The Problem With Letting Go

Rethinking Our Relationship To Suffering

Letting go has become a popular term in the healing, spirituality, and self-development lexicon. From what I can tell, the modern idea of “letting go” originated from the Buddhist term alobha, which means non-attachment. 

If you aren’t familiar with it, non-attachment is just what it sounds like. It’s not being mentally attached to worldly things like desires, thoughts, or emotions. At its core, non-attachment is a philosophical quest for personal freedom.

Freedom from what? From allowing the shiny material objects of the world and the painful mental states (emotions, memories, perceptions) inside of us to influence our experience of life. 

The suffering that comes from attachment is one of the main factors of human unhappiness. We hold on to ideas about ourselves from when we were kids—that we were too ugly, unlovable, awkward, or talentless and let that idea from a decade or two (or four or five) ago influence who we are and how we feel about ourselves in the present moment. We crave love, wealth, status, and material abundance, never feeling like we are enough, no matter how objectively beautiful our current lives are.

This list of possibilities goes on and on.

Modern wellness culture seems to only want to tackle immediate surface-level pain points that lean towards instant gratification. Since healing culture is mostly communicated via social media, the ideas and teachings have to be inherently shallow. There simply isn’t enough room—or attention span—on social media to go deep. This is why self-help poetry has boomed in the past five years. 

Because of this, we mostly see non-attachment spoken about regarding negative thoughts, emotions, and relationships. Really, it goes even deeper and pokes holes in our idea of selfhood—but that’s a story for another time. When we’re haunted by these heavy things, we’re told to let them go. 

Letting go suggests that once we notice we’re grasping (or are attached) to mental formations that are too heavy to bear, we should release them from our attention and emotions, pointing our focus on what’s truly in the present moment instead of what our past negative experiences are grafting on to it.  

First off, this is good. If this is as deep as most people want or need to go with letting go, then that’s fine by me. That fact that people out in the world are working at all to heal and enlighten themselves is a massive win. 

However, I wonder if turning a huge philosophical idea like non-attachment into a mass-produced social media commodity has limited our thinking and achieved the opposite of the intended effect. 

When I see letting go talked about on social, it has an air of submission to it. The general point of view is, “when things get too heavy,” you should let them go or (rephrased to seem new like much Insta-wisdom) leave them behind.

Thinking like this suggests that we are overwhelmed by our spiritual ailments, that they are in control, and our only choice is to submit and hope the weight of the burden doesn’t break any bones as it falls through our fingers into the void. 

Looking at it from this perspective, letting go doesn’t sound appealing. It sounds more like the lesser of two evils. Either submit to your pain or keep suffering. Maybe this is why people have such a hard time actually doing it. There’s something in us, as humans—as animals—that no matter how much pain we are in, we don’t like giving up or going down without a fight. 

The way letting go is written about now makes it feel like our negative mental states are stalking us. Like our suffering lurks in the very shadow we cast, always right on our heels, breathing its cold breath on the back of our necks.

These pains are framed as bullies. 

Pushing us around. 

Dictating our moods. 

Feasting on our sense of worth.

But what if we flipped the idea of letting go inside out? What if instead of waiting until the negative thought, bad habit, or harmful emotion was too much to hold, we became the hunters instead of the hunted? 

What if letting go wasn’t an act of submission but an act of strength?

Rather than waiting around until we runneth over with unhappiness, what if we took back control from what’s causing us suffering? 

What would this look like? 

Engagement. We would reframe our relationship with our own suffering. Instead of opening a back door and hoping it finds its way out, we would become the bouncers of our own bar. In the moment we see something out of line, we would grab it by the collar and toss it out the front door. Maybe even staple its ID to the bar so it is never granted entry in the same way again. 

In practice, this means being proactive. It means not waiting around until your suffering becomes so heavy you have to deal with it. It means dealing with it when you notice it rather than being passive and letting it fester.

Ask yourself questions. Sit with what you’re feeling or thinking. Journal. Talk about your shadow with a friend or therapist. Recognize your mental stories as stories and stop letting them trick you into believing they are reality. Draw mental boundaries so that every time a negative thought comes back, you deny it attention and keep pointing your focus elsewhere. Somewhere hopeful. Or at least somewhere with clarity. 

Maybe instead of calling it letting go, we should call it throwing out. 

Throw out the idea that you aren’t good enough. Throw out the pain you still hold from your childhood that wasn’t your fault. Throw out the idea that you can’t win in life the way you want. Throw out the idea you have to stay in bad relationships because they are familiar. Throw it all out as you notice it’s spoiling instead of waiting until it smells. 

Embrace your strength. 

Become the hunter instead of the hunted. 

Throw it out.

Slow School — Starts December 3rd

Learning to calm your mental noise and let go of attachments is life-changing. That’s one of the many invaluable skills we will learn in my 8-week “Slow School” online course.

It starts Dec 3rd. I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone and connecting as a group.

Go here to learn more: https://www.cory-allen.com/slowschool