SESSION 1: The Art of Letting Go: A New Approach. 

The Next Big Thing – Chasing it or Being it?

Everyone chases the Next Big Thing, with its promise of finding more money, more free time, more quality of life. But we chase it with our last breath, the only ones profiting being those who sell that thing. Ask the hard questions. Seeing Life through the filters, you need more than the filters if you want to see clearly what is before you.

• A few people make things happen
• A few more watch things happen
• And most wonder what happened

Emotional Shielding – Maintaining Your Balance

Let’s be honest, this past year was non-stop in curve balls, uncertainty, and outright anger. Why wait until then to know how to shield yourself? So let’s practice keeping our center before the storm. Even on good days, the practice I’ll share with you will help in maintaining mental balance when incredible things are coming your way, followed by ….crickets… and your hunger for that, you guessed it, Next Big Thing. You won’t believe how easy and hands on this technique is.

• As you think, so you become.
• When the mind is still, you are present.

SESSION 2: The Understanding of Letting Go.

The Past is Dust – The Art of Letting Go

Don’t let half-baked truisms become your aphorisms – question everything. Both emotions and logic can work quickly but intuition works instantly – you just look at something and you know it. Self-reliance builds intuition. Let go of the old ways of doing things. If they don’t work and you’re still doing them, that’s self-sabotage. And if you have had some success, it is possible that whatever got you here won’t get you “There”.

• The Place You Want to Be isn’t one you go to or come from, It’s simply a place you are.
• Atonement is found in making better choices in the future.

Logic & Emotions – Both Have Their Place

To be called a logical person is a compliment. To be called emotional usually isn’t. Logic tells us what should be correct. But emotions tell us what is important. Knowing what is important to me… seems important. Thought and feeling can move slowly or quickly. But Seeing knows instantly. Taking our practice of emotional shielding, we can control our up/down oscillation on the sine wave of chasing pleasure and avoiding pain. We can move toward that constant, main axis of Acquiescence, using the same technique as shown before. Accept what comes. When it is time to let it go, let it go. Rather than saying, “I am sad” say, “I feel sad”. If you are sad, you now become the story, one without end. If you feel sad, it is only for a time and when that time is done, you let it go. You did not come here to feel sad all of your life. And being manic is also a swing. Go for the constancy of accepting whatever you are sent as part of what you need.

• There are some stories best read by the heart, not the mind.
• Others to be experienced more than understood.
• Each emotion has its own breath, coming and going in its own time.

SESSION 3: The Meaning of Letting Go. 

Do What You Love Because You Love It, Winning Will Take Care of Itself

When you are Present, you are inside the eternity of a single moment. In a place where time stands still, you don’t change. You stop identifying with the parts of you that change. You simply observe what’s going on without judgement. You don’t use your memory to tell you what you know, but your intuition. You know what you need to know when you need to know it, and afterward, you just let it go. When you experience this in a moment of epiphany or transformation, your sense of passing time changes. Other reference points in life also change. Staying in that Observer mode of non-judging, non-grasping, you are naturally Detached, without effort. Because you are in the Space you created for that purpose. You feel fewer desires because they are associated with change and stimulation, things you feel less drawn to in contrast to the sublime. It’s not about wrestling with your ego, your lower nature or anything else; it’s about letting go. Here and Now, you are within all the probability waves, at the crossroads of decision. By choosing, you collapse one of the possibilities and move in the desired direction. Or you can stay in a state of potential, which feels like a very powerful place because it is.

• Your will is free until it acts.
• Then it will surf the causal wave it sets in motion and that is where karma begins.
• It is with intention that we do anything.

