the pain of letting go

someone once defined that letting go has to be painful. no matter what the object of letting go is. whether it´s a material thing, an emotion, even a lethal addiction. letting go means having pain.
I guess I have worked the first 30 years of my life towards letting go of a lot of things: self-destruction, inferiority complexes, fear of life, anorexia, obsessive overeating, feeling responsible for my parents and the world (instead of myself), depression, obsessive working out, panic of losing security, anxiety about living an unhappy life without any meanig to it... and so on.
This year´s yoga festival was a lot about letting go of a lot of these things. finally. still, for the first 3 or 4 days, I felt so miserable I couldn´t figure out why. I was crying a lot, in the evenings before sleeping, then again at 4 a.m. before even getting up to visit a toilett. I was sad. I let it go. All that pain and suffering I used as a dear crutch for so many years. Not that it had enabled me to walk properly. In contrary it only made me stumble through life even more. But I knew it was there, it was dependable, it was secure. Secure to keep me alive, but unhappy.
The biggest fear of letting go for me is always the anxiety there might exist a big vaccum that cannot be filled and then (like a black hole) sucks in the universe and destroys it as soon as the old crap is gone. One of my teachers said: 'Nature doesn´t like vacuums, you know that.' But isn´t it allowed to be afraid of what nature will fill in the gap with?? 'So what if there isn´t a big black hole but a bright light?' Hm. Interesting idea. and then you finally get the point. It´s a construction of your fear. You KNOW there is a bright light. You ARE the light. You have just so much gotten used to put yourself down that you didn´t have a concept anymore of yourself being light. I was at the moment to understand it in my mind a while ago but on the festival, I understood it in my heart. (God, that sounds cheesy. awful. life is cheesy sometimes in the same extend it can be cruel and unfair. it still gives me a hard time to accept that...)
so I try to relax into letting go of a lot now. the main thing being, I et go of having a plan. being a true pitta person, I need plans, lists and concepts. at the moment I only have some travelideas, but no fixed plans yet. I feels new but for the first time it feels good. I feel more free than I have ever felt since childhood. The letting go part is still a little shaky, but the pain becomes smaller and less dramatic. *big sigh* I will let go of typing this now (only for today) and see how I feel with that. wahe guru.