The Art of Letting Go

Letting go takes practice. Letting go gracefully? Even more so.

For many years, I thought I had this whole ‘letting go thing’ sorted – regular decluttering to throw out sh*t I didn’t need, navigating life’s changes without too many backward glances, recognising when a friendship had reached its natural completion. But it took a global pandemic to show me most clearly what I haven’t been able to let go of yet – and potential ways I might clear and declutter in a much deeper way.

Letting go has various meanings, from relinquishing and releasing, to surrendering or giving something up. Despite the simplicity of the language, it’s not an easy process (especially when we don’t realise we need to let go of something in the first place). In the last year, many of us have had to unexpectedly let go of so many things simultaneously – loved ones or seeing loved ones, travelling, routines, expectations, seeing friends, hobbies, going to group events, envisioned futures, ideas about who we are and what we represent.

That’s a lot of things. And to add to it, this has all come without warning.

So - Covid-19 – how do you think you have coped? This global pandemic has certainly changed all of our lives. While some have embraced the changes in transformative ways, for many of us the changes have been less than welcome. In a time when potential sweeping change and uncertainty are all in another day’s experience, becoming comfortable with letting go has become something we need to know how to do. In fact, nowadays, I see it as absolutely essential for our mental, emotional and physical health. 

The problem occurs when we don’t know how to let go or don’t realise we even need to - then, we often get stuck. We get stuck in old ideas, patterns and behaviours that no longer serve us. We get stuck in outdated beliefs about ourselves and about the world. In many ways, when we can’t let go, we function and cope as though we are living in another time – maybe reliving a certain crisis or trauma repeatedly, unable to release the experience or move through it. Some of us don’t see the last year as a trauma, or at least not consciously. However, the official definition of trauma is any deeply distressing or disturbing experience. And for most of us, we have had deep disturbance to our day-to-day, if not distressing experiences within that. On one side, some of us may have felt totally resilient during this time – transformed, even - but for others, the upheaval on a global scale has been disturbing and stressful in extreme ways.

Whichever camp you fall into - and all the possible camps in between - one thing is undeniable: you have weathered change this year, whether it has been welcome or not. And with any change, progression or forward movement simultaneously comes the need to move on, move past, and let go of where we’ve been. This doesn’t mean we have to throw it out with the rubbish – it means we have to realise we are in a place of transition in order to allow ourselves the space we need psychologically to fully embody change. Without this, we can get stuck in a kind of mental purgatory – between the old and the new. 

So where are you right now? How much do you feel like you are embodying your life now, a year into a global pandemic? What has changed and what has stayed the same? How do you identify yourself now - after a year of turbulence and chaos on a collective scale? 

There is a definition of grief that I have always resonated with. The saying goes that there is no timeline for grieving – you can’t rush it. And you need to learn how to grow with the grief, not push it away. I believe the same is true of any form of letting go. It has to happen when we are ready, we have to grow with it, like leaves falling off a tree. When it’s overly forceful, it doesn’t feel right - or if we avoid it, we won’t feel right either.

So, what of grief in a global pandemic? In order to move forward from where we are right now, I believe many of us need to grieve all sorts of things before we can really step into where this pandemic will take us next. Grief is a natural – and necessary – experience that emerges in times of change and loss. When we do not acknowledge it, or allow it, it begins to control us – and letting go becomes impossible. As psychologists say, ‘what you resist persists’.

What might you need to grieve so you can let go? Perhaps you and your family and friends have been affected by this pandemic on the most fundamental level – you have actually lost someone in this crisis. Or maybe you carry a daily weight of fear or dread about how it might affect those you know and love, you’ve lost a certain peace of mind. Perhaps you have been homeschooling for many months and the stress (or even trauma) of trying to manage so much at once has left you feeling exhausted, frustrated and even resentful. Maybe you feel a sense of outrage about the fact the world has changed so fast that many of the dreams you had in March 2020 will never come to pass – or at least not in the way you had imagined. Or maybe you are aware that this pandemic has created rifts in your relationships – ones that may have been there already, but maybe this period has made them all too real. Is your job unrecognisable now? Do you have stable employment? Maybe you’re deeply frustrated that you can’t travel. Any of these, or thousands of other possible scenarios might be affecting you daily. Including the important one, that since the world changed on an unimaginable scale you might not really know who you are anymore. Perhaps you feel you’ve lost that essential sense of ‘me’.

Ultimately, if we do not learn to face and acknowledge what we may have lost and what we might need to grieve, we simply cannot move on authentically. Letting go doesn’t have to be a clean or aggressive cut, and we also don’t need to deny where we’ve been in doing it. But in spring, famously the time of cleaning, amongst a backdrop of multiple lockdowns where we’ve explored and maybe cleaned our home spaces more than ever – perhaps there’s an opportunity here for a deeper clearing than the one you’d normally do. And this time, perhaps it’s for yourself. 

If you want some more practical, actionable tips on the HOW of letting go, you can watch my new Youtube video here, as part of my ‘Know Yourself in 2021’ series.