So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for being here and thank you for listening.
So the words are let it go.
Three words you have heard.
In one form or another,
Your entire life.
Let it go.
From your parents,
Partners,
Friends,
Books,
Therapists,
Algorithm,
Let it go,
Just let it go.
Why are you still holding on to that?
You really need to let it go.
And if you have spent any time in the wellness internet,
The spiritual marketplace,
Or simply in conversation with a kind of friend who has read a couple of books about Buddhism,
You have probably heard this advice.
And if you're honest with yourself,
You have probably also experienced what I think is one of the small universal humiliations of modern adult life.
You nodded politely.
You have agreed that yes,
You should have let it go.
You have then in private completely failed to let it go.
And you have wandered away quietly.
What is wrong with you that this thing everyone keeps telling you to do is evidently beyond your ability?
So I want to say something tonight that I think a lot of teachers,
Including teachers I have respect.
Have not been honest about.
That letting go is not something you do.
Letting go is not an action.
It's not a decision.
It's not an intention.
It's not something you can perform on yourself by willpower or effort or by a determined morning routine.
Letting go is what becomes possible when the body finally feels safe to stop holding.
And it is the result of conditions,
Not the result of will.
And the entire industry that has built itself around telling you to just let it go.
Has been asking you to perform something by its nature,
Which cannot be performed.
So tonight I want to look at what letting go actually is.
Why this standard advice doesn't work.
And what is actually happening in the body when something is being held.
And what does eventually allow the holding to ease.
Just see what lands for you.
And leave the rest,
As always.
So let me describe what most of us,
When we hear the phrase,
Let it go,
End up trying to do.
Because I think the confusion starts early.
So most people on hearing this instruction,
They attempt one of three things.
They try to stop thinking about the thing.
They try to feel different about the thing or they try to declare sometimes they declare it out loud that they are done with this thing that's it,
I'm done now And none of these things are letting go.
They are respectively suppression,
Performance,
And intention.
And they share a feature,
Common feature.
They are all happening in the head.
They are all being attempted by the will.
And the thing that you're trying to apparently let go of,
The thing being held is almost never in the head.
The thing being held is in the body.
Resentment lives in your jaw and your shoulders.
Grief lives in your chest and your diaphragm.
Old shame lives in your belly and your pelvis.
Anger that wasn't allowed lives in the upper arms and the hands.
The mental story is the surface report,
Whereas the actual holding is somatic.
Which means that telling someone in your head to let go of something that has been held in your body is a category error.
It's like telling your liver to please stop processing alcohol while you continue to drink.
So the instruction is in the wrong language and delivered to the wrong department.
And it gets worse,
Because when the head instructs the body to let go,
And the body for excellent reasons does not comply.
The head usually concludes that something is wrong with the person.
That you're not trying hard enough,
You're not spiritual enough,
You're not healed enough and that adds a layer of shame to the original holding.
Which the body then also has to hold.
So the standard advice taken too literally often makes the situation worse.
Now let's talk about why the body holds things at all.
Because once you understand this,
The advice to just let go starts to sound a bit absurd.
When something happens that the system cannot fully process in the moment,
Because it was too much,
Too fast,
Too soon,
Too unsupported,
Many reasons.
The body does the next best thing.
It holds it.
It holds the experience and it stores it,
Often somatically,
In the tissues,
Muscles,
Autonomic patterns.
Until a time where there is enough capacity and enough safety to process it.
And this is not malfunction at all.
This is,
In fact,
A very intelligent design.
The body is doing for you what you could not do at the time.
It is essentially saying,
We cannot deal with all of this right now,
So I will keep it for you until conditions are better.
So the holding is,
In its way,
A service the body is performing for you.
So when someone tells you possibly years later to just let go of the thing which the body has been carefully holding for you,
They are asking you to release a deposit before the conditions are right for releasing it.
And the body very sensibly will refuse.
Because letting go in conditions that are not safe would mean re-experiencing the original overwhelm without the protections that allowed you to survive it in the first place.
So the body's refusal to let go is not a flaw,
It's the body's wisdom.
The body is waiting for the conditions in which release can happen safely.
And the body is in fact a much better judge than your conscious mind of when those conditions exist.
So the job is not to override the body's refusal.
The job is to slowly,
Patiently build the conditions the body has been waiting for.
Now I want to be a little dry for a moment because the spiritual marketplace has,
In my view,
Made this whole thing considerably harder than it needs to be.
There is a particular flavor of spiritual teaching which is currently very popular.
In which letting go is presented as a kind of a moral achievement.
The truly evolved person we are told,
Let's go.
