Letting Go Is Not Dropping Everything

By Simone Claridge · True Better You 

“Just let go.”

We say it so easily. We hear it and nod. And then we go home and grip harder than before.

I’ve been sitting with this lately—not as a teaching to deliver, but as something I keep watching in myself and in the people I practice with. Because for some people, “let go” doesn’t land as relief. It lands as threat. As exposure. As the edge of a cliff someone is telling them to step off.

And I want to say clearly: that response is not stubbornness. It may be intelligence shaped by experience.

What the body hears

When someone has learned that releasing control led to harm—that trusting meant being hurt, that letting go meant losing something that mattered—the instruction to “let go” doesn’t open a door. It triggers the alarm.

The system grips harder. Not because it is broken. Because it is doing exactly what it learned to do to stay safe.

This is worth naming before anything else. The resistance to letting go is often not the problem. It is information. And the first question is not “How do I release this?” but “What does my system believe will happen if I do?”

Leave space for that question.

The answer may not be intellectual. It may live somewhere in the body—in a tightness across the chest, in a jaw that never quite unclenches, in the way sleep sometimes won’t come.

What we are actually holding

Someone I know has been living through cancer treatment: the medication, the body’s rapid shifts, the way a sudden change in hormones can affect mood, pain, sleep, the way the joints move, and the way tears arrive without warning.

These are not metaphors. They are physiological realities.

And layered underneath the physical are other experiences: fear about the future, old memories surfacing, and the pressure—felt even when no one is applying it—to remain positive. There may be worry about becoming a burden, the wish not to be reduced to a diagnosis, and the ache of a life that looks different from what it was supposed to be.

I want to be careful here. Not every intense experience should be immediately interpreted as spiritual resistance or psychological failure.

Sometimes the body is simply responding to a real physiological change. The nervous system, the hormones, the pain pathways, and the sleep are matter. They are real. They belong in the picture.

Grandmaster Pang Ming’s framework holds all of this without separating it into competing explanations. There is matter—the hormones, the medication, the physical body. There is qi—the movement of sensation, emotion, energy, and the way information flows between people. And there is consciousness—the awareness that can know all of this without becoming limited to any single part of it.

These are not three separate things. They are three ways of experiencing one living process.

The paradox of forcing release

We commonly approach letting go as a decision:

I have decided to stop worrying.

Or as suppression dressed up as calm:

I will not allow myself to feel this.

Or as forcing the outcome before we feel safe enough to release it:

I should have moved on by now.

Sometimes positive thinking becomes a substitute for presence:

Everything happens for a reason.

None of these actually loosens the grip. Trying to force release is another form of control. We are still in the driver’s seat, still demanding that the inner state conform to what we believe it should be.

The more someone is told to let go, the more tightly they may hold. Not from obstinacy, but from a system that knows it is not yet safe enough to open.

What if the first step is not letting go at all?

What if it is becoming honest about what we believe would happen if we stopped holding on?

Un-gripping, not dropping

I have come to think of letting go less as an act and more as a gradual process.

Not one dramatic release. More like loosening the jaw. Allowing one full exhale. Stopping—just for now—the next round of mental rehearsal. Letting a feeling be present without immediately making it an identity. Allowing a question to remain unanswered for a while. Resting attention somewhere slightly wider than the problem.

We may not be able to let go of the circumstance itself.

We cannot simply release a diagnosis, another person’s behavior, or what the body is doing. But we may be able to let go of the extra layer: the demand to understand it immediately, the belief that suffering means something has gone wrong, or the fear that a difficult feeling will last forever.

There is a phrase I return to:

I may need to hold this again later. For now, I can let it rest.

Not throwing it away. Not pretending it no longer matters. Not abandoning what needs practical action—medical, relational, legal, real.

Just allowing it to rest outside the narrow space of our immediate attention. For a moment. For an hour. Until we come back to it with more space.

Giving it to the earth

There is a practice I have been offering quietly for a while now. It is not a technique for producing a result. It is more like an experiment in trust.

Feel the weight of what you are carrying. It may be a fear, a decision, an image, a conversation, a physical pain, or a question that has no answer yet.

You do not have to throw it away.

Imagine placing it into the earth—not as rejection, but as a temporary resting place. Let the earth hold it within its vast information and qi field. Let what is larger than you carry what you cannot carry alone right now.

You can retrieve it when you need to. You are not abandoning it.

Feel your feet on the floor. Let the body be supported by something beneath it that does not require you to hold it up in return.

The earth has been here longer than the problem. It can hold what we cannot hold continuously.

This is not a promise that circumstances will change. It is an invitation to discover what the body feels like when it is not carrying everything alone, even briefly.

The N as companionship

A soft N-Tone sound can accompany this—not to overpower the experience, not to make anything disappear. Just to be present alongside it.

While walking. While sitting with a difficult sensation. While the hands are in water or resting on the earth. While allowing an emotion to move through without being grabbed and analyzed.

The sound is here. The body is here. The earth is here. The emotion is here. Awareness is here.

All of it is held in something larger than any single piece of it.

The one who knows you are holding on

Here is what I keep coming back to.

You know you are holding on. There is already something in you that can see the grip.

That awareness—the one that notices—is not trapped inside the grip. It is already slightly outside it. Already watching.

Not separate from the body. Not escaping the pain. Not hovering above the human difficulty.

Awareness includes all of it. And it is not limited to any of it.

Mingjue—the clear observer—does not begin with a special state we have to manufacture. It begins with awareness recognizing itself. Which is already happening, right now, as you read this.

You do not need to locate it. Just notice that knowing is already present.

And notice: the thing you are holding and the awareness of holding it are not the same thing.

I am not trying to get rid of what is happening.

I am noticing that what is happening is not all that I am.

What acceptance is not

I want to be careful here too, because acceptance can be weaponized.

Acceptance does not mean approving of what is happening. It does not mean tolerating abuse, remaining in danger, ignoring medical symptoms, giving up practical action, or calling helplessness surrender.

Acceptance may simply mean allowing ourselves to know what is happening—fully, without immediately adding the demand that it should already be different.

Love can include a boundary. Awareness can recognize danger.

Letting go of mental gripping may make appropriate action more available, not less. Hands that are not white-knuckling the wheel can steer.

What if letting go is not dropping everything?

What if it is allowing life to hold some of what we have been carrying?

What if we can return to it later, when we have more space?

The earth does not need us to solve everything before we rest.

Perhaps the next time someone says “let go,” we can pause before obeying. Feel what the words awaken. Ask what we believe would happen if we softened.

And if something in us says not yet, perhaps that too can be met with awareness.

The earth is still beneath us.

We may place something down without losing it.

And for a moment, simply feel what it is like not to carry everything alone.

Every morning, a group gathers to chant N together from 8–9 AM EST. No teaching. No performance.

We