The Art of Letting Go
Learning to leave the past behind and live free
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Without further ado, let’s dive into our first mediation for 2024.
This Week at a Glance:
This week we look into how one can let go of something they’re holding onto whether it be a goal, a failed relationship, or a specific mindset.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 Psychological reasons for why we hold onto things;
🍬 The importance of learning to let go;
🍫 Five tactics for letting go of things in your life.
Let’s dive in.
One thing we all carry around with us, day and night, is our past. Each of our pasts are unique to ourselves and yet what is not unique is that we all carry around certain aspects of those pasts that we probably shouldn’t anymore.
Sometimes we do this because there is pain associated to something in the past and we haven’t resolved it, other times it is because we hold and cherish something and letting go of it would mean letting go of a piece of ourselves.
But life moves in a single direction and if we do not properly curate our experiences once they have occurred, we run the risk of them dragging us down and preventing us from the good life. Our fates are determined not only by the actions taken today but also those we took yesterday. If we cannot relinquish them, we cannot properly move forward.
The most popular tactic for dealing with this is to just push on. Many of us experience life, take it in, and then move on. We bury the painful times deep inside and try to never let them out. We avoid certain music or foods because they remind us of something no longer there. Or we tell ourselves we want to change, we want the past to be left behind, but we don’t quite know how to actually let it go.
Pushing our experiences and emotions down doesn’t do anything but kick the can down the road. Sure, for the time being we can decline their existence, we can lock away any pain in a box, bury it deep within us, and try never to open it… But eventually it finds its way out, and it comes with compounding interest.
The only way around this is to embrace what life has presented, what one has experienced, and come to terms with it.
One reason we can’t seem to let go of something is the time we’ve invested in it (known as the sunk-cost fallacy). Because we put in time, because we’ve carried something with us for so long, we refuse to let it go because we’re already invested. We refuse to cut our losses and see the possibilities of life if we divest.
Many of us also continue to push on and refuse to let go because we believe we’ll be seen as weak, or that we don’t have any grit. But by refusing to let go, we rob ourselves of happiness and opportunity today.
Holding on is easy, letting go is hard. And letting go is not just something one does, it is a skill one learns.
Here are several tactics to help one learn to master the skill of letting go.
Our Personal Narrative
Our lives are driven by specific narratives that we create. These narratives create an identity around us and through that identify, we take on the world.
But when we experience a conflict between our identity and something we need to let go of, we’re like a deer in headlights, we do not know how to proceed. Do we give up who we’ve been, what we’re known for, just to let go of something? Or do we risk shifting our identity in order to move on and grow?
The stories we’re telling ourselves are critical to being able to let go of something and move on. Checking ourselves and reflecting upon our self narratives helps to uncover hidden truths in why we refuse to let go.
One Tiny Leap
Often times when we attempt to make a change, we dive head first into the change. Change is hard, and we know that in order to really get behind a change, especially a big life change, we need to commit. So we dive in with all we’ve got (think New Year’s Resolutions).
But like New Year’s Resolutions, we often take too big of a leap into the change. These giant leaps often look like this: We want to change, we commit to the change, we begin executing on the change… and then within a short period we falloff.
Taking giant leaps into change backfire because we do not have the support systems in place or the stamina to sustain the ongoing process of change.
Rather than taking a giant leap, start with a small step. Work your way up from one step to two. Change is hard. It takes time. Letting go is not going to be something one can just do, it is a skill and all skills need to be nurtured and strengthen over time.
Dropping the Bags Off
As time goes on, we collect more and more experiences and with each of those experiences, we have good ones we wish to remember, neutral ones we forget about, and bad ones we wish we could not remember.
If we refuse or are unable to let go of things, then over time those things compound. With each passing year, the suitcase of baggage we carry becomes heavier and heavier, with each new bad experience, we add another garment of clothing to the bag. Eventually, the suitcase is pretty damn heavy and is hard to lug around.
If we can shift our mindset and try to let go of the negative baggage from the beginning, over shorter periods, we have less that we’re carrying with us. We’re better able to then take on new experiences, good, bad, or neutral, and handle them in real-time versus having a build-up of past issues.
Treating “letting go” as a skill that we learn over time helps us discard unnecessary weight and frees us up to truly experience the world for what it holds.
Our Control Illusion
Much of our experiences in life are outside of our control. This means that we are, to an extent, always on guard for what life is going to throw at us. Sometimes it is right down the middle and we can see it coming, other times it is a curveball.
Believing we have full control over life is an illusion. The sooner we can embrace this, the sooner we can take appropriate actions to learn the skill of letting go.
If we place blame for everything on ourselves, we will never be able to let go of anything. We do not have full control and not everything is our fault. Embracing life’s chaotic nature and removing the veneer of control allows us to provide compassion to ourselves, to remind ourselves in many situations we couldn’t have done any better than we did.
Learning to let go of what we couldn’t control paradoxically frees us up to control the things we do have control over such as self-care, compassion, and recovery from experience.
Lean in
Human happiness can often be boiled down to a single sentiment: run away from pain, run toward pleasure. This is great in principle but as we’ve all experienced, it often leads to long-term issues that need resolving.
Life is painful. Not every experience we have is going to be pleasant. There are going to be very very hard times we all have to face.
Understanding this is the first step to letting go because when we admit there is pain in the world, pain that we will experience, we are less caught off guard. It also frees us up to be able to embrace the pain for what it is at that time.
If we run from pain when the pain arises, it does not go away, it eventually surfaces. We need to resolve things, to come to terms with them in order for them to go away. The sooner we can lean in and embrace the discomfort and begin to process it, the sooner we can leave it behind and prevent it from being added to our suitcase of bad experiences.
3-Bullet Summary:
Learning to let go of the past is a skill to be learned, not something that is just done.
We too often refuse to let go of things because of the investments we’ve made in them or the emotional attachments we have to them.
We start to learn to let go by:
Checking the stories we tell ourselves
Taking incremental steps to let go
Treat letting go as a skill to be learned
Let go of the things we do not control
Lean into the experiences early to better process them
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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