And the unevolved person clings.
Letting go is presented as a sign of maturity,
Spiritual progress,
And inner work completed.
And holding on is presented as the evidence that you have more work to do,
More clearing to do,
If that's the right word,
More inner child to heal,
More ego to dissolve,
More therapy to do.
And I want to gently call this what it is.
It is a moral framing layered onto a physiological reality and the moral framing causes real harm.
It causes harm because it implies that there is something deficient about the person whose body has not yet released what it is holding,
When in fact what is happening is that their body with its longer view is this wisely waiting for better conditions.
So a truly spiritual move,
I think,
Is the opposite of this.
The truly spiritual move is to honor the body's holding.
To trust that there is intelligence in it,
And to stop demanding that the body produce on your schedule a release that it is not ready to produce,
To make room for holding rather than to shame it.
To make room for holding rather than to shame it.
Now there is a saying that I keep returning to.
In the traditions I take more seriously.
Letting go is not described as something the seeker does.
It is described as something that happens.
When the conditions are right,
What was being held simply ceases to be held.
Not because of any heroic act of release,
Because there is no longer any reason to hold it.
The body,
Having finished the work,
Exhales.
And if that sounds suspiciously easy,
It is not.
Why?
Because building the conditions in which the body can exhale is often work of years,
If not more.
But the work is not the work of trying to let go.
The work is always the work of building conditions.
And the release is downstream.
So what are those conditions that the body is waiting for?
The first condition is safety.
Not abstract safety.
Definitely not affirmations about feeling safe.
Felt safety.
Actual presence in the body of the signals that say,
It is now okay.
The room is not dangerous.
The people around me are genuinely not the original threat.
My own internal state is genuinely able to receive what comes up,
If I let the holding ease.
And for most of us,
This kind of safety is built slowly,
Over years,
Through small repeated experiences of the world turning out.
On this particular day to be okay.
Through relationships that hold steady,
Through practitioners that don't flinch when you share,
And through environments that allow the nervous system to gradually update its model.
Safety is not announced.
Safety is felt over time.
Now another condition here is time.
Not the time of appointment,
Or the time of the meditation session,
Or the time of another retreat.
Body time.
Which is slower than the calendar time,
Slower than the wellness industry's preferred timelines.
Slower than most of us in our impatience want to allow.
So the body releases what it has been holding when the body decides it is ready,
Not when we decide it should be ready.
And another condition.
Which I think is often the missing one.
Is the absence of pressure to let go.
And this is,
I think,
The great paradox of this world.
That the very pressure to release tends to keep the body holding.
And when you stop demanding the release.
I am okay with this.
I am holding on to something.
I don't know where it's coming from and I'm unable to release it right now.
I am okay with that.
I am simply going to learn now to coexist with it for a while.
When you stop demanding the release,
The body sometimes,
Almost as a matter of relief,
Begins to soften.
The instruction to let go is,
Ironically,
Often what keeps holding.
Keeps the holding in place.
And once you drop that instruction,
Sometimes that's what allows this thing to ease and soften.
Let's talk about what letting go actually feels like.
Because when it happens,
This matters.
It never feels like a great release.
And it never feels like a moment of dramatic release and tears and shaking.
It almost never looks like.
.
.
The way the wellness industry has trained us to expect it to look.
In my experience,
Real letting go feels more like a very quiet noticing.
A morning with a thing that used to occupy a corner of your chest.
Is present,
But it's a little bit less.
A meeting where the person who used to trigger you,
Simply does not,
This time.
A memory comes up and instead of producing an inner landslide.
Produces something like a recognition.
Yes,
That happened.
Yes,
It shaped me.
Yes,
I'm still carrying some of it.
But I can carry on.
It is rarely accompanied by ceremony.
It tends to happen between things.
Ordinary moments.
Wednesday afternoons.
Or you realize two weeks later that something has shifted.
You can never quite point to when it happened.
The releasing was happening at the body's pace,
In the body's time,
And your conscious mind simply noticed the result after the work was done.
Sometimes,
Of course,
There are bigger releases also,
Like a wave of grief that finally moves through,
A burst of anger that finally finds expression,
And a tear that arrives years later,
But it's on schedule.
These do happen and when they happen they are also real.
But they are usually the visible peaks of a longer underground process that had been working for months,
Sometimes years,
Before the visible release happens.
So the peak is not the work at all.
The peak is the moment.
Where the work becomes briefly visible.
So,
Going on a retreat and letting go of your traumas,
Taking some sort of medicine or substance and then letting go and releasing all your traumas,
It may or may not last.
