How to Let Go: simple ideas for tough times
We all hold onto stuff. Emotions. Relationships. Dead end jobs. We know these things are wrong for us. But without any concrete way to learn how to let go, we remain stuck.
I’ve been there, too. A decade ago I felt stuck in my marriage. I watched, helpless, as my husband abused alcohol and drugs. We met when we were just twelve; his joy and sweetness was such a natural part of my life that I called him “My Buddha.”
As his behavior changed and became more dangerous I knew I had to leave the marriage; but I was terrified that he would become homeless or die without my care. And in that dark moment I was stuck. I was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. But. I realized that in order to hold onto the love I felt for him, I needed to let go of our marriage.
It’s not easy, this letting go thing. And I share my story with you so you know that you’re not alone. And so that you know that it is possible to train yourself to let go.
Learn three simple techniques that you can use, right now, to start practicing how to let go. You can be emotionally free and balanced; I believe in you! Let’s move forward!
Techniques for letting go:
1. What to do when you’re stuck in your head
Use an exhale to train your body to let go by relaxin muscle tension. Your mind will catch up!
Take a breath in
Exhale and release the muscles in your face and neck. shoulders
Inhale
Exhale and relax your shoulders, arms, and hands.
Inhale
Exhale and relax your chest and belly
Inhale
Exhale and relax your hips and legs
Inhale
Exhale and relax your feet
Sit quietly for a moment and observe how you feel.
Picture yourself a year from now; see how easily you let go of stuff much quicker! Keep practicing!
2. Switch up your thoughts! “Pratipaksha Bhavana”
This technique is from classical yoga traditions; which means it’s been tested by people over thousands of years! It was first written down in a text called The Yoga Sutras, which is attributed to a sage (some think it was more than one sage!) named Patanjali. Sutra means thread, so you can think of this like a small thread of thought that gives you way to bring yoga into life. Sutra 2: 33.
When you have a negative thought, substitute an opposite, positive thought.
This is really what letting go come down to. It’s about managing your thoughts about the situation, shifting your attitude, and reframing the challenge.
As we mentioned in the class, you can use a mantra for your situation. Repeat it every time you feel your negative thoughts looping; you can train your mind to see life with equanimity!
3. Train yourself in the art of deep relaxation with the technique of Yoga Nidra
Using guided meditations saved my health and sanity! When we deeply relax the body and mind are naturally healed and letting go becomes more bearable. Hop on YouTube and search for “guided relaxations” or “yoga nidra” and enjoy! Also check back on November 4 and enjoy my online mini-course, Relaxation Rescue
4. Train daily!
Practice on a daily basis. So when you're called in a crisis, you have the skill of letting go right in your back pocket!
Full Transcript:
Hello my friends and welcome to the Gita Brown show, bringing harmony into everyday life. Get inspired with practical tips for your creativity and spirit. If you're a musician, an artist, writer or just a creative soul, you have found your source for guidance and inspiration. Today's show is all about how to let go. We hear this a lot, right? You should just let go, let go, let it go, let it go. But like how do you actually do that? So I've been doing yoga for over 30 years and I've been a teaching artist and a musician and I have had some really hard knocks in life in my personal life too, that I'll share with you today. And I've had to learn and continually learn and I'm still learning the art of letting go actually practically how you do it. So the other day I hopped on Instagram and one of my dear friends, Dr. kallie Snyder, who was a guest on this podcast, she's an amazing flutist and a teaching artist and a beautiful person.
She posted this and I asked her, can I share that? Because I think it's so appropriate. And of course she said yes because she's a generous soul. Thank you Kallie. So she says, " I get frustrated when people tell me to let it go. And then there's an emoji here of a smiley face like um, and she says like, cool, cool, cool. How do you do that again?" Exactly. And you should have seen the chat thread that blew up of people talking about how frustrated they get when people tell them to let it go when there's really stuck in a moment and then how hard it is to let go. And then people were sharing their strategies about how to let go. And I thought, man, as a yoga teacher and as a human being, I have encountered this so many times. So I wanted to talk to you, my dear friends, about it today.
Talk a little bit about it philosophically of course. Cause I love to do that. Share a little bit of like my heart wrenching story, at least to me, it's heart wrenching. And then really most importantly, give you guys at least two. I think I might even have three in here. Practical ways that you can practice the art of letting go with simple little daily things that kind of build traction for when bigger things come along that you have to let go of. I'm going to hopefully give you some ideas and tips of how to think about it and also practically what do you do? How can you train yourself to let go when everything in you is holding on so tight. So we all know this, right? We hang onto stuff. We hang on to literally physical stuff that we don't need anymore in our closets and in our homes.
