Why Letting Go Is the Path to Happiness

Why Letting Go Is the Path to Happiness...

‘The Ecstasy of Surrender’ author says it’s an anti-aging secret, too Bestselling author and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Dr. Judith Orloff is a model for balancing fierce left-brain intellect and right-brain compassion. She calls herself an “empathic psychiatrist,” and it’s her ability to connect with her patients on an emotional level while supporting them and offering wise life strategies that puts her in a rarefied league. As a follow-up to her 2009 book, the wildly popular Emotional Freedom, Orloff has penned The Ecstacy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life . She gave readers a taste of it in a TED talk. , which garnered more than half a million views on YouTube. In the new book, Orloff shows why surrender is a more effective approach to life than trying to control or force things. She offers examples and exercises to help us make that simple, yet super-challenging, leap when it comes to power, money, communication, relationships and mortality. I had the pleasure of chatting with her about these subjects and others and was especially eager to hear whether she felt surrender was more important to boomers than other age groups. Highlights from our conversation: Next Avenue: You’ve said you write about what you want to learn about. How did you pick the subject of surrender? Orloff: Well, because I’m a control freak and I tend to fight with life sometimes, and worry, and get attached to patterns and relationships that aren’t good for me and I can’t rid of them … my deepest desire was to learn surrender on a deep, deep level so I could shed what wasn’t working for me and learn how to trust and flow instead of...