The Practice of Letting Go: Why Holding On Keeps You Stuck PART 2

The harder we try to fix something, the more we actually hold on to it.

Take impatience (not speaking from experience, of course!):

You can’t really practice being patient by forcing yourself to be patient. You can, however, become aware of your impatience.

What triggers it? What are you expecting? What happens when things don’t happen as quickly as you want? What pattern have you developed around needing things to happen now?

Letting go isn’t about forcing yourself to stop being impatient. It’s about understanding what is underneath the impatience. The same can be true physically. “No pain, no gain” has no place in chronic pain. Forcing a nervous system that already feels threatened isn’t necessarily going to make it feel safer.

We don’t learn safety by forcing ourselves into the deepest end, hoping we’ll adapt. We learn through experiences that our nervous system can actually process.

Small steps, manageable movement, attention, breathing, repetition and evidence.

Letting go doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean surrendering nor accepting that you’ll always be in pain. It means accepting where you are today. It means letting go of what you used to be able to do, of the fear of what might happen. Letting go of the need to control every sensation, of some of the tension you’ve been holding.

Sometimes it means allowing yourself to feel the pain without immediately fighting it, taking a breath. Relaxing around it. Observing it and noticing what happens.

Does it change? Does it move? Does it soften? Does it dissipate? You are not giving the pain permission to stay. You’re giving yourself permission to stop fighting it for a moment. And that can be a surprisingly different experience.

I worked with someone experiencing very acute shoulder pain.

The pain was affecting their ability to make a living. They were frightened for the future and were full of tension. They had spent a lot of time and money looking for answers and had been told that there was nothing structurally wrong with their shoulder and to keep stretching and resting. They came to me desperate.

We started by looking at the evidence. Together, we looked at the scans and the facts. We looked at the information from their medical team.

Their body was structurally sound, that didn’t mean nothing was happening. The stress, tension and worry were very real, and this was acknowledged and understood. The pain was also real!

So we started gently, we explored movement, paid attention to the pain rather than immediately fighting it. We used breathing, worked with small movements and gave their body opportunities to experience something different. We observed without fearing the pain by gently providing signals of safety.

Slowly, they began to realize something. Their body could move, the pain could change. They could move without the pain they had been expecting.

Something else happened. They started to believe there was hope and with that hope came results. The tension began to release. They could breathe more easily, move better and sleep better. Their confidence began to return slowly.

This is what letting go can look like. Sometimes you can actually see it. There’s a smile… a deeper breath. More freedom in the movement. A little less fear.

And it’s simply the moment when someone realizes: “Maybe I don’t have to hold on so tightly anymore.”

Sometimes, letting go is emotional.

It can be powerful to tell yourself: “I’m safe. I’m okay. I don’t have to hold everything so tightly.”

You can fully fill up your lungs, relax a little. You can take a slightly bigger step. You can test something you’ve been afraid to test. Not because you’re forcing yourself to get better. But because you’re giving yourself the opportunity to discover what happens when you stop protecting yourself in quite the same way.

Letting go isn’t about doing less. It’s about fighting less, understanding what you’re holding, why you’re holding it, and whether you still need to hold it in the same way.

Because the things that once protected you may not be the things you need to protect you now.

Letting go is one great first step to take!

And for me it’s beautiful to witness.