We hold on to emotions, right? We remain stuck like mad at a person or hurt at something that happened like 20 years ago. We get stuck in relationships that we know, man, we should, I should move out of that, but we just seem to let it go. We get stuck with ideas, limiting ideas about ourselves and about what we can accomplish. We get stuck in jobs that we can't let go of. I can't let go of that one because I don't have the other thing yet. All these things that we know on so many levels are wrong for us. We know are toxic and we know are dragging us down. But without any concrete steps, without any real way to figure out how to let go, we just remain stuck because it's easier to hang onto this thing when letting go means dropping into some unknown void.
I mean, who wants to do that? So the nice things that I've learned along the ways, uh, there's some prettier things to hold on to that I can hang onto while I'm letting go of that other thing. And it makes letting go a little less scary if I have something else to latch on to in the meantime. We'll talk about that in a minute. Um, but you know, if you're watching this, I'm guessing that, or listening to this, I'm guessing that maybe there's something you want to let go of. Um, most of us at some point in our lives, we're kind of in this transition phase. We've been in one position, we're not quite where we want to be and we know that there's still stuff that's like a little stuck and it's a little holding us back and there's only so far that thinking will take you.
That is why you hit play on this episode, right? Cause you're like, man, I would like some fresh ideas of how to do this because I am stuck and I cannot let go. So if you are one of my viewers or listeners, I know that you're friends and I know that you are striving for something bigger. And I know, think about it for a minute. Isn't there some part of you that knows that? If you let go of that one thing you're hanging onto, maybe it's a caffeine addiction, maybe it's a man, maybe it's a woman, maybe it's a job, there's some part of you knows that you're hanging onto that and that it's holding you back. And reaching for this episode means that you are ready to move on. You're ready to let go. So know that about yourself just by listening or watching. You are already taking steps towards transforming into the full potential of who you are.
Actually let me back up. You don't need to transform it to who you are. You just need to let go of this stuff that's blocking who you really are cause you're already perfect and awesome. You're just hanging on to everything that's blocking that light from shining. So dropping it will let you shine. And I know you're here because you're ready to do that. So, um, I also know my friends, Oh this is not easy. In a minute I'm going to get really real with you and share from the depth of my heart how much I know that this is not easy. I know if you're listening or watching, you're maybe feeling really frustrated. What's like a work situation or a family situation. Maybe you've been really hurt. I mean someone just wronged you in a way that's inexcusable and you know, let yourself feel that.
Let yourself feel the pain. There was no reason to, like, let go of that pain. Just let it be. There's no need to change. I am not here to push you or to make you be any different or to force you to let go of something that you're not ready to release. That's totally fine. Just be you with the knocks and the scars and the burns and the scrapes and the hurts. Just let it all be I and just know this, that I'm there with you in spirit, right? I'm clapping you on the back right now. I'm high five and you, I'm hugging you. Whatever you need. And we're just today going to share my personal story and then some ideas and tips about different ways to think about letting go and then some practical ideas that maybe you can start thinking about implementing maybe now, maybe in the future.
But just know that this is just us here right now. Just be you. I'm just gonna be me. All right. I know this is heavy, but we've got this. So I'm going to share a story and just a little warning before I share this story. This is, you know, an adult conversation we're having here about letting go. This is not for kids. It's probably not for anyone under the age of 18. Um, and if they're particularly sensitive, maybe knock that up to 20. Um, you know, if you have kids around pop in your headphones or save this for, for another time. Um, it's not all that dark and deep though. I mean, but there's some, you know, some challenging issues that I'm going to discuss in a moment. So I want to make sure that you feel comfortable listening. So here we go. Let me tell you a little bit about my backstory.
Some of you know this very well, but for those of you who haven't heard this before, I met a wonderful boy when I was only 12 years old. I met him in junior high and it was like that or Romeo and Juliet moment. Truly there is a tragedy. Uh, when I saw him, it was like the world stopped and I went, who is this radiant person? And we just fell in love. Boom. At 12 he was my little boyfriend and we went to the dances together and shuffle to Cindy lopper in the dark with the crepe paper streamers and you know all the other kids around and he was so sweet and he was so kind and he was so relaxed and so loving. I actually used to call him in high school, my Buddha because he was so like, Hey, just let it go.
