The fear of letting go

Transcripts were done with AI and may contain a few minor edits for readability (removed filler words and repeated words). Enjoy!

—

**Jump to a moment:**

[01:59] The fear of letting go
[05:59] Why we chase specific goals
[09:18] Take the energy, let go of the result
[11:25] You can’t have an optimistic future without letting go of the past
[13:52] The paradox of the present moment
[16:39] What meditation actually taught me
[20:38] We are always present, just not always here
[23:38] Closing thoughts

—

**DAVID**

Hello, this is the first episode of The Pattern Room podcast, and I’m David, and I’m the host. I don’t know exactly what to expect from this podcast. I have an idea, I have a business in mind, I have questions. But for today’s episode, I have some notes, some questions, and a topic, and I think that’s good enough. So we’re just going to start.

The topic of today’s episode, the first episode, is the fear of letting go, and how to be present, how to be in the here and now. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see that I have a Kindle Scribe, and I’m taking notes on it, and I’ll look at it from time to time.

I wanted to start the podcast with this topic because, from my work and from what I notice, we as a society are struggling a lot with staying present, with being in the moment. People have the ability to be present, but not in the moment, and we’re going to discuss that later in the episode. I think it’s a very, very powerful idea, and it’s worth starting with.

**[01:59]**

People are afraid of letting go, both of the past and of the future. When I say they’re afraid of letting go of their past, they’re afraid of letting go of their identity, because everything you did so far in your life creates who you are right now: your thinking process, your behavior, your knowledge. Everything that you are right now, your identity, is built through every moment of your past, whether you’re aware of it or not.

People are also afraid of letting go of their future. That’s where the goals come into play, the vision that we have, the expectations that we have. Everything related to the future comes into play, and we’re afraid of letting go of that because, without our future, there is no meaning to our life in a way, because if there’s no future, then why am I living? What am I living for?

People are afraid of letting go of the future because then they’ll struggle to find meaning in the present moment. And they’re afraid of letting go of the past because if they let go of it, they have to let go of that identity, and without that identity, there is no control over who they are. If you let go of who you think you are, then who are you? That’s the question you’re going to have to answer when you decide to let go of the past.

**[03:21]**

At least, that’s how this idea of letting go has been promoted in the society we’re living in, because letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. I think people mistake these two ideas: that as soon as you let go, you also have to forget. If you let go of your past, you have to forget your past. If you let go of your future, you have to forget your future. But it doesn’t work like that.

To let go means to create enough space in the present moment that the information you have from the past, or the vision you have for the future, doesn’t drive the present moment. Because you create that space, you allow yourself to live in the present as it is, not written through some rules of the past or some rules of the future. You stay in the present moment while also knowing there’s a past and knowing there will be a future, but you don’t let them overwrite what is happening right now. That doesn’t mean you have to forget them. It means you have to accept that the past is the past and the future is the future, even though that sounds as simple as it is.

**[05:20]**

But we struggle putting that into practice. We use the past to live in the present moment, and we’re not living in the present moment anymore. We use the future to fuel the present moment, and by doing that, we’re not living in the present anymore either. We’re living in a present with the lenses of our future, and we’re living in the present with the memories of our past. That’s what’s happening.

**[05:59]**

I think when it comes to the future, people are obsessed with this idea that they want something very, very specific in their lives. We’re obsessed with setting a goal and then achieving that goal with no flexibility whatsoever. We’re not looking for a flexible apartment, a flexible home, a flexible job, a flexible car. I want a Ferrari, I want a Porsche, I want a Tesla, I want an apartment with two rooms, with three rooms, I want a specific phone, I want to go to this specific country, I want to meet these kinds of people, and so on.

From one point of view, it makes sense, because you want your life to look a certain way. We’re all doing this: because of the way we imagine our life in the future, we connect that to a goal, and through that goal we try to reach that moment in the future. But what if you don’t really need that future you imagine? You don’t really know what you will need. You know what you need right now, and based on what you don’t have right now, you create this idea in your mind connected to the future. You say, hey, I don’t have these things in the present moment, so let’s try to have them somewhere in the future.

