One of the most underestimated tools for greater joy, peace, fulfilment and success is surrendering and letting go. Very often this notion is confused with giving up, becoming complacent, or resignation.
Instead, letting go and surrendering is a very natural way of processing your emotions and energy blockages.
In this article, let’s explore how you can surrender and let go of the inner blockages.
Dealing with Emotions
According to David R Hawkins, the physician, researcher and spiritual teacher, the usual processes we use to deal with our emotions are:
Suppression: We ignore our bodily sensations consciously because we are afraid of what emotions will come up, and don’t believe that we can handle it.
Repression: We unconsciously block our emotions, we push away difficult thoughts or feelings.
Expression: We vent, cry, shout, scream, express our emotions and believing that this will help us to let go.
Escapism: We escape our feelings through distractions: shopping, drugs/ alcohol, phone scrolling, TV….
Most of us haven’t learned how else to process emotions fully. Either we ignore them, talk about it, or escape them. This seems to partly ‘work’, we might feel better for a bit, or feel that we have managed our emotions - yet, there is almost always some residue of emotion and energy that is left unprocessed.
Over time, we have more and more unprocessed, blocked energies. This can result in mental or physical illnesses, stress, dissatisfaction, frustration…
The method David R Hawkins explains in his book: ‘Letting Go’ provides a healthier, more complete alternative to processing emotions.
In the podcast, The Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson and his cohost also discuss the power of our emotions and how to surrender to our emotions, and allow for higher vibrations of emotions.
Letting Go
I first came accross the concept of ‘letting go’ when listening to Michael Singer. His books: The Untethered Soul, The Surrender Experiment and Living Untethered all encouraged letting go, and surrendering.
Though I sort of understood what he meant, and I tried at times to accept, and let go when I felt that I was clinging for a specific outcome, or didn’t accept a current situation; it wasn’t until I read ‘Letting Go’ by David Hawkins that it truly clicked and I was able to practise this.
We have a tendency to undervalue principles and techniques that seem too simple -
This is how the technique works:
Emotion awareness: First you sit in silence and notice your emotions in the body. If you are not used to practising this, it can take some time. You observe your body and notice: where do you feel tension, heaviness. You might become aware of a lump in your throat, or heaviness in the chest, or a tight stomach. If you are not used to noticing your emotions in the body, it might take several attempts sitting in silence and observing, before you become aware of this.
Let the emotion come up: When you observe the emotion and notice it in the body, you let it come up and stay with it. You notice your own thoughts, your resistance to the emotion, and you let it be.
Stay with it and accept it: Once you have noticed this tightness, blocked energy, sensation in the body, you accept it. You let it run its course until completion.
Release and surrendering: When you have stayed with it, and accepted it fully, with inner compassion and calm, the emotion will on its own complete its course and be released. When this happens, you might experience: crying, shaking, trembling, chills, sneezing, ears popping… This is part of the physiological response of the emotion and energy being released.
The core idea of the ‘Letting Go’ method is both incredibly simple and incredibly powerful. The first time I truly sat and accepted my emotions, I stayed there for an hour, and felt wave after wave of deep release. It’s incredible the amount of blocked emotions that is stored in us.
The Practise
Though it is incredibly powerful, it’s very easy to forget, ignore, not prioritise, and just not do it.
Letting Go is a practise that you can do both in silence while sitting, or walking. But also, once you become familiar with feeling your emotions in your body, noticing them and staying with them, this practise can also be done throughout the day.
The idea is to allow your emotions to flow through your body and not to let them block your energy. As we have spent years, decades suppressing our emotions, it is a change in our approach and perspective to finally allow all the emotions to come through and be fully processed.
When going through a challenging and overwhelming phase in your life, first you can suppress/express/escape to manage the overwhelm, and once it feels more manageable, you can use the let go practise, to process the emotions.
While reading the book and implementing this practise of letting go, I experienced tremendous release, lightness, ease and joy - I feel a lot of gratitude for having come accross this book and recommend it to all.
Thank you for reading,
Enjoy the journey,
Katie