The Triple C Project

Don't Be Afraid of Letting Go : Detachment Will Set You Free

• Ryan Spence • Season 2 • Episode 117

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What do your goals, yoga, and the actor Jackie Chan have in common?

Find out in this week's episode, which is all about the art of letting go.

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Speaker 1:

But actually, is that healthy? Is that the best way of getting what it is that you want? You're listening to the Triple C Project. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live like lit. I'm your host, ryan Spence, the Big Law Dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip-hop and big, hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want, and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now we're friends. I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat and allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit.

Speaker 1:

Hey, hey, welcome to episode 117 of the Triple C Project. Woo, I've got something to talk about today. Before we get into it. Uh, let's give you some updates. So the the upcoming book, the triple C project. It has a release date. It is now available for pre-order on Amazon and it will be released on the 17th of November, that's Sunday, the 17th of November. So you can go ahead over to Amazon and pre-order now at the pre-order price, because the price will go up shortly after release. So if you want to get in there and get yourself a good deal, then go ahead to your local Amazon store and pre-order now. And if you're sitting on the fence thinking I'm not sure, if I want to pre-order, I'm not quite sure what the book's about.

Speaker 1:

First of all, you listen to this podcast. If you listen to this podcast, then the book is definitely something that you're going to be into. Otherwise you wouldn't be here. But because I'm a generous guy, you can still grab a free chapter of the book. Um, if you head to my website, I am Ryan Spencecom uh, there'll be a link there or a pop-up and you just pop in your email address and you will be sent the introductory chapter, uh, to the book, which will set the tone. Um, and let you know this is a book for me and I need to go ahead and pre-order my copy. Pre-order is great for us writers because it just helps to helps in this world of algorithms. It kind of helps to kind of show the algorithm that people are interested in the book and allows more people to find the book. So if you have an even an inkling, um, that this book might be for you, if you listen to this podcast. If you have read any of the things that I've written, if you love the first book, please, please, um, don't wait till it's out. Go ahead and pre-order, um, and, uh, help a brother out, it'd be much appreciated.

Speaker 1:

Uh, next thing, uh, yoga, as you, as you well, actually you don't know because I haven't told you this, but I have or what you do know is that obviously I've been teaching again this year, loving it really re-energized me, and I'm bringing my yoga teaching and coaching. I'm trying to bring them closer and closer together and make create this kind of cohesive ball of methods of bringing awareness, clarity, confidence, courage all of that good stuff to people. Um, movement, breath, mindset, all of that, um. But I've also, um signed up to do my next level of teacher training, my 300 hour teacher training. Uh, I'm just over two weeks into it and, man, I love it. I love learning. I'm so curious. I just like, just want to take all of this stuff in, just go sit in a cave somewhere and just shut out distractions and take it all in. Unfortunately, I don't have that luxury, but it's great. I'm taking in stuff, I'm applying it in lessons week by week, doing it bit by bit. It's fantastic. One of the things that I've been wanting to do this year since I had this regular class. I got this regular class teaching at Open House, which is literally the highlight of my week is I want to teach more, and trying to find a way to teach more with everything else that I've got going on and finding that time is a bit of a challenge, but I finally sorted out my Zen Den here where I record the podcast, amongst other things, and I am now teaching online.

Speaker 1:

I have a weekly class 45 minutes, 12 o'clock to 1245 UK time, so that's a lunchtime class here in the UK to just get you out of that midweek slump, you know, get the body moving, get the blood flowing, get you, bring you down to some stillness, get you feeling calm and reconnected with yourself, and I'm really excited about building a community around this. So I would love you to join me. Join me for that class class if you're in the UK. It's the perfect way to break up the week. It's in the midweek slump, you know. Rather than sitting and having lunch at your desk because you're overworked and overstressed and staring at your emails, take some time for yourself away from the screen and, trust me, your body, on your mind and your soul are really going to thank you for it. And if you're in Asia and Singapore or Hong Kong, it's kind of towards your dinner time, so you could get a practice in just before dinner or maybe have an early dinner and get a practice in afterwards, and if you're in the in the US and the Eastern time zone, it's a perfect way to start your day. So, wherever you are in the world, this is a beauty of teaching online. You can attend and you can become a part of what I am hoping is going to be a beautiful community of lawyers, corporate professionals, people who just need to get off the hamster wheel for a moment and dedicate some time to themselves, to taking care of their mind, their body and their breath, and their breath and their soul. Uh. So I hope to see you there. Head to IamRyanSpencecom. Slash yoga for all their deets. How to book times of classes, um, and yeah, who knows? Um, over the coming months there may be more classes added, depending upon how the community grows. So really excited to see you on the mat, cool.

Speaker 1:

So today's topic is kind of there's a yoga influence to it a little bit. So there's a quote that is often talked about in yoga. So there's a, I guess, a preeminent yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita I can't speak today which anyone who's in a 200 hour yoga teacher training is kind of required reading. I won't go into what the book is about too much now, maybe I'll do that in a later episode. But there was a quote that is often attributed to the book which is about yoga, and that quote is yoga is the journey of the self to the self through the self, and I actually use that quote in my chapter of my book, and that journey is a journey related to finding a place of peaceful indifference.

Speaker 1:

So this journey to yourself is about finding yourself, who is universal consciousness, and in that journey to yourself you shed things along the way and you find this beautiful space of peaceful indifference where it's about detachment, not attachment. So you're not trying to find and attach to a particular thing or feeling. You're literally trying to shed everything and just detach, and that is the ultimate consciousness. You can get quite deep here and yeah, as I said, I've been doing this training, so I'm getting deep into the philosophy, but that's kind of where I wanted to come at for today's episode. Is this concept really of detachment, of letting go, because sometimes we can hold on so tight to something that it starts to take over, uh, and the thing that we loved then becomes the thing that, if we don't hate, is the thing that causes us the most amount of stress and grief. Um, and that's no way to live.

Speaker 1:

So I share a story um this week and the email, the email I sent to my email list Um, if you're not on my email list, you need to get on it. I'm going to start getting better at sharing more there and less on social media, as I, as I kind of find alternative ways to connect with people that that energize me, um, and sort of reduce my social media, um, my social media use time, shall we say? Um, so get on that email list. Uh, head to Iamryanspencecom and sign up and, um, you'll be kept in the loop anyway, slightly, of course.

Speaker 1:

So the story I was talking about is it's about a video I saw when I was scrolling through social media. I think it might have been Facebook, which I rarely do, actually, but recently I think it was Facebook because you know even, yeah, I'm a coach and I know I know kind of all the things about intention and um, and I'm a yoga teacher as well, but I mean still human. You know, sometimes you just want to scroll, um, and it's intentional, it's like, yeah, I like I literally just want to scroll now, like I know I'm not really doing it productive, but that's fine, um. So I was in one of those intentional moments of just scrolling through my um social media and in doing that, uh, I came across a video of um the actor, a martial arts expert, jackie Chan. Um, if you've ever seen Jackie Chan movie, jackie Chan is just, he's just epic. Um. And if you've ever seen the movie rush hour, um with Chris Tucker, um, the two of them together um, make a really good team in that. Um, in that.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, this was, I don't know, this must have been a good few years ago, but he was on. Jackie Chan was on this game show and he was kind of showing off well, not showing off, he was exhibiting his martial arts prowess by breaking through 12 concrete blocks with his bare hands. So if you know anything about martial arts, you've probably seen something like this before, where someone goes up, they kind of get into the zone and then they just, with their bare fists punch through wood, concrete, whatever, without injury, and it's very, very impressive and it kind of shows the power, in some sense, of the power of the mind. I guess is what is one way of putting it? Um, so, but in this particular um clip this exhibition in the hand that he was punching through the blocks with he was holding an egg, right, okay. So imagine this open up your hands, imagine you've got an egg in your hand, and then roll your hand up into a fist, okay, trying not to crack the egg. Okay, that in itself could be quite challenging. Now then imagine taking that fist with the egg in your hand and punching down into a concrete block, into something hard. What do you think is going to happen? Well, if it was me, the egg's going to crack, right, because the combination of squeezing your hand into a fist and then the force of punching down into a hard surface, surely the egg is going to break. But that isn't what happened.

Speaker 1:

He finished his performance, opened his hands and that egg was still intact. It wasn't cracked. He did show that it was a real egg by cracking it at the end. So it wasn't like hard boiled or a toy egg or a dummy or anything like that. It was a real egg, but it was intact. And it was quite amazing because, as I just sort of tried to illustrate to you through that imagery, you'd expect that, to break through those blocks, the force that was needed and to protect his fingers by creating a tight enough fist the egg would crack because he'd be squeezing too hard. But the fact is, in order to create the force to achieve the goal, he didn't need to squeeze that hard.

Speaker 1:

And that's kind of what got me thinking, in conjunction with, um, the philosophy that I've been looking into as part of my um 300 hour yoga teacher training um, this concept of letting go, because sometimes you can want something. You probably think about something that you've wanted really, really bad. Um, you know, whatever it is, whether it's a it's it's a particular gift, whether it's a promotion, it is, whether it's a particular gift, whether it's a promotion, whether it's a particular opportunity that you're desperate to come your way, that you're trying to achieve, and there's this kind of fine line between being focused on the thing and then allowing the thing to basically take you over, take you over to consume your every waking moment, to the point where you become so laser focused. You have this tunnel vision, to the point of rigidity that you just can't see anything that's beyond this thing you're trying to achieve. You're almost obsessed with it, and it's kind of how we're conditioned. In a way. It's kind of like if you want something bad enough, you've got to give it your all. I mean, everything you've been told to this point is you've got to hustle harder, you've got to grab hold of that thing a little bit tighter. I mean hold on to it. But actually, is that healthy? Is that the best way of getting what it is that you want? Because in the process of becoming so consumed by this thing, you fail to notice everything around you. You neglect your friend, your family, your health in pursuit of the thing, and the thing that you thought was going to make you happy, was going to make you successful, is actually the thing that does the complete opposite. It's the thing that makes you start to lose yourself, and so I was thinking about this in relation to a couple of things really.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, when I was in big law and knowing it wasn't right for me, but also feeling I had to cling on to this prestigious career because what else was I going to do, and it was only once I let go, I guess, let go of the idea of what it meant, let go of the identity of being a lawyer, of that being who I am, and really kind of started to figure out who I actually was. I mean, I wasn't this job, I wasn't this career, it was just something that I did. And once I started to detach from what that meant, I started to see myself and my life more clearly. I started to see myself and my life more clearly and even if I had decided to stay in big law, I would have done it completely differently to how I'd been doing it to that point. I wouldn't have been so attached to what that meant to other people. It would have been this is the job that I do, but I am all of these other things. This is not who I am, um, I mean. So ultimately, yes, I decided to to walk away, but that could have been another way that I could have done it, because approaching it from a sense of detachment would have just may reduce the reduced, the stress, made it a lot more, a lot easier really to be in that world. I also was thinking about it in relation to this podcast, funnily enough. Um.

Speaker 1:

So I had a couple of weeks where I just didn't put an episode out and I was really sort of soul searching about whether I wanted to continue doing the podcast. I'd started the podcast to promote my first book and the idea was that it had to be easy, like I had to do it because it was easy and it felt good. And if at any point it didn't, then I would reevaluate. So I had a little period of the last couple of weeks where I was sort of thinking you know, do I really want to do this? And again I got to a place of detachment.

Speaker 1:

I started off thinking you have to do it. You've committed to this. This is kind of what you need to do. It's a very important part of your business, of what you're trying to achieve, of the message that you're trying to share. You can't possibly give it up. And so there was a part of me that was very much kind of clinging on to you have to do this. But then I realised that but it's that obligation that is actually not making this fun for me anymore. And the whole point of this is that it had to be fun, it had to be easy. Okay, yeah, it's not always fun, but I mean, it definitely didn't need to be making me sort of miserable and stressing me out. And so I actually got to a point where I was like you know what, I'm going to let it go, maybe I'll just not do it anymore.

Speaker 1:

And once I did that, once I released the grip on this thing that I had to do, I became lighter and I could breathe this sigh of relief and then I could approach the whole process a whole lot differently, with a clearer head, you know, with greater insight. And that's why I'm recording this episode today, because I was like, actually, yeah, I'm good, I'm going to do it, but I'm going to, I'm going to reevaluate, um, I'm going to do it in a way that feels good, but at the same time, if I decide it's not working, then I can quite easily let it go. And I think that's the thing is. I'm at a place where I like doing it. I hope that you find some value from it as well. That's why I do it, but it doesn't define me. So if I decide I'm not going to do it anymore, I don't have to do it anymore.

Speaker 1:

And sidebar, the funny thing is is that before I recorded this episode, I kind of went to just look at the stats for the last week just to kind of see, I mean, what the download numbers were and that kind of thing. And there were a ton of downloads over a hundred downloads in the last week, even though an episode hasn't been released for a couple of weeks. So people are finding it, people are listening and there's a body of work there that I've created that, even if I decided to stop today, people could still gain value from and they still would have done what I set out to do when I created this podcast. So that's just two examples from from my own life where, detaching from the outcome I mean letting go of the thing not holding on too tight, um, to kind of how things, how I thought things should be or what I thought I should do, and kind of loosening the grip has allowed me to just feel a little bit more free and to gain a little bit more clarity and ultimately, to have a little bit more fun. Have a little bit more fun.

Speaker 1:

And so, going back to Jackie Chan and the egg and the fist and the breaking of the concrete blocks a question I have for you, or what I kind of guess I'd like to leave you with is, as you think about something that you want, that you're trying to achieve, that you're trying to make happen, that you're putting a lot of effort, a lot of your heart and soul into, if you feel that it's taking over and you have very little time to think about or to do anything else, I'd like you to think about this what if, like Jackie Chan, you just loosened your grip a little bit, you didn't hold on so tight? What if you softened your focus? Rather than staring like a laser at this thing that's in front of you, you just softened your gaze a little bit and allowed your periphery vision to come into play? What might you see that you'd be missing? What other options or opportunities or ideas might present themselves to you? What support might they be, what people might be there who could help you?

Speaker 1:

Because when we let go a little bit, when we don't hold on so tight, we create a little space for other things to appear, for other things to happen, for other people to enter in, and that can actually help us get to where we're going quicker and in a way that's more sustainable than if we just do it all ourselves. Hold on tight and don't let go. So that's what I'd like to leave you with this week Don't be afraid of letting go, don't be afraid of loosening your grip. I saw something on Instagram recently about the concept of giving 80% rather than a hundred all the time, leaving a little bit of space for rest, for recuperation, for inspiration, for blue sky, thinking I mean just space, just leaving that space, because within that space, things can occur. Things can happen. You'll see things that you didn't know were there, see things that will make you think, hmm, maybe there is another way of doing things. Okay, I can riff on this for who knows how long, but I'm going to leave it there. So don't be afraid of letting go. That's all from me this week.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for being here and until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Stop living life of lethargy. Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C Project. In the spirit of the Triple C, here's three things that you can do to support the show Head to ratethispodcastcom, slash tripleC or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how the show can help them. Second thing you can do share, share this episode, share a previous episode with a friend, someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this here. Show and number three head to IamRyanSpencecom. Get on the mailing list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to my new book start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life lit.