The first step in letting go is to let in. Initially, this may sound counterintuitive. We assume that letting go of something means getting rid of it, pushing it away. If we want to let go of some grievance, we may try not to think about what the other person did and how awful they were. Or if we want to let go of our attachment to money, we may try to stop worrying about our finances, pushing such concerns to the back of our mind.
However, the central idea of this book is that we should do the opposite. In order to release the grip our mind has on some attitude or idea, we first need to let in the experience of holding on. If we aren’t aware we’re holding on to a rock, we can’t let our grip relax.
To let in an experience means to allow it more fully into awareness, to become curious about what is going on.
Let’s take as an example some bodily discomfort or tension. You may already be aware of discomfort somewhere in the body. If not, be curious whether there might be something you haven’t noticed. Some sensation may then reveal itself. It was probably on the edge of your awareness, but because your attention was focused on reading this or some other experience, you didn’t notice it. Innocent curiosity opens you to the possibility that you might have missed something, giving it the opportunity to enter your awareness.
When you do notice physical discomfort somewhere, let it in, be curious about how it feels. It might appear as tightness, a muscle ache or a feeling of pressure somewhere. How far does it spread? Is it localized or more diffuse? The key is opening your awareness to what is rather than trying to change anything.
We can apply the same principles to more painful experiences that may initially seem much harder to let in. We tend to turn our attention away from pain, distracting ourselves with some task, becoming numb to it or resorting to painkillers to get rid of (or at least subdue) the pain. We fear that if we let the pain in, it’ll hurt more. And that’s the last thing we want.
Yet pain calls for the very opposite. Pain evolved to alert organisms to bodily damage or dysfunction. It’s meant to be unpleasant. It’s a call for attention, the body’s alarm bell: Hey! There’s something wrong here. Attention, please. Rather than ignoring it, resisting it or trying to make it go away, we can give pain the attention it’s requesting.
If we follow this call, and open up to the pain—taking the risk of letting in how it feels—we may find it does at first seem stronger, just as we feared. But as we explore it more, becoming interested in what is actually there, we find that what we had labelled as a pain or an ache now becomes more specific, perhaps a sharpness here or a tightness there; maybe it’s a sense of pressure, a stinging, a prickling or some other sensation.
Letting be
Having let the sensation in, the second part of letting go is letting be. Don’t try to change the feelings that have appeared or wish they weren’t there. Instead, accept them as they are. Let your attention stay with them in an innocent, curious way, almost as if you were experiencing them for the first time. Think of it as making friends with the sensations, getting to know them.
As you do, you may notice it doesn’t feel as bad as you thought it would and might become a little easier to be with.
Pain, it’s often said, is inevitable; suffering is optional. The pain is the physical sensation. The suffering, on the other hand, comes from our aversion to the pain, our wishing it weren’t there. It’s an added layer of discomfort that results from not accepting what is, from holding on to our idea of how things should be.
But in the present moment, if there is pain, it’s real, it’s there. Resisting the pain doesn’t help; it only adds to the discomfort. By accepting it as it is, allowing the sensations to be just as they are, we may well find we don’t suffer quite so much.
By accepting it as it is, allowing the sensations to be just as they are, we may well find we don’t suffer quite so much.
As you let the experience in and let it be, you might notice that it begins to change, sometimes in unexpected ways and without any effort on your part. A sharp sensation might soften. An ache might grow stronger and then fade. Numbness might give way to other sensations. A tense muscle might begin to unwind of its own accord.
The body knows which muscles are tense and how that tension is held in place. It knows what needs to be released. But most of this information never reaches the conscious mind; we don’t know exactly what needs to be released or how to release it. However, if we become aware of the tension and experience how it feels without trying to reject it, we open a door for the body’s innate wisdom to shine through.
Sometimes when I’m sitting for a long period, I feel a pain beneath one of my shoulder blades. I recognize that it probably has something to do with my posture, but despite readjusting my position to relieve the pain, it keeps returning. My conscious mind can’t sort it out.
But if I open up to it more fully—letting it in and then just letting it be—the natural wisdom of my body often shows me what needs to happen. Several muscles that I didn’t realize were tight begin to relax, the area softens and my body readjusts itself. Without my doing anything, the pain goes and comfort returns. The body does the releasing for me—once, that is, my conscious mind gets out of the way.
Werner Erhard taught a similar process in est—Erhard Seminar Training—a pioneering program of the 1970s human potential movement. He’d ask people to describe a pain in terms of its shape, size, colour and texture and to rate each on a scale from one to 10. He’d then ask them to go through the process again, rating how it now felt.
As they continued repeating the process, the intensity of the pain would tend to decrease, often disappearing completely. By using these sensory metaphors, people were opening up more to the feeling of the pain. They were, in effect, letting it in and letting it be.
In other situations, where the pain has some deeper, long-term cause, it may not go away, but our relationship to it can change, making it easier to bear. A woman I heard of had severe pain, caused by bone spurs along the spinal column. She was in continuous pain for years before she discovered her meditation practice, which allowed her to relax around the pain and open up to it. She reported that this letting in brought welcome relief from the debilitating effects of the pain. The pain hadn’t changed, but her relationship to it had, dramatically.
I don’t mean to imply we should always take this approach to pain. There may be times when turning our attention away is the appropriate response, and sometimes taking a painkiller might be just what we need. Or, as is often the case, we may need to look for the cause of the pain and do whatever is necessary to remedy it.
I’ve even found the principle of letting in and letting be helpful in situations where there is no obvious discomfort and little reason to suspect I’m holding on. There was a time when I was exploring ways to relax more fully before going to sleep at night. Lying there in bed, I might not feel any obvious tension; indeed, my body would seem quite relaxed. Adopting the principle of open curiosity, I’d wonder if perhaps I was still holding on somewhere.
I’d simply pose the question, in an open way: Could there be some tension I’m not aware of? Does my body want to show me something? I wouldn’t look for anything but just remain open to the possibility, waiting to see if anything revealed itself.
After a while, I’d usually notice an area begin to soften slightly. As I stayed with the sensations, allowing the softening to continue, I’d find muscles that I thought were already relaxed beginning to relax even more. Then my body might spontaneously adjust its position a little in response to the increased relaxation. Other muscle groups followed, as my whole body sank into a deeper relaxation.
And before I knew it, I was asleep.
Peter Russell, author of Letting Go of Nothing and From Science to God, earned degrees in theoretical physics, psychology and computer science at the University of Cambridge in England, where he studied for a time with Stephen Hawking. He studied meditation and Eastern philosophy in India and later conducted research into the neurophysiology of meditation. www.PeterRussell.com.
Excerpted from the book Letting Go of Nothing. Copyright © 2021 by Peter Russell. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com.
