Wisdom of autumn season.
‘Let it go’: in Disney’s blockbuster Frozen it all sounds easy and appealing, but when the going gets tough in the non-Disney world – which happens to all of us, from time to time – how do you do ‘letting go’?
Well… You don’t. Allow me to explain my view on one of the most popular terms in psychology & mindfulness.
How I see it, letting go is not something to be done or achieved. There is no from-A-to-B ‘how to’ when it comes to this matter. After all, this would imply there is effort and force in the game to make something – or some result – happen or disappear. Can you see the irony, here? It brings us further away from the true nature of letting go, loosening up. When you dig deeper into its core, letting go can perhaps be better phrased as ‘letting be’: a sense of deep acceptance and surrender to how life is unfolding in this moment. Trusting that – in the bigger picture of life – every experience has its place, lesson or value. It means loosening your grip and giving up any attempt to manipulate the situation or forcefully make something happen. And from that place of presence, you can finally free up your focused energy that had been tightly wrapped around the subject you so badly wanted to get rid of, and choose to guide it toward situations, things and people that deeply nourish you. Fun fact? It works the other way around too: when we are connected to our essence – the core of who we really are and the life we want to live – anything that’s not supportive of that, tends to fall away quite naturally. Letting go is getting out of the way – your own way and the way of life – and allowing yourself to drop into a soft free fall, full of trust that things will fall into place in their own time and manner. From this perspective letting go is less of a doing, more of a being. Or for the music lovers amongst us: less Frozen, more Beatles. 🙂
Now, in case this makes you wonder if we should all become passive life adventurers: Not at all. Of course we always have the power to choose. If something negatively impacts us, or the people around us, and we have control over the situation: why not make a change? But sometimes life humbles us and asks us to acknowledge that we are not always in the driver’s seat. In that case, we can turn to specific practices that can help us to accept and let go of accumulated tension. Not necessarily to get rid of the situation, feeling or worry – that often doesn’t work and creates even more tension in the body and mind – but to make space for reality, acceptance and new, creative possibilities. Yin yoga, breathwork and tapping – an emotional release technique – are incredibly effective tools for this!
Releasing something you have no control over or that is weighing you down, can of course be done throughout the whole year. But autumn is the creme-de-la-creme season, where that sense of letting go is reinforced by nature. In order to contain its energy for the upcoming, cold winter season, a tree extracts the sap from its leaves, and brings it right back to its core: the trunk and the roots. As a consequence the essence of the tree is being nourished, but the leaves slowly start to loose their liveliness. So the tree sheds the leaves. The same holds for us humans: if you aim to take good care of your well-being in winter season, it’s important to reserve your energy and get yourself prepared in autumn. This implies guiding your energy back to your roots, your essence – that what makes you really you – and letting go of anything else.
SOL - Yoga with Melanie 