Table of Contents
Why Is Letting Go So Difficult?
Well, if you have a past lover you always think about. Or had someone you love betray you. Or if you suffer from the injustice of a great crime against you. Or maybe you’re carrying a grief that gnaws in your gut that you don’t talk about. These – and things like these – can have a grip on us so tight that our hearts and minds can’t let it go. These things live in us, but they’re not healthy for us and learning how to let go of things that don’t serve us is crucial to living a high quality life.
We have an ego, and the role of the ego is to build our identity around – among other things – our suffering. And suffering can be seductive because it’s a convenient and familiar way to live inside our world without having to face our pain – making it easy for suffering to take root in our hearts and minds. Suffering gives us the certainty that there’s something or someone to blame. But every false identity that we build around pain will eventually rise to the surface of our life to seek healing. And that healing can begin when you become more committed to the truth than to the story you’ve been telling yourself.
The moments of release are some of the most powerful moments in our life.
The moments of putting something down. Of letting the grip loosen. Of discovering that the thing you have been carrying — the story, the grievance, the identity, the fear — does not actually have to be carried. That you were the one deciding to carry it. And that you can decide otherwise.
This is the art of letting go. And it is an art, not a technique. It cannot be forced. It can only be practiced.
What Does Letting Go Mean?
Letting go is not forgetting. It is not pretending that something did not happen or that it did not matter. It is not the performance of acceptance, and it is not some ‘mind over matter’ decision to no longer be affected.
Letting go is the moment when you stop spending energy maintaining the space where the trauma lives in you. When you recognize that the grip was always voluntary — that you were the one choosing, consciously or not, to keep the thing in the position of defining you. And when that recognition arrives, something releases. Not the memory, not the history, not even sometimes the feeling. But the energy that was going into holding on.
That energy, when it is released, is extraordinary. People who have done significant letting go work describe a quality of lightness that is almost physical. Not happiness necessarily. Not the absence of difficulty. Room where there was not room before.
Letting go is the moment when you stop spending energy maintaining the space where trauma lives in you.
What the Medicine Shows You About Holding On
Natural psychedelics are very good at helping emotions that are stuck rise to the surface to seek healing.
In our daily awareness, the things we are holding on to are often so much a part of the background that we cannot see them. The resentment we’re holding on to has been present so long it feels like a feature of our everyday emotional landscape rather than a choice we are making. Our identity — our ego; the story of who we are and what happened to us — feels like a forgone conclusion of our reality rather than a position we are actively choosing and maintaining.
When working with plant medicines as part of your spiritual development, these forgone conclusions become visible as choices and not as carved in stone facts. The medicine shows you – and not always gently – what has a grip on you. Sometimes with the kind of direct, unambiguous clarity that is only available when the ordinary protective structures of the self have temporarily stepped aside can we now observe and work with the pain in a safe way.
That seeing — that recognition of what holding to that pain has cost you — is frequently what makes letting go possible. Not the intention to release. The actual, felt encounter with what the grip of that trauma has been doing to your life.
Surrender Is Not Weakness
The word surrender is frequently misunderstood, particularly in cultures that conflate surrender with defeat.
In a plant medicine ceremony, surrender is not defeat. It is the most skilled and courageous thing a person can do. It is the decision to stop fighting the medicine’s direction, to stop trying to manage the experience toward a predetermined outcome, to let what is arising actually arrive.
And it is the hardest thing for most people to do. Particularly people who have built their lives around control. Around consistency and competence. Around the management of how they appear and predictable outcomes. For these people, the invitation by plant medicine to surrender in ceremony is not comfortable. It feels like the thing they have spent years learning not to do.
But the people who can surrender — who can genuinely let the medicine of psilocybin or DMT lead rather than trying to lead the medicine — consistently have the deepest experiences. Not the most beautiful necessarily. The deepest. The ones that actually change something and improve their lives.
Because what you are surrendering to in ceremony is not defeat. You are surrendering to your own deeper knowing. To the intelligence that the medicine surfaces when your defense system is lowered. To the part of you that has always known what needed to be released and has been waiting, patiently, for the conditions in which you could finally put it down.
The Daily Practice of Release
Ceremony is the deep water. But the art of letting go can be practiced every day in the shallower water of ordinary life.
Every time a resentment arises and you notice it before you follow it, you have an opportunity. Not to suppress it. To feel it fully, ask what it is protecting, and make a conscious decision about whether you want to keep carrying it.
Every time you catch yourself repeating an old story about yourself — I always do this, this never works for me, I am not the kind of person who amazing things happen to — you have an opportunity. To notice that you are the one telling the story. And that stories can be set down.
This is what the medicine teaches in ceremony and what it hopes you will take home: that release is not a one-time event. It is a practice. A daily, ordinary, unglamorous practice of noticing what you are carrying, asking whether you chose this or whether it accumulated without your awareness, and making the deliberate decision about what to put down.
The ceremony breaks the ground for this practice. Every ordinary day is where the practice actually lives.
May Love Guide The Heart of All Beings.
If the medicine is asking something of you, you were never meant to walk it alone. Wherever you are on the path, you are welcome here.
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May Love Guide The Heart of All Beings.