But what if, in that future you’re referring to, you won’t need them? Maybe you don’t even need them right now. But because you think you need them, you build this whole idea in your mind and try to make it part of your reality. We’re all doing that.

**[08:32]**

But what if we tried to be a bit more flexible? What if, if you will need a car in the future, you’ll get a car, the car that will help you get to where you need to go? What if you will need a house, then you’ll get a house, an apartment, a place to live? Maybe you won’t need an actual place to live, but you’ll need this idea of having a place you’d call home, and it may not even be your own place. Let’s try to create some flexibility when it comes to this future we imagine.

**[09:18]**

From the goals we set ourselves, let’s only take the energy out of them, and put that energy into the present moment. That should be the most important thing. Because when we set a goal connected to an image we have in our minds about the future, we create a whole lot of good and positive energy in our bodies. That’s what we should focus on: how good it makes you feel to see yourself traveling, to see yourself owning that car, to see yourself having the house. Focus on that, but then let go of the actual result, and let life bring you whatever it is you’ll actually need in that moment, not what you think you will need.

Because through that imagined need for the future, you disconnect yourself from the present moment. And the more goals you have, and the more strict you are about these goals connected to the future, the more disconnected you become from the present moment.

**[10:25]**

It goes the same for the past and the memories we have. The more you hold on to all these experiences, all this whatever happened to you in the past, the more you will live in that past, and the less you’ll live in the present moment.

**[11:06]**

Somewhere between 2023 and 2025, for almost two years, I researched optimism, and that will be the topic of another episode. But the thing I discovered, and it came with a lot of value, sounds like this:

**[11:25]**

If you don’t let go of the experiences of the past, you can’t have an optimistic future. If you don’t let go of your traumas, you can’t have an optimistic future. It makes a lot of sense. But even though I learned this, and spent a lot of time with this idea, it’s very, very difficult to let go of the past.

**[11:57]**

It’s difficult because of the emotional weight the past has, and that makes the past feel more valuable than the present or the future. People want to go back to their past because there’s emotional familiarity there, even though it hurts. They know that emotion so well that they want to go there. They’ve been hurt, they’ve been struggling, they’ve been failing, and those experiences carry emotions so familiar that people want to return to them. I’m doing it, and I’m guessing you’re doing it too. We’re more likely to spend a lot of time in our past because of these familiar emotions.

**[12:57]**

It’s way easier to stay in the familiar pain of the past than to try to find stillness in the present moment, or even to envision the future and stay in the discomfort of the unknown. It’s way easier to stay in the past.

Looking at my notes, I think that’s what I wanted to share about staying in the present moment, and about exploring these ideas of past and future and why they carry so much weight. I have some questions I’d like to read from my notes and explore live, here in the podcast.

**[13:52]**

The first question sounds like this: what happens in the present that we run away from it so fast and so far?

**[14:05]**

My simple answer is that in the present moment, two things are happening: both everything and also nothing. And because of that, we run away from the present moment. It’s a paradox.

**[14:29]**

When I say everything happens, I mean everything happens in the present moment, because everything is here now. There is nothing two hours ago, two minutes ago, two seconds ago. There’s also nothing two hours from now. There’s nothing. Everything is here now.

At the same time, in the present moment, nothing happens, because we have all these concepts in our minds that there should be some action, some goal, something bigger that should happen. And nothing like that happens. That’s the paradox. There’s both everything and nothing at the same time in the present moment, and we don’t know how to deal with that. There’s no formula, no secret, no method for dealing with something and nothing at the same time.

Because we don’t understand that, we don’t understand how to create space for nothing to manifest and, at the same time, for everything to exist in that same space. We can try to go to that space and create it through stillness and through meditation, and that goes to the second question. The struggle is that while we’re in the process of meditation, we’re creating that space, and as soon as we step out of the meditation, we’re not creating it anymore.

**[16:20]**

The second question was: how do we go back to the present moment? Because we’re so disconnected from it, and we need to go back there. Meditation is one of the answers. Breathing is another. Nature is another.