Everything is fine. Life is good. He was always happy no matter what was going on around him. He was just happy was his just default setting. So we dated on and off, on and off, on and off. And then finally in college we were like, well I guess we better just go on ahead and be together because it's pretty clear that we keep coming back to each other since we were 12 so let's go on ahead and be together. So you know, we moved in together, the whole thing. A few years later we got married and we were married for about 10 years. Along the way though he developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol, particularly. Alcohol was really the thing and what started out as just sort of like some binge drinking and partying grew into daily drinking and then when I confronted him in the world, confronted him on that with drunk driving arrests and things like that.
Then he began to hide his drinking and it really became this insidious addiction and now people, I am not talking here about a functioning alcoholic. I'm not talking about someone who like you know, has a beer during the week and then binges on the weekend. I'm talking about someone who by the end of our relationship was drinking so heavily that he never remembered things that happened the day before. Even things that happened before he got blackout drunk. We'd have conversations and lay plans. He was literally washing his brain away. It was like watching him step into dementia. Not only could he not remember the evening where he was drunk, but then he started to lose days and weeks and I began to become afraid. Boy, if I divorce him, he's going to die. I mean that's where it went. You know, it went from a point of, Oh I better leave this person cause it's not healthy, but I love him.
But he has a disease. But he has an addiction. I want to help him. I love him, I want to stay. All that conflict then turned into at the very end of, Oh my goodness, if I leave this person, he is going to die. How could I possibly do that? Because I was feeding him and taking care of him and supporting him. It was bad. If you can just imagine the darkest, darkest nights, and of course there was emotional abuse happening to me too. He wasn't in his right mind. He was literally washing his brain cells away. It was like watching this beautiful sweet boy completely become eroded in front of me. And all I felt for him was rage and love. And what do you do with that? This person that you love so much and at the same time you're so angry and hurt and feeling betrayed.
And then also personally feeling like a failure because now my marriage is going to end and this is the one thing that I've built my life on since the time I was 12. This belief in this heavenly ordained love with this person. What? And then, Oh, just let it go Gita. Yeah, it was, it wasn't that easy. So, but what I was realizing along the way, it was this, you know, cause I was doing yoga all the time since I was about 16 I had been doing yoga. Thank God. People do yoga before you need it. Don't wait until you need it. Because what I was realizing as I was doing yoga, and I'm going to share some of what I learned in a moment with you too, so you can start doing it right now, but what I started to realize this, the more I tried to hold onto the relationship, the more I was pushing the love away, the more I tried to hold onto my conception of who I thought he should be, the more I wasn't just letting him be who he was.
Even if that was not someone that I felt that I could be within a relationship, it was kind of like trying to hold a running river in your hands. You know, you can hold the water, but it's no longer the river. It's stagnant and eventually it's going to evaporate and eventually it's going to drain through. You can't actually hold the river and I realized I was trying to hold love by holding onto him and holding on to the marriage. And at the end, right before we got divorce, you know, I had that like "come to Jesus moment" when I was just like, I can't do this anymore. What is going to happen, his emotional abuse turn to the threat of physical abuse and that was the line for me and I said, I have to end this. What's going to happen to him? And in that moment I realized that in order to hold onto the love I needed to let go of the relationship and it broke my heart.
I mean at this point my friends, I was, how many pounds underweight was I? I don't know. Let me just put it this way. People who met me a year after that time when I was getting a divorce, didn't even recognize me. I had spent three weeks with some of those people at a training and a year later they're like, no, you weren't there. I said, no, I was there. They didn't even recognize me because physically and mentally I was so amaciated. I didn't even look like the same person when I returned to health. It was a bad, bad state. So I think that holding onto things, this is going to get a little philosophical and out there, but bear with me. We're going to get real tangible and concrete in a moment. I think trying to hold onto things, emotions, relationships, especially love trying to hold onto it; we are actually trying to grasp the ungraspable.
Can I repeat that? We're trying to grasp the ungraspable. It's like trying to hold your breath. Can you hold your breath? Even if you're a super accomplished one of those deep sea divers, you can only do it for so long. Eventually you lose it. You can't hold onto it forever. Can you hold onto your body forever? I know you can't. At some point you're going to have to drop this body and go on to whatever else happens after you die. You can't actually hold on to anything, but we have this illusion in our head that we can, that we can hold onto love, that we can hold onto name fame, that we can hold onto wealth and our whole lives. We're rushing around and trying to hold onto things around us so that we'll feel safe so that we'll feel like we have enough.
