112: How to Let Go

laura: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships and its hidden costs and shadows in a world where other people, where we build walls, we sit hair down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey friends, welcome back to a podcast all about how to make the things we value, like love, like courage, like wholeness. I'm Laura and I'm really glad you're here. I was reflecting recently that so many of the episodes of this podcast and the guests on this podcast reference this notion of letting go.
I reference it as important all the time. It comes up in a lot of our conversations, and yet, holy smokes, I've never done a full episode on it. So today we are going to tackle letting go, why it's essential, why it's really fucking hard, how to do it when it's time to do it, all that sort of stuff. But I want to say this is a framing and I'll explain a little bit more about it later in the episode. Letting go isn't just about people, it's about systems, identities, expectations and illusions that we've built our entire lives around. Sometimes this is about the kind of letting go that frees us personally, politically, spiritually and collectively. That's the sort of letting go we're going to be talking about today. So let's start with story time. I remember the moment that I knew my marriage was over.
It wasn't especially dramatic. It was actually a really quiet moment. Right after a long conversation, the door clicked shut behind me and I was standing in the hallway and I remember just feeling kind of shocked by the silence around me, the silence inside me, the silence in the house. And I had this realization that I was the only one still gripping to the idea that we could figure this out. And I had this thought if I let go of this, this marriage, this identity, what's going to be left of me? Because I wasn't just holding onto relationship, I was holding onto a whole self, a version of me that kept promises who believed that love had to be enough and it could be enough if we just loved hard enough who had built a life and a future and a home, and even in some cases a spiritual identity all around this marriage vow and this human that I had been with for almost 20 years.
And I was holding on because it felt like that version of me, if I let go, might die. And to be honest, I'm not totally sure she didn't. People talk about letting go like it's some kind of liberation and it is, but for me it wasn't freeing, at least not for a really long while. It was devastating and I'm still in it and still grieving and still wondering who I am without that life and that role and that dream and that human. And maybe what hurts the most I think, is that I didn't just lose a partner. I lost a version of myself that I really loved and I'm still not sure I've let go of her. But here's why I'm talking about this now, because letting go is usually not some neat linear process. It is messy, it's unfinished. Sometimes it never feels good, and yet it's still really necessary because if we don't learn how to release people roles, illusions, power control, then we keep living from our grip of fear and not from our truth.
And we're in a world right now where that sort of gripping has real consequences where the inability to let go of being right or of power or of control or of capital is costing lives. Where letting go isn't about ease, it's about ethics, it's about courage. It's about not becoming what we say we really fundamentally oppose. So this episode is about that kind of letting go, not the graceful kind, not the romanticized kind, but the kind that's probably going to gut you, but it also might just be the only path forward and probably the one that points to deliberation.
So let's clarify some misconceptions right off the bat here. Letting go is not giving up. It's not passive, it's not pretending that you don't care and it is not erasing what was or bypassing the pain, the very valid and real pain that you feel or that someone else might be feeling. Letting go means releasing your grip on something that's no longer true or maybe never was. It means loosening the way that you are holding on to illusions of control or attachments to certain identities or roles or outcomes that are keeping you that sort of grip and that control on those things is keeping you from being whole. Letting go is not disengagement. It is a sort of re-engagement, but with reality, with the way that things are, with truth, with presence, with freedom, with your courage. It's how we stop contorting ourselves to fit a world or a relationship or a belief or a context that just no longer fits us.
And in this political climate, it's also how we stop reproducing control and dominance and harm and violence and this sort of white knuckled righteousness, this fear-based righteousness in our actions and our movements that comes from just clinging on to the safety of the things that we know typically at the expense of many, many others. Letting go is choosing to stop reenacting that supremacy in our own lives and in the lives of others. It's a spiritual sort of disarmament, like a refusal to keep performing the illusion of safety by gripping to the things that are enacting harm against others and against ourselves. So letting go isn't just this personal practice, it is also a collective practice. It's also a political practice and it is also an urgent practice. We live in a world unraveling from its own refusal to let go, refusal to let go of fossil fuels, refusal to let go of white dominance and white supremacy, refusal to let go of binaries and borders and empire and capital refusal let go of control.
We see it in every institution clinging to these outdated values to preserve power, and we see it in every moment that someone justifies violence in order to preserve their illusion of identity or control. We see it in ourselves when we refuse to grieve or to change or to evolve or to forgive. Letting go is a counter practice and it makes space for grief and it makes space for truth and it makes space for transformation. Personally, letting go helps us stop performing. I think it helps us stop pretending and stop burning out and services something that we no longer believe in or that no longer makes us feel whole or that is no longer good to us. It makes space for a more honest version of ourselves even if that version is cracked open and uncertain and raw. So if letting go is so powerful and so liberatory, why is it so fucking hard?
