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Letting go can be difficult. This is true even for things that aren’t good for us and never have been, but what is often particularly challenging is letting go of what has been deeply good but simply isn’t the right thing anymore.
The thing itself - a practice, relationship, vocation, way of being - might still be lovely and full of life, but for us, it has somehow lost its vitality or sense of rightness, or we sense it can’t come with us where we’re going, or maybe we feel that we’ll come back to it, but it needs to be set aside for now. No matter how much we want to hang on, we have a gut sense that we must let it go in order to move forward.
It can be difficult to trust that, in letting go, something better or more suited to this time or this stage in our development will come in. But there is an organic intelligence in the world that - if we can learn to trust it - somehow has a way of helping us move from one stage of life to another, providing on a heart-level what it is we actually need to thrive as we enter a new place. It takes time to learn to trust that something will be there to catch us on the other side of release. We might have to “microdose” our trust initially. This is okay. You’re allowed to take it slowly. Even a few moments of imagining what it might feel like to trust this letting go can awaken something inside you.
This process of letting go is one I’m currently living. Releasing several well-loved containers and practices is difficult; I have felt deeply nourished by them for years, and letting go is bittersweet. It has taken time to discern whether releasing is truly the right thing, or whether a reorientation toward them is really what’s being asked (discernment often takes time, so know you’re not alone if you’re in the midst of this). It is also requiring a lot of trust that other good things - things more suited to this next phase of life - will emerge behind them in the right time.
Making the choice to listen to this gut sense is a bit scary, extremely new, and requires both stepping onto an unknown path and grieving the release of some of the pathways that have served me beautifully for years. Despite the difficulty, I sense that if I ignored this inner guidance to release and kept trying to make an old thing work, I would start spinning around in circles of frustration, tension, and confusion. In contrast, when I internally open to release, I feel calmness in my body, a sense of clarity, a feeling of unwinding in my chest. This information in my body is helping me to trust the pathway forward.
Learning to trust the call to let go takes time, patience, practice, love. It makes sense if we want to resist or we’re uncertain. If you find yourself still discerning if it’s really time to let go, that’s okay - it does take time. If you know it’s right to let go but are having a hard time doing so, that’s okay, too - self-compassion really gets to be a part of this process. If you’ve let go and you feel a bit groundless or dull, that’s okay, too - disorientation is often present when we first step over a threshold.
Wherever you are on the spectrum of letting go, my prayer is that you will be gentle with yourself, that you will have good companions beside you, and that, when it feels accessible, you might play around with trusting the potential for goodness on the other side of release.
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