Letting go of expectations - a reflection for the autumn equinox

Welcoming Prayer

Make yourself comfortable...

Close your eyes...

Feel and sink into what you are experiencing this moment in your body...

Welcome it... 

Let it go, gently.  

Let go of desires for security or control or anything else. 

Let go. 

Autumn is the season of letting go. As the trees let go of their leaves to conserve their energy over the winter, how can we do the same? What can we let go of to make room for nurturing the seeds of new growth, ready to sprout when the cycle begins again in the spring? Every year at around this time I try to spend some time in quiet reflection on this. This year I am thinking about letting go of expectations. 

One of my guilty pleasures is watching 'And Just Like That' – the sequel series to the nineties/noughties 'Sex and the City' – about the complicated relationships of a group of female friends in New York. In a recent episode, the main character, Carrie, sells her apartment, which she has lived in for decades, to please her boyfriend (because he's also her ex-boyfriend who won't go in her apartment because of what happened there with her ex-husband – told you it was complicated!) 

Anyway, she throws a “Last Supper” party with all her friends to say farewell to the place. During the dinner she asks them to say something that they would like to let go of – one word only. The words include:  rules, competitiveness, nervousness, control, distrust, yesterday, regret, guilt, fear, possessiveness, limits. Most of these words had a context within the storylines of the characters, but it's also a pretty good list of things I have struggled with letting go of at some point or another. I wonder what resonates with you from the list?

The word Carrie chooses is 'expectations' and she adds (therefore breaking her own rule), “To be clear, I'm not talking about having dreams, or wanting something to happen, it's so important; I'm talking about assuming that things will go the way we think they should, for whatever reason, because you never know what tomorrow will bring, and it might be greater than anything you ever expected.” 

In Carrie's case, what tomorrow then brings is her boyfriend asking her to press pause on their relationship for five years while he goes away to look after his troubled teenage son. This is so unexpected and she realizes that letting go of expectations is much harder than it seems.

I have noticed recently that when things have gone wrong it's often because people have had different expectations about how something should go, but haven't been able to communicate them until it's too late to rescue the situation. Perhaps that's sometimes because we are not even aware of what our expectations are – until we realize that they haven't been met. 

Having some expectations in life is of course helpful. There is nothing new under the sun, says Ecclesiastes. If we never expected the sun to rise in the morning or set at night, we would go through life being constantly surprised and completely unprepared for everything! 

Our expectations are influenced by our upbringing, our cultural conditioning, and our life experience. There is nothing new under the sun. We keep coming back to the same things. But just as the sun's trajectory across the sky is never quite the same from one day to the next, the trajectory of our days is never quite the same. The next time we spiral around, we are not quite in the same place. Letting go is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process, in the ongoing spiral journey of life. There is always more letting go, more growing, more healing, to be done.

We can consciously work on identifying and letting go of those expectations that are not helpful. I have recently experienced this in my spiritual practice. A while ago, I came across Centering Prayer, developed by Father Thomas Keating, which he described as “a receptive method of silent prayer in which we experience God's presence within us; a method to prepare us to receive the gift of contemplative prayer, or “resting in God” as Gregory the Great described it in the 6th century.”

Centering Prayer is a very simple practice, in which you sit quietly, then choose a sacred word, such as Love or Peace, and keep bringing your focus back to that word when you notice your mind wandering. I tried it a few times, found it very frustrating, and decided I wasn't doing it right and it wasn't for me. So I stopped. After a few months, I came across the practice of Welcoming Prayer, which can be practised just before settling in to Centering Prayer. By combining the two, I realised I was holding on too tight to my expectations of how my meditation was supposed to go. Once I began to let go of my expectations I was able to engage with it again, and it has now become a regular practice that I value.  

Centering Prayer by Keith Kristich, 

“In letting go of thoughts and thinking, we sink into Deep Mind. 

In letting go of emotion and feeling, we sink into Deep Heart. 

In letting go of action and doing, we sink into Being. 

In letting go of self and other, we sink into God. 

In letting go of letting go, we recognize that we were never holding on. 

We’ve always and only ever been held.” Amen.