It's like this protection, but there actually is nothing to hold on to because you can't hold on to anything. Your body, your breath, the only thing you can hold on to is a recognition of your soul, of who you really are, your soul, your peace, that little spark that made you, you. That crazy amalgam of like DNA and you know the big bang and whatever you believe in that brought you here at this point. That's the only thing you can hold on to is your connection to who you really are. And I call that your soul. Everything else you can even hold on to it. So why are you even trying? No wonder we're all so frustrated because we're trying to hold on to stuff that we can't hold onto. Okay, so that gets a little like "out there" But I share that story too about me and my ex husband so that you know, like I'm speaking from a deep well of like pain and hurt. And I still cry over him probably once every other month or so. It just hits me. We did get divorced, but our divorce was very loving. We shared a cab, we shared a lawyer, we shared dinner, we took a walk together, and it was a very loving experience.
You know, years later he did go on and he died from his addiction and it was incredibly sad and it felt incredibly inevitable to me. And I continue to learn how to let go and let go and let go of the hurt and the anger and the fear and the frustration and the deep sadness. I feel over the loss of his incarnation, of his soul in this lifetime. So I share all that so that, you know, like I get it. It ain't easy. But now let's turn the corner. Let's let go of trying to grasp the ungraspable and give you some practical, tangible ways to practice letting go. So this ain't easy. I'm not going to pretend like it is, but there is one very simple thing you can do to train it right away. So often when we're struggling with letting go, we're stuck in our emotion or we're stuck in our heads, right?
We have these like repetitive thought loops. Anyone out there have a repetitive thought loop. I have them like every day and we're stuck in that and so the only way to sometimes shifted the mind and when we're stuck like that is to actually get back in the body and to kind of let the body trick the mind into a different pattern. My favorite way to just do this little like micro mini, tiny practice is just to take an inhale and on the exhale I try and relax my body as fully as I can. Shall we do it right now, my friends? Let's do it right now. Just wherever you are, if you're driving your car, if you're walking, just get yourself like kind of comfy, sit in a nice position just so that you feel relaxed. If you're stretched out, you know, just get yourself aligned. No colossal mental shift here at let's just together take a breath in, exhale and relax everything.
Yeah.
Even if your attention was at a 10 take it to a nine. Just one little shift. Do that again. Take a breath in, exhale and just release the muscles in your face, your arms, your hands, and just do one more. You just take a breath in, let everything be exhale, and just let your physical body soften just a little bit.
There's no need for massive forgiveness here. There's no need for a wrenching letting go. There's just a simple exhale where you start to train yourself in every moment of that exhale to let go. So let go. That's it. It doesn't matter if you snap right back into being angry again or hurt or defensive or whatever, it's fine. Just take another breath and let go. Again. You think about like you're resetting your baseline, right? You're kind of up here attention wise and you're just bringing it down a little bit. You do that for five years and it comes down and down and down and down and down until your natural baseline is just ah, releasing and letting go. Isn't that simple? I mean, come on people. I think every day you could probably take one nice deep breath in on the exhale. You could just not let your issue go, but just let your body relax a little bit.
Imagine if you did that every day for five minutes, what you would feel like in a year. Imagine if caught with the next thing that was kind of getting stuck to you at a thought loop and you could use that technique and it was well grounded. How much more quickly you could let go of things. Can't you picture yourself like a year from now being able to let go of stuff much quicker? Wouldn't that be nice. So just inhale, exhale and let the body release a little bit of tension. That's it. Um, okay. One of my other favorite things to do as a little more of like a little mental yoga. There's this technique in yoga called [inaudible] puck SHA Bahava NA practice puck [inaudible]. These words are so fun to say. Pratt T puck SHA Havana and this just means when you have like a really negative thought, you substitute the opposite.
Positive thought, right? You've got a dark thought. You substitute a light thought so you don't actually have to let go of the dark thought. Isn't that nice? You don't have to let go of it. Just start thinking about the other happy one and focus on that one. So a thing I do a lot. Um, for example, I had a dear, dear colleague of mine, also a dear friend and I loved her so, so deeply, still do, still have a great relationship, but we went through a rough patch about five years ago. Oh my goodness. She was always canceling appointments. We were working on a project together, canceling, canceling, canceling all the time, rescheduling, rescheduling, um, turning in work late, um, not responding to emails. I mean, just on and on. I was trying to get this project done. I was so frustrated and I could feel the project eroding the friendship.
