The Art of Letting Go

Letting go means loosening your hold on how things ought to be. You keep feeling what you feel, and you can still act on what matters to you. What eases is the demand that life match the picture in your head. Acceptance is the moment you take in what is here as it is. Equanimity is the steadiness that follows when this becomes a habit, close to what the Stoics meant by apatheia: a mind no longer thrown about by things it cannot control, which for them never meant a mind without feeling.

The next step is the one most advice skips. Peter Russell, in his book Letting Go of Nothing, observes that what we get stuck on is rarely a problem sitting in front of us right now. It is usually a thought about the problem: an interpretation, a belief, an expectation. A grip on a thought can loosen in a way a grip on a fact cannot. Loosening is also different from pushing a feeling away, and the research further down suggests that pushing feelings down tends to go with more distress, not less.

What the grip is made of

The psychologist Gail Brenner describes attachment as a set of expectations. We have a picture of how our life should go and we feel we need it to hold: the partner stays, the children stay small, the body refuses to age, tragedy never strikes. When life goes another way, the attachment turns into resistance, and resistance is where she places the suffering.

wanting it one waylife goes another wayresisting what happenedsuffering

She gives two pictures from her work with older people. A 92-year-old woman, in a nursing home after a fall and unlikely ever to see her own house again, told her quietly, “I’m not attached.” She had learned it as a girl, after her mother died, and said it had left her free to live fully because she was no longer afraid of losing or gaining. Another woman, 88, losing her sight and barely able to cross a room, spent her days wishing her life back to what it had been. Both were losing a great deal. What Brenner saw between them was how much of each day went to fighting it.

Brenner’s own questions are a good place to start. Are you weighed down by hopes and expectations? Are you resisting what is here? Neither asks you to stop wanting anything. They ask you to notice where the wanting has hardened into a demand.

A sitting practice for letting go

This sitting works with one thing you are holding. It borrows from several places: Thich Nhat Hanh’s habit of calming the body before turning toward a hard feeling, Brenner’s questions, and the old Stoic sorting of what is yours to act on.

1. Settle before you look. Sit so that you feel light rather than braced. Let the breath slow on its own. Feel the weight of your body on the seat and the cool air at the nostrils. Thich Nhat Hanh taught that once we are calm we can look into a hard emotion and see its roots, so give the calm a few minutes first.
2. Name the thing and the picture. Bring to mind what you are holding. Then say to yourself, in one sentence, how you want it to be: she calls, or this never happened. That second sentence is the grip.
3. Find it in the body. Holding on often shows up as tension in the jaw, the shoulders or the stomach, which Therapy Central reads as the body bracing against what it cannot change. Rest your attention there. There is no need to make it relax.
4. Separate now from then. Ask whether the feeling comes from something happening in this moment or from something you are still carrying from the past. Then notice how much of the weight is a story about what will happen next. Often most of it is thought, and you can feel the difference between the thought and the room you are sitting in.
5. Set down the demand, keep the feeling. Let the sadness or the anger stay as it is. What you put down is the insistence that things be otherwise. Brenner calls this “receiving what is happening, without resisting,” and Stephen Levine described letting any feeling arise “without closing around it.”
6. Ask what is yours. If something in the situation is in your hands, a phone call or an apology, name the next small step. The rest you leave where it belongs.

Some days the grip won’t move at all. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of beginning to let go of what belongs to the past, which is a gentler verb than most of us use on ourselves. The same holds for forgiveness: you can forgive and then feel the anger come back, and that return is part of the process rather than proof it failed.

Letting go in the middle of a day

The sitting is practice for smaller moments. Ellie Ballentine suggests starting with something as ordinary as a change of plans, and not reacting to it right away. The train is late, or someone says no. There is a half second where the jaw tightens and the mind starts arguing with what already happened.

That half second is the place to work. Feel the tightening, and ask yourself what you are fighting that you cannot change. The Stoics drew this line long ago: other people and nature are outside your control, and your own will is inside it. Sorting a situation that way takes a breath or two, and it often shows that the thing you were bracing against was never yours to fix.

The Five Remembrances

In a Plum Village talk called The Art of Letting Go, Brother Ngộ Không teaches letting go through the Five Remembrances, a short contemplation from Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition. In substance it says: I will grow old, I will get sick, I will die, and I cannot escape any of these. Everyone and everything I love will change, and I will be separated from them. My actions are what I inherit, and they are what continues after me.

Read the lines slowly, one at a time, and pause after each. Notice where the mind pulls back or reaches for something else to think about. That pulling back is the grip, met in its oldest form. The fifth line turns you round at the end. After four statements about what you cannot keep, it names the one thing that stays yours.