The Impossible Now – Standing Inside the Eternity of a Single Moment

Single-minded attention narrows your focus like a laser and expands the “now” toward infinity. That gives your thoughts more power. They manifest in greater numbers and you see more synchronicities. Being Present makes it hard to process information linearly. When Present, you are non-linear, taking in the whole enchilada in a moment. Trying to apply non-linear perception to a linear world that deals with time has surprising drawbacks; you perceive patterns instead of steps and intuit their relationships and meaning all at once. The more Still we are, in that Impossible Now between what comes next and what is turning to dust, the more we reside in a state of pure Potential and come closer to our powerfully unmanifest aspect. Einstein showed how in that suspended unexpressed state of all and equal probabilities, we are every place there is to be and in every time there is to be. We are One with all there is.

• There are at least two entangled particles, one at the beginning of time, and the other at the end of time.
• Across an infinitude of space and an impossible expanse of time, whatever happens to one immediately happens to the other.
• Which means, there is only the Present, in Between.
• Time is an illusion.

SESSION 4: The Price & Cost of Letting Go.

The Ambiguity of Truth – Letting go of the Need for Control

We’re constantly bombarded with ambiguities and each of them provides a Rorschach Test in which we reveal something about ourselves in how we try to understand them. Positive people view these uncertainties in terms of possibilities while negative people see threats everywhere. You know the old saying: to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s interesting how some of the most profound spiritual truths are stated in the most ambiguous way. The Tao Te Ching is a great example, leaving many readers scratching their heads, wondering what fortune cookie company put the book together from its favorite sayings. A doozy many Westerners may be more familiar with is from Job 1:21: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised”. Depending on whether a thorn in your side has been removed or you have just lost a loved one, that statement has equal amounts of gratitude and sarcasm, which Job authentically expressed as he flip-flopped on where he and God stood. Like Job, many who have had Spiritually Transformative Experiences, the greatest ambiguity of that truth comes in its integration into your life where relationships are concerned. And it’s all about the relationships.

• Our marriage vows say, “Until Death do us Part”
• What happens when one of us dies, no matter that we return?
• 78% of NDEers get divorced.
• That’s 50% more than the already epidemic rate of 53% for normal people.

Linear & Non-Linear Seeing –Answers & Understanding

Linear thinking pursues answers through a step-by-step process that has a Go/NoGo gate at the conclusion of each step deciding whether we move on or go ‘round again. Thinking this way lends itself to a very binary viewpoint: things are black or they are white. These types of thinkers may miss seeing an opportunity or reaching a compromise. Some patterns of information remain invisible to them. They are inside-the-box thinkers because part of the process is “defining the problem” which means “defining the box” and then working on it from the inside. This is how most of the world thinks. Non-linear perception brings understanding by moving in an outward expansion spiral. Multiple entry points are seen from which one can study a problem. You can walk around whatever you are considering and find the way through, rather than trying to solve for “x”, moving in a two-dimensional, iterative circle. Nonlinear perception goes deeper, spiraling through different perspectives, revealing other aspects of consideration. This is a more evolved way of thinking. It is also more natural to process information this way when being Present. Instead of following the breadcrumbs, you can see the loaf. Instead of answering questions, you are awakening to them. You realize you aren’t using your memory to understand things; you don’t need a memory to perceive a complex and dynamic pattern moving in front of you. When you are Present, it’s with no memory of the past or anticipation of the future. It’s with your intuition. In being still and knowing that “I am/You are God” you choose the sublime over the intense, the silence over noise, focus over distraction and dualities like joy and pain withdraw into the main axis of the sine wave of emotion. We walk along that axis, not chasing pleasure or avoiding pain, but accepting of either. When we hear someone speak, their words provide information, but from their nuance, inflection and body language emerge patterns of meaning.

• Becoming Still creates the vacuum.
• Nature wants to fill the vacuum.
• We direct the vacuum with our intention, which can be separate from Desire.
• Without desire, we are not the primer movers.
• And therefore, we act without generating fresh karma.

SESSION 5: The Fruit of Letting Go. 

What is the Best Version of Yourself?