Why do most of us avoid it even when we know it's time? Why do we continue to keep suffering in order to hold on? Well, I've got a handful of reasons for you. Number one, we confuse control with safety. Control is a really powerful illusion. It makes us feel like if we just try harder, if we just say the right thing or if we just enact the right mechanism or if we just stay visible or stay small or stay perfect or whatever it is, we can protect ourselves and the ones we love. So we grip people, we grip titles, we grip identities, we grip plans, dreams. Letting go often feels like stepping into free fall and most of us were never taught the skills for how to navigate that kind of groundlessness in our lives. So there's a legitimate fear and avoidance because we don't know how to take that leap skillfully, and I don't want you to lose.
The main part of this control is a cheap drug with a really, really powerful high. You get the delusion of believing that you're safe and in a world of chaos and violence and confusion, I mean I think most of us would pay and are paying a really big cost for that kind of high, but control and safety are not the same. And my friends, I hate to break it to us, but we will never get to safety by using control. Another reason we avoid letting go or why it's just so damn hard is because we're largely afraid of grief in this society. Letting go requires that we mourn not just what we're releasing, but the dreams attached to it, the identities attached to it, the imagined futures attached to it and grief is really holy, but it can also be brutal to feel. So we stall the release to delay the pain and I think that makes a ton of sense.
It doesn't justify it, but it makes a ton of sense. Another reason letting go is so hard is that many of us have internalized this lie that staying means we're really strong. It's a sort of strength, especially for those of us who are raised as women or caregivers or leaders. We are typically praised for staying, for fixing, for enduring. That is especially true for women of color. Letting go can feel like failure, like we're giving up or we're quitting or we're abandoning something or someone. But what if quitting something false is actually one of the most sacred things that we can do and it is separate from our notion of strength. I say this with love and humility, but there's nothing especially strong about staying in that harms us or harms those around us. Or if it is strong, I'm not sure it's the kind of strength we want.
So I think we have to be willing to redefine how we orient to strength and where we derive our sense of strength. And maybe it's even time for us to redefine our definition of strength. I'm going to give you two more reasons letting go of so fucking hard. And one is that we are all of us typically in this society addicted to certainty. Letting go means facing the unknown. Who am I if I'm not this thing or this relationship? What's going to happen to me if I stop fighting? I think this is a really big one. What if nothing better comes next? And so we stay not because we are aligned, but because we are afraid. And my friends, I am not judging. I've told you before and I really mean it. I write these episodes based on what I'm going through in my life, the medicine that I need for myself, for my own practice of courage and liberation.
And the single biggest cause for why I don't let go of things in my life or identities in my life or people or relationships is because I am terrified. So we can all have a little compassion for ourselves and that's not a pass on the work here. So this last one, it's a whopper. We don't let go because we confuse attachment with love. This one's hard to admit, but sometimes we don't let go because we think that holding onto something or someone proves something like our loyalty or our goodness or our love and our culture has sold us a ton of bullshit. We think real love martyrs itself, but it doesn't. Real love releases. It honors truth more than comfort In some ways. I still feel like I had the most incredible wife and marriage on the planet, even in the fact that I got divorced.
And that's largely because when the moment came and we had to choose, Angie and I chose wholeness for ourselves and for one another and it wasn't pretty. It was full of snot and tears and weeping and fear, a ton of fear for me. The thing is we could have stayed, we had been staying, we could have made it work and we had been making it work. We knew how to survive. We had almost 20 years of really good practice and a super loving relationship that had taught us how to survive hard stuff, but it would've cost both of us too much to stay. And that is many things, but it's not exactly liberatory love. So we chose to let go, not because the love wasn't real, but because it was so real and so beautiful. And I'm still grieving years later, but I am also deeply, deeply grateful because I was loved so fully and so courageously that when we had tried everything and finally reached the edge, she said, you have to be whole and so do I.
And I said it back, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done and it was also one of the most loving what made it so hard besides the grief were all the ways that we had both internalized. Attachment is love. Attachment is safety, attachment is survival. Attachment is a way of trying to earn worth or avoid abandonment or stay good in each other's eyes or prove to one another that we loved each other beyond anything else in the world but love, real love, radical love. It doesn't ask someone to disappear for you and it doesn't ask yourself to disappear for someone else. It asks us to tell the truth to one another and to make space for one another's freedom even when it costs us our fantasy. Now, that doesn't have to mean the end of a relationship or for that matter of an organization or of an institution, but it does have to mean that in order to stay and to do that in healthy freedom-based ways, we're going to have to change who we are and we're going to have to let go of some fantasies. So letting go. It is some of the most challenging work that any of us can do will do. And again, it's not just relationally, it's politically, societally, socially, institutionally, systemically. There are so many things that we're attached to we're using to feel safe or using to avoid grief or using to avoid accountability. And those things are robbing us of our one precious life. And if we can be brave enough to see it denying those around us, their wholeness and liberation too.
So if you're struggling to let go, it's not because you're weak, it's because you are hardwired for safety. You don't want to feel pain and because you've been taught some wrong definitions of strength and none of that is your fault, we've all received that conditioning. Letting go is hard. That's why it is a practice. So let's talk about when we know it's time, when we know it's time to let go, and then how in the world do we do it? Here are some clues that it might be time to let go when holding on is hurting you or others. When clinging requires you to portray your values when you're staying out of fear, not alignment, when your grip is about control instead of care and when the fantasy is costing more than the truth. When I say fantasy, it's like the idea of who we could be with someone or a fantasy about the future.
And I don't mean fantasy as in unrealistic, I just mean as in not real or not real yet and maybe never real. These are the signs in relationships or in activism or in identity and in the collective sense. Here are a few more signs when we're clinging to incrementalism while people die. That is very much the time place we are living in right now as genocide has continued to be enacted around us in many places of the world. When we're clinging to politeness while fascism rises and when we are clinging to ideals of unity that protect privilege over truth. Letting go is not abandoning people. It is abandoning illusions that harm people and I think that's the single most important thing I could say. So I'm going to repeat it. Here's the takeaway for this episode that we're not done yet. Letting go is not abandoning people.
It is abandoning illusions that harm people. So how do we practice this? This podcast isn't just about concepts, it's about the ability to live those concepts out to make the things we value and practice. So I'm going to offer six different ways that you might practice letting go as a mechanism of liberation and none of these actually require you to let go. I'll say more about that at the end, but these are like six micro practices that will help you build your skills at different aspects of letting go. Number one, build a practice of naming the grip you have on something. So ask, what am I holding onto or why or what am I afraid to feel if I let the thing go? Get in the habit of having that conversation with yourself whether you change anything or not. That's a practice of learning to have strong discernment, being able to see what's happening, see that you're gripping something and call it out again, separate from taking action against it, but at least developing the ability to call it out.
Another way to practice the micro skills of letting go is take knowledge, the cost. What is the cost that you are paying? What's this grip on whatever it is, the fantasy, the illusion, this part of my identity, this relationship, what is it costing me? How is it impacting my health, my integrity, my connection, my sense of alignment to myself, my capacity, love, or to lead or to care for others? Acknowledging the cost without izing. It is a part of practicing honesty with ourselves. And again, it doesn't require us to let the thing go. It's just a lens and a filter and a skill that we need to be building because if we can't tell ourselves the truth, there's no hope of breaking the patterns that keep us from our liberation in the first place. Next, sorry, booze, but this comes up over and over and so many of our episodes.
A part of the way to practice letting go is to learn how to grieve, to grieve what you thought it was. Let yourself more in the story or the hope or the fantasy that you had or the version of you who needed it. And again, you can do this step just like the others. You can do this without taking any kind of dramatic action. And in some ways letting go can be eventually made much easier if you're learning to metabolize the grief first or along the way. Another way to practice letting go is to work on loosening your grit. I think this is a really important one, not all at once, but practice like a pause, a breath, a moment of softening. Let go in one small physical way today. If you can work to create just a little bit more space in how tightly you grasp at something, whether it's a response to someone or whether it's an idea of what's right or wrong or whether it's a way that you're parenting or in a relationship, start to notice how tight your grip is and then try to work on loosening it just a bit more.
Number five, learn to practice acting from release. What decision would you make if you weren't gripping this? How would you speak or move or choose differently? Just give yourself the space, the freedom to consider these things. Again, you don't have to go actually engage the release, I'm just asking you to build this habit of looking at things from a lens of liberation instead of from the condition lens of attachment or fear. This is going to help you build your skills of letting go in the future, and it's probably going to help you avoid future scenarios of getting hooked to safety or control in the first place because you're already in the practice of learning to think and act and be release and openness and freedom and spaciousness. And last, if and when you decide to release the thing if and when you decide to let go.
Something that often helps a lot of people is to ritualize it, to write a letter and burn it to say the name of what you're releasing out loud to go be in or near water, to let yourself witness the moment where you choose to let go and honor the fuck out of that moment. Now again, I just want to reiterate that none of these six practices actually require you to let anything go. You can and you should work on all of these skills and dispositions knowing that you don't actually have to let go of anything. I don't necessarily recommend holding on to all the things, but I name it to say You don't have an excuse not to work on these skills, not to build these skills because I'm not asking you to go and make any big decisions. These are practices independent of the outcomes.
I am just asking you to build the skills and see what happens in and for your life and in for our collective life. Letting go is love because it says, I trust you. I don't need to own you or control you in order to love you. Letting go is courage because it means stepping into the unknown without all your old armor let go is liberation because it makes space for what is true, what is next, what is needed. We are not free when we are gripping my friends. We are not just when we're controlling and we're not loving when we are dominating, letting go might not feel good. In fact, it might not ever feel good. I can't tell you that it's going to get easier, but it can be holy, it can be honest, and sometimes it's the only path to becoming who we truly are.
We're not letting go to punish ourselves. We are letting go to make space for our wholeness. So two opportunities to noodle as I let you go, pun intended, number one. One, am I still clinging to because I'm afraid? And number two, what might become possible if I let go? Remember y'all letting go doesn't mean you stop caring. Letting go is not giving up. It doesn't mean the firm end of something more than anything else. It is about becoming and becoming free. And now more than ever, we need to learn the skills in our individual lives and our relationships so we know how to build a context of choice and freedom and love for the collective. So go to the symbolic gym and start getting those reps in. I will see you next month, my friends, and until then, let go and let love. Bye for now.