What the traditions share

Nonattachment turns up across Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Stoicism, the Baháʼí Faith and Christian spirituality. In Buddhist and Hindu texts its opposite has a name, upādāna, attachment, treated as the main obstacle to a serene life. Each tradition adds something of its own:

• Hinduism: detachment applies to the results of your actions, and you stay responsible and active. The Bhagavad Gita (5.10) says such a person stays clean, as “the lotus is untouched by muddy water.”
• Stoicism: the only thing you control is your own will. The Stoic sage aimed at freedom from being driven by outside events, and the reward was contentment and good feeling, never numbness.
• Zen: the Chinese term wú niàn means “no thought.” In Hui-neng’s Platform Sutra it describes a mind that thoughts pass through without staining it. Thinking goes on.
• Ignatian Christianity: it is called indifference, and its purpose is to leave a person more available to God and to other people.
• Taoism: chapter 44 of the Tao Te Ching asks you to be content with what you have and to “rejoice in the way things are.”

Eckhart Tolle, in his foreword to Russell’s book, adds a warning. The old renunciants, from India’s sadhus to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, gave up possessions, comfort and relationships, and some of them then built a new identity out of having given it all up. The self they meant to starve came back dressed as a spiritual one. For Tolle the letting go that counts is inward: you stop taking the voice in your head to be you.

Stephen Levine put the same point gently. Non-attachment, he wrote, leaves desire in place. What it adds is room, so that any thought or feeling can come up without you closing around it.

an active receptivity to life

Accepting and still acting

The common fear is that acceptance means giving up. Most of the traditions above say the opposite: the Gita asks for action, and the Ignatian aim is availability. Accepting that something happened is different from approving of it, a distinction Therapy Central draws from the radical acceptance taught in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. You can accept that a friendship ended and still set a boundary, still grieve, still wish the person well.

Psychology has a name for this combination. Kashdan and Rottenberg (2010) describe psychological flexibility as a set of abilities: noticing what a situation asks and adapting to it, changing course when a habit of mind starts costing you, keeping the main parts of life in balance, and staying aware and open while committing to actions that fit what you value. Openness and commitment sit in the same definition. In many forms of psychopathology, they write, these processes are missing.

Letting go also doesn’t mean swapping a bad feeling for a good one. Ciarrochi and colleagues (2016) looked at the charge that positive psychology programmes push people toward positive states and neglect hard experiences. Their review suggests the charge may hold, but only for programmes that focus almost entirely on changing the content of what people feel. Letting go works on the grip and leaves the content alone.

What the research shows, and where it stops

None of the studies here tests “letting go” as a single thing. The closest evidence comes from work on how people handle their emotions, and it points one way.

• Suppression and rumination go with more distress. Aldao and colleagues (2010) combined 241 effect sizes from 114 studies on six habitual strategies and four kinds of disorder. Rumination had the strongest link to symptoms, with avoidance and suppression close behind. The link for acceptance was smaller, which the authors found surprising given how central acceptance is to some therapies.
• The pattern holds in young people. Across 212 studies and 80,850 participants, Compas and colleagues (2017) found that suppression, avoidance and denial went with more symptoms, while emotion regulation and adaptive coping went with fewer.
• Depression looks like a mind that can’t let go. Gotlib and Joormann (2010) describe depression as marked by trouble disengaging from negative material and by going over it again and again. That reads close to a clinical portrait of being stuck.
• Feeling is part of the work. In persistent pain, Lumley and colleagues (2011) found that more pain went with emotional stress and with limited awareness and expression of emotion. They call for research on when to damp negative emotions down and when to feel and express them.
• Mindfulness training helps anxiety and low mood. Hofmann and colleagues (2010) pooled 39 studies with 1,140 participants and found moderate improvements in anxiety and mood from before to after mindfulness-based therapy, with larger gains in people diagnosed with anxiety and mood disorders.

Most of these studies measure people’s usual style and correlate it with symptoms, so they can’t show that a practice of letting go causes anything. Hofmann’s figures compare people with themselves before and after, and the samples are clinical. The fair reading is modest: gripping, suppressing and replaying tend to travel with suffering, open and flexible responding tends to travel with less of it, and mindfulness training has some support for anxiety and mood. A direct test of letting go is still missing.

If the replaying won’t stop and low mood is crowding out your days, a doctor or therapist is the right next step.

Tolle offers a test for progress that is easy to check. You grow less reactive with hard people and situations, and thought “loses its capacity to make you unhappy.” It says nothing about feeling detached or serene. It asks whether the same old thought, arriving again tomorrow, still has the same hold on you.