And then I got those thought loops and I knew I needed to let go of my anger and resentment because I knew that she was having issues with add and that the add was like pulling her in a million different directions and she was doing the best that she could and I wanted to keep the friendship and I wanted to keep my peace because I was losing it and that was making the project stall even worse, right? Cause I was coming into everything defensive mode. I knew I needed to let my emotions go. So I did this little trick and I invite you to try it too. I brought that person into my mind and every time I felt that like rise of anger, you know what I'm feeling? I know you have felt this, where you think about that situation, you start to get all heated again and you start to like gossip about it and talk to your family and friends about it and get all heated.
I'd catch myself in that moment and I would have this little phrase I said about her over and over and over. I did this for a year cause I had a lot of emotions. I would say this, may she be happy, may she be healthy, may she be productive, may she be connected to her soul and may I be free from my attachments and every time I would have that like rise of anger or that thought loop and I'd get stuck and I knew I needed to let go of my own drama about the situation, I would force myself to repeat that. It was happening a lot. May she be happy, may she be healthy, may she be productive, may she be connected to her soul. May I be free for my attachment, Even if I was saying an angry, it didn't matter, but a mentally was practicing wishing and not wishing but manifesting the situation to shift by controlling my thoughts.
And that's really what letting go, comes down to is about you, my friend, managing your thoughts about the situation, you shifting things and reframing and wishing that person or that situation. Well, I did the same thing with my ex husband. I said over and over and over again. I release him to his path, I release him to his path, I release him to his path even when I didn't believe it. And it really, really does help. All right, so you've got the deep inhale and exhale with just the body release. Just a little relaxation there. You've got finding a mantra for your situation or person and repeating that every time you feel that thought loop coming up, you can also do a longer extended yoga Neidra. Okay. Total shameless plug here, my friends, but I have a whole series of yoga Neidra deep relaxations. It's called relaxation rescue and there are, I think there's like five 30 minute relaxations. Ones you can do when you can't sleep in the night.
Ones you need to do when you're feeling super stressed out and you need to take a nap, but don't have time. I have two minute deep relaxations on that. When you need that rescue, when you feel yourself getting fired up, but you only have two minutes, you can plug me into your ears any time and just sit there or lay there and I will guide you through the process of learning how to let go of the body. Let go of the mind, let go of the breath so you can dwell at that space where you're sort of just connected to your soul and feel how nourishing that is. I've got those for sale. You can do those. They're awesome. You can also just go on YouTube and literally put in deep relaxation and there are some really good ones on there. I actually did one this morning from someone I'd never done before.
It totally rocked practice. Relaxing your body using the technique of yoga Neidra but in the meantime, find a mantra for the situation. Take an inhale on the exhale, release all that tension from the body. If you practice that, you are training yourself in how to let go. So next time someone else says to you, you really need to let go of that. You can say, you know what? I'm practicing that skill, but practice it separate from the really hot, fiery situation. Just practice it on a daily basis. So when you're called in a crisis, you have that skill right in your back pocket because I'm telling you my friends at the end of the day, we're all going to have to let go of these bodies and I don't know about you, but I would rather do it with a little modicum of grace and practice so that it's an easeful transition for my soul rather than clinging to the very life that I can't even hold on to in the first place. So why bother trying. Relax and enjoy. Okay, so please do your homework. My friends, take a deep breath and exhale and relax your body just a tiny bit. Practice letting go that way. Easy peasy. Let's do a little chant for peace because it's been a heavy topic. Let's bring the energy back up. Let's bring some light into the room. I'm going to do this chant for peace. And then I'll give you the English translation from this beautiful Sanskrit yoga chant at the end.
Locah Samasta sukhino bhavantu
May the entire universe. And you my dear friend to be filled with peace and joy and love and light. I'm sending you lots and lots of love and lots and lots of easy letting go; if and when and if you're ready to. So my friends, if you like this, please share with your friends. Hop on over to Gita, brown.com you can check out my whole series on Relaxation Rescue right there. And I will be right there in your back pocket to help you relax and let go. Any old time that you need me, I'm at your call now. 24/7 isn't that cool? Yogini on call! Okay. My friends, have a beautiful, peaceful day. Lots of love. Om. Shanthi. Peace