**[16:39]**

When it comes to meditation, I did some. I engaged with the process at the end of 2023, and until summer 2024, for around five or six months, I was doing it almost daily, at least five days a week. I did it with the guided sessions from Joe Dispenza, the blessings of the energy centers. If you’ve heard of them, that’s great. If you haven’t, I recommend doing some research on that topic.

I believe it helped me a lot. I got to solve, if that’s the proper word, some of the impulsivity I was dealing with at the time.

**[17:44]**

The most valuable insight I got from those five, six months of meditation was this: if you’ve meditated before, you know that when you start, you little by little notice how you have more and more thoughts disconnecting you from that moment, from that process of meditation. Through that disconnection, you might think, hey, I’m doing even worse at this thing of being present, maybe I should stop meditating. The more disconnecting thoughts you have, the more you start thinking about the future or the past during meditation, the more you’re inclined to think, okay, I’m not good at this, I’m not good at meditating.

**[18:43]**

But the insight I had was this: the more you discover, or the more you become aware of these thoughts, the better. Let’s say before you had only two thoughts per minute, and now, in the process of meditation, you have twenty thoughts per minute. If that’s what’s happening, then you’re doing a better job of being aware of your thoughts, which means you’re more connected to the present moment, because guess what: all your thoughts are happening in the present moment.

**[19:16]**

That’s the bump all of us hit when it comes to meditation, because all of a sudden we become aware of what’s going on in our minds, and we have to deal with that.

**[19:34]**

Dealing with it means going through it. There’s no avoiding it. And the more you practice, the easier it becomes to shift into being present.

**[20:38]**

I have another note, about a paradox I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, and it goes like this: we are always present, but we are not always present here and now. When we go somewhere in the future, in that imagined future, we are present. When we remember the past, in that memory of the past, we are present. We have the ability to be present. We just have to channel it toward the right thing, which is the present moment. That’s the idea, and that’s the paradox: we believe we don’t have the skill, we believe we have to train the skill. And while training is an important part of the process, and the more time we spend with it, the better we’ll become at staying present, there’s no doubt about that.

I also believe we already have the ability to be present, because as soon as I talk about, say, this mouse I’m holding in my hand right now, and then I think about laptops, and then about technology, I am present in whatever I’m thinking about. I’m not present in the idea of the mouse anymore, but I’m present in all these other things.

**[22:03]**

The question is: where is it that I want to be present? If we’re talking about life, and how we live our lives, the present moment is the best moment to be present in, because that’s the only one that exists, the only one that’s part of reality. We only have what’s called here and now. We don’t have the future, we don’t have the past. They don’t exist. The mind, and the way it’s built, creates these constructs so we can properly engage with reality, so we can have an identity, so we can have a vision for the future, so we can get energy from that and navigate reality properly. Yes, we need all that, but it doesn’t mean it’s real.

**[22:54]**

The mind creates them so we can navigate reality. It’s as simple as that.

**[23:01]**

And realizing that you have a skill, that you have the skill of being present, you just need to redirect it to the here and now. I think that refrain should create the awareness that you’re capable, and should also give you the opportunity to notice that there’s already this space where you’re present. You just have to redirect it, and put in that space the thing you want to be present in. From my point of view, that should be the here and now. That should be the present moment.

**[23:38]**

That’s all I had to share with you in this first episode. I hope you found it valuable, and I hope you found something interesting in this short episode.

**[23:51]**

I’m going to record a second one, a third one, and so on. I’m also going to try to find some guests for this podcast. I have a big vision for this podcast and the business behind it. So if you liked it, if you listened to it, just hit me up on social media, wherever you find me. I’m either at Magister Coach or at David The Optimist, and just send me some feedback. It can be something like “that was cool, I learned something from it, here’s what I learned,” or “I didn’t like that, and here’s why.”

So that was it for the episode. Thank you for listening, and you’ll be hearing again from me in the next episode.

**[24:45]**

Have a great, great, great day. Bye bye.