What if the best version of yourself wasn’t when everything was going right, but when everything was going to hell and you were getting your ass kicked? Why are the heroes in stories not those who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths? Why are they those people who were knocked down repeatedly, sometimes only picking themselves up from the dust because if they didn’t, it’s right there they would starve? It’s because more of know challenge and adversity than silver spoons, so it’s a matter of what we can relate to. We admire the strength and tenacity of such heroes and their determination not to fail, like the closing words in Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”. Joseph Campbell has said as much in his study of the Hero’s Journey. When this life is done and we look back on it n our Life Review, will we judge ourselves by whether we won or lost, or in what we found within us that gave us the courage to try? Pushed to our breaking point shows us what we’re made of: our character and our heart. This can be our finest moment, bringing out the best version of ourselves. Moving forward in our own Hero’s Journey, how else can we grow, or atone, but by making better choices in the present, as the future births into the Now? Usually, the number of choices that are better are fewer than the many that result in failure. If that is what is in our hearts, then we reduce the number of actionable probabilities to choose from, which mercifully blinds us to the other, unfortunate ones. We may still make wrong decisions, but they don’t have to be bad ones. A mistake is not necessarily a sin. The need to atone is the need to evolve. This usually surfaces in our need to return again and again for whatever reason to experience the joys and sorrows that can only be experienced here. But it’s like the Uncle Remus story of the Tar Baby. Once you touch it, you can’t untouch it. You’re stuck to it. So how do we break that chain? Ultimately, when our sense of detachment includes any sense of self.

• Your mind is a sophisticated mirror
• It is what it sees
• Be careful what you show it
• For you can be anything.

Being Authentic – Even Atheists can be Spiritual

You can’t row in 2 boats at once. If someone were talking to God about their choices, they may say how they would want to live a questionable life because they liked the cars, the money, the clothes and the power. I think God would just say, “You have free will and can make whatever choices you want. If that is what you really want to do, then go see how it works out for you. When you are done, come back, I’m not going anywhere.” Extending this thought, I have come to believe that even if you are an atheist, and live your life authentically, then you are living it spiritually. There are many people who say they believe in God but they don’t live a life that demonstrates the choices or the sacrifices you would expect if you were making the same declarations. You don’t have to look far to find examples. But what about the people who do own their crap, who don’t justify it or dismiss their bad choices offhandedly, and totally own who they are, warts and all? Isn’t this a kind of humility that makes such a person worth watching? Living authentically really does go back to Socrates’: “Man, know thyself”. Awaken to the MEANING of life, as you see it, and then back that into the question of what your unique purpose is, given your unique interests and abilities. Put this knowledge into practice, maybe first in avoiding situations and people that bring out the worst in you. then try different approaches to survive such encounters that don’t turn you into Mr./Mrs. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll. Do that and while you struggle to do so, you WILL be living Authentically.

• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Enjoy a private one-on-one session with Jim Bruton who can assist you in the Art of Letting Go of situations in your life that no longer serve you. This can be purchased as an individual Session, or bundled with the Webinar Series so you can have additional assistance with integrating the course into your life experience.

Jim has always been spiritually inclined. That took a quantum leap after a plane crash in 2016, resulting in a Near-Death Experience. Upon return, Jim focused on Integrating the experience into his life. The Art of Letting Go offers Jim’s perspectives as a tool for integrating your own Spiritually Transformative Experience.

Jim has been in Amazon’s Life to Afterlife 2 and many, many podcasts. Jim also has:

1. An Emmy for my film production work for National Geographic Television
2. Lived in Africa among the wildlife off and on for 14 years.
3. Had my own safari company, Old World Safaris
4. Invented the Satellite VideoPhone, disrupting how global news could be transmitted with live video from places formerly impossible.
5. Field produced the Titanic expedition for DIscovery.com, winning it Yahoo! Site of the Year.
6. Retraced the Journey of the Magi through Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Israel
7. Several trips to Mt. Everest: to transmit live video from the summit for the Malaysian team, and as Lecturer for Yale University School of Medicine, testing new biometrics destined for the International Space Station.
8. NBC News war correspondent: Northern Africa, almost everywhere in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc.