Letting Go - Story, Theory & Practice
Someone asked me recently, “what is my main learning from the last ten years?”. Although the years have been transformative and deeply educational, understanding what it means to let go and surrender has been the most significant learning and created a radical attitudinal change impacting all areas of my life.
Until my little brother died suddenly from a brain tumour when I was 22, I believed I was in charge of my life. I could control my future using my will. I felt comfort in this sense of control. The decade after Sam died was an intensive course in letting go. This life-changing event had pulled the rug from my feet, and I felt the ripples of pain amongst our family. It could have been at this moment that I understood I didn’t have control over everything but instead, I began to cling to things more intensely than ever before.
In that decade, I had my first child, broke up with her father, started a business with a friend, and then went on to lose that business and, sadly, the friendship. Finally, I began and eventually ended a toxic relationship where I faced even more of my demons. I clung, begged, made myself ill, hurt others, and was desperate. I’m not embarrassed to admit this because it was from here that I rebuilt and was forced to look at everything I was carrying from the past, how it made me who I was today and I begin to shed the weight of it all.
Towards the end of the decade, I began understanding the energetics of letting go. I had mounting personal evidence to show that when you let go, and I mean let go on every level (practically, emotionally, physically and energetically), you feel the benefits instantly.
We can choose how we meet situations, our inner dialogue, and how we meet change. We can choose to accept, surrender, trust and embrace or we can choose to fight, cling and manipulate.
“We all need to let go of our obsession with perfection as an ideal and maybe choose humanness, connection and honesty as our intention.”
I can let go more easily now because I had to shed everything to breathe properly, but I also no longer attach myself to things like I used to. It is still a practice for me and always will be. I can choose to let go with grace or have my hand forced. I would love to say that I always select grace, but self-discovery and reflection are a lifetime of work.
The Energetics of Letting Go
You free up energy and make space when you let go. We don’t have boundless energy, which is why the act of letting go is radical self-care. If we were to hold on to everything, joy, trauma, people, and situations, we wouldn’t be able to stand. Taking a personal inventory is an excellent way to check in with what you are carrying, and from that point, you can look at where letting go might be helpful. The energetics are simple when you let go - you make space. You won’t always fill the space with joy and delight, but I like to view it as though I am up levelling and with that can come growing pains but also greater consciousness and vitality.
I wonder - do we all come to this understanding? Just at different times? I was blind to it for so long, but now it’s my operating model.
“We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.”
Your Relationship with Letting Go
We carry different loads, depending on the life we have led; this is true also of our inclination to cling or to let go. If you grew up in chaotic or traumatic situations, you might find comfort in trying to control the uncontrollable, as those were coping mechanisms that may have worked for you in the short term.
Research shows that older people tend to let go easier, as do people with solid meditation practices.
How deeply we define ourselves by outside factors is also a key component in our ability to let go. Understanding your unique relationship with this concept is an excellent place to begin.
Your strategy for letting go is attached to your fundamental beliefs about life. It would help if you connected to your ideas about this life to find your unique practice for letting go. Knowing where you stand regarding fate, will, energetics, universe, connectedness, after-life, oneness, soul, purpose, metaphysics and quantum physics will ground your strategy.
“Is letting go so hard because we are trying to make all that is temporary permanent?”
Letting Go of the Good Times.
To harness the ability to let go, we need to feel ok with all that is temporary. That includes the good times. A beautiful practice is to embrace and sincerely acknowledge all that is good but don’t cling. Life is a cycle of the good, the bad and the ugly. Move through those cycles with as little resistance as possible, and play with impermanence.
Let Go and.
Letting go as a practice sometimes requires an action or acknowledgement. There is no spiritual bypass. You cannot will yourself to ‘let go’. You might need to let go and grieve, let go and reflect, let go and celebrate, let go and acknowledge your loneliness. Letting go isn’t always without agency and action. Pay attention to your will in the process of letting go and when you might require further action.
When Not to Let Go.
Some things must be processed to be let go of; there is no set or structured timeline for this. You cannot fast forward. You can lean into it and ask for help, but it will shift when it is ready to. We cannot force ourselves to let go. We can intend to let go, we can journal around the idea of letting go, and we can ask out loud or pray that we can let go but until something shifts energetically, we cannot force it. The more you try to force it, the more it will escape you. Acceptance of where you are in the process at all times is helpful.
“Poetry can come from our past.”
The current world is full of injustice and horror. Do we use the concept of letting go when it comes to social, environmental and political change? The answer is connected to you as an individual. It is to do with the placement of energy. It is related to your passion and empathy. It is aligned with your understanding of making change rather than worrying or aimlessly talking about injustice. My last essay - How To Be Of Service - has some valuable points regarding fighting for our human and environmental rights.
Let Go and Surrender.
You can let go of emotions, beliefs, thought patterns, people, things in the past, worries about the future, expectations, and disappointments. Following that, you can SURRENDER to where you are and who you are; you can surrender to the not knowing, you can surrender and trust, and you can surrender and go with the flow. Surrender brings you home and breaks you free.
SURRENDER IS RADICAL, and building a foundational framework for letting go is the first step.
“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything — anger, anxiety, or possessions — we cannot be free.”
What can you let go of (in no particular order and by no mean exhaustive)
BELIEFS
EMOTIONS
THOUGHTS
PEOPLE
THINGS
DESIRES
IDEAS
FEAR
CONTROL
GUILT
SHAME
OBSESSION
RELATIONSHIPS
PAST
BELIEFS EMOTIONS THOUGHTS PEOPLE THINGS DESIRES IDEAS FEAR CONTROL GUILT SHAME OBSESSION RELATIONSHIPS PAST
PRACTICE
Find a quiet space to sit, and close your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so. Take some deep breaths, noticing the breath moving through your body, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Not forcing anything, just noticing.
Let your mind go where it needs to for a few minutes. Don’t try to stop or control the thoughts as they come up, don’t judge them. Just let them come.
Bring your attention gently back to your breath and notice how much you are carrying. Let that sink in, and notice where you feel it in your body.
Now visualise how you might feel if you were able to offload some of that weight. Notice your feelings, notice your energy, see your heart space, notice your core and then your mind.
Bring the attention back to your breath and prepare to come back to the room.
Picking up a pen, begin to answer the following questions:
How much am I carrying?
What am I carrying that no longer serves me?
What am I clinging on to?
What does it mean to let go of all that is not serving me?
What am I left with after letting go?
You can take this exercise further if you feel ready to by writing all the things you carry in list format but feel prepared to let go of. Then in the next column, you can write down the right next action in the process.