanating from the sun. That energy enters your rooftop solar panel made of photovoltaic cells which transmute that energy into electricity which then allows you to play Mozart throughout your home.

The long and the short of it is that this letting go thing I’ve written about all these years is about transmuting negative, stuck energy into higher-vibration, positive energy.

Can I prove this scientifically? Others probably could, but I hated chemistry and never even took physics.

The bottom line for me is that a) it makes sense, and b) this concept has, in some form or other, been taught for thousands of years in Eastern spiritual traditions. That’s good enough for me.

What’s in it for you

As always, though, we have to pose the question: Why should this matter to you?

I’ll answer that by relating why it matters to me. And why Mickey’s talk about transmutation pricked up my ears.

The basic thrust of these teachings is that we accumulate stuck energies/Samskaras throughout our lives and unless we let them go, our lives will always be a struggle. That being the case, letting go is the most important, salutary endeavor we humans can pursue.

But here’s the thing: Letting go has always seemed amorphous and fuzzy to me. So anything I come across that helps explain that invaluable process in more concrete terms is of paramount importance to me.

Transmutation helps me clarify what is actually happening when I let go of emotional baggage which I think, and hope, will improve my ability to do so.

I hope that makes sense.