It may or may not create that slow,
Sustainable change.
It may or may not create those sustainable,
Consistent conditions for the body to continue this process.
And I want to add one more thing here that very few people say,
And I think it matters.
Some things you are not meant to let go of.
Because some things are still doing work in you.
Some grief is still moving,
Some anger is still useful,
Some attachment is teaching you something.
So the instruction to let go applied universally to all internal content is irresponsible.
It assumes that whatever is being held is finished with you.
Which sometimes is true and sometimes very much not.
So if you are in the middle of grieving someone,
That grief cannot be asked to go.
The grief is not asking to be let go of.
It is asking to be felt.
If you're in the early stages of recognizing an injustice you've been minimizing,
The anger arising is not asking to be released.
It is asking to be allowed to inform you.
If you're in the middle of an attachment that hasn't yet resolved into something else.
The holding is not over yet because the work isn't over yet.
So trying to let go prematurely is what the spiritual marketplace has often encouraged people to do.
With the result that they have buried sometimes for decades material that was simply asking for more time to be felt.
So the premature release is just suppression in spiritual clothing.
So your body knows what is finished and what is not.
Your body has in fact much better information about this than your conscious aspirations.
So the trick here is to listen to the body's report,
Then to impose your preferred schedule.
Some things will be released this year,
Some things will be released in 10 years,
Some things will be released in the moments before death,
And some things will carry on with you.
That is not failure.
That is the actual shape of how a life metabolizes what it has lived through.
So now,
Let me offer you something that is not letting go,
But it is the kind of thing that over time create conditions in which letting go can begin to happen.
So,
Wherever you are,
Just settle.
And let your body be supported now.
By whatever is underneath you.
Just think of one thing you've been told to let go of by somebody,
Or even yourself.
Doesn't have to be the heaviest one.
One specific thing.
Something someone said.
A way you've been hurt.
A pattern you've been trying to release.
Or a person you've been trying to be done with.
That had come to you.
Can be an event,
A person,
A place,
A pattern,
Experience,
Anything.
And now.
.
.
I am going to ask you to do the opposite of what most teachers ask.
I am going to ask you to acknowledge that you are still holding it.
Out loud or in your own head.
However you do it internally.
To the part of you that is holding,
Just say this.
I see that you are still holding this.
I am not going to ask you to let it go.
I see that you are still holding this.
I am not going to ask you to let it go.
I see that you are still holding this.
I am not going to ask you.
To let it go.
And just notice what happens in the body when you stop demanding release.
There may be a small softening.
There may be a wave of tiredness.
Or there may be a sense of being unexpectedly seen.
Whatever arises.
Just let it be there for a few seconds.
You And now if you want internally.
You can offer the part of you that is holding a sentence.
Something like this.
You don't have to put this down today.
I trust that you will when you're ready.
I am not going to rush you.
I am going to keep you company until then.
You don't have to put this down today.
I trust that you will when you're ready.
I am not going to rush you.
I am going to keep you company.
Until then.
Now this is what the body has been waiting to hear.
This paradoxically.
Is the condition in which letting go eventually becomes possible.
The non-demanding is the medicine.
And the patient accompanies the work.
The not demanding is the medicine.
And the patient company.
Is the work.
So,
There were things I tried to let go of for years that simply would not be let go of.
I read all the books,
I did all the practices,
I told myself on many mornings and many evenings that I was done with them.
And then Tuesday afternoon I would discover that I was not done with them.
So what eventually shifted things was not better techniques.
It was exactly the opposite.
It was finally stopping the project.
It was letting the holding be the holding,
Without trying to make it stop.
It was in some sense giving up on letting go.
Which sounds like resignation.
But in fact it's the door.
So some of the things over time eased on their own,
Some are still being held.
But I now understand they are being held because they still have work to do in me and with me.
Both are okay.
The agenda has stopped,
Which has freed up an extraordinary amount of energy that used to be spent on the agenda.
So if this torque has loosened in you,
The grip of the letting go imperative,
That loosening is the work landing.
You don't have to let go of anything,
Today,
Tomorrow.
You do not have to feel any different about what you're carrying.
You can just notice gently that the project of forcing release has been costing you something.
And that can end now.
Your body in its own time doing its work.
Some of what you're holding will ease in months,
Some in years,
Some may never quite ease and will instead become integrated into the texture of who you are.
All of these are valid.
The body knows what is finished and what is not.
And now notice as we close that the not having to put it down might paradoxically be the very thing that allows it to begin one day.
To ease on its own.
So,
Thank you for listening.
Take gentle care and Namaste.
