THE physical acts of letting go

This month we’ve been considering the importance of finding meaning and purpose in the challenges we face. We’ve spent some time ‘telling the story’, and in that acknowledging some of the things that have been gained and some of the things that might have been lost. 

Spending time letting go of some of our challenges and uncomfortable emotions can be an important step in us forming meaning and purpose. Our resources last week encouraged us to find greater clarity about what our experiences have been, and this week we want to focus on what it might look like to ‘let go’ of anything that has left us feeling burdened, overwhelmed or unable to ‘move on’. 

Letting go isn’t easy. We’re wired to hold on. But letting go will allow us to move forward with greater clarity and purpose.

Emotions are abstract; we can’t touch them or hold them in our hands. We find the abstract difficult to deal with, and we therefore might benefit from making the abstract concrete, real, physical. 

Writing emotions down, making a plasticine model, drawing a picture of something, holding an object that represents the abstract could all help. 

And then we may need to find a way of discarding it. 

Burning, shredding, ripping, burying, breaking are all physical acts that might help to tell our brain that the thing that’s been difficult can be gone. 

TRY THIS…

Here’s some physical actions that might connect with the idea of letting go. Why not give or two a try?

• Write things down, using colours to bring more life to your emotions and then shred the paper

• Make a plasticine model to represent what has been difficult, and then purposely remould it into something new

• Gather some belongings that represent an event or situation you want to move on from, box them up and send them off to a charity shop or is it’s safe, burn them. 

• Taking a stone, holding it and feeling the weight of it as a representation of any emotional weightiness you might feel. Dropping or throwing the stone into a stream, or body of water as a way of releasing it. 

A physical act like this is an event. Something we can remind ourselves of, and tell others about; something that forms part of the story we are writing. 

Our brains compute real events, concrete objects far better than the abstract, and rituals like these can therefore be powerful in readying our brain to move on. 

This weekend will be full of symbols of new life; bunnies, eggs, lambs. Symbols of hope against a backdrop of something far darker. New things are easier to receive when we’ve made room for them, letting go of anything that’s unhelpful from our past. 

Consider

What do you want or need to let go of?

What ritual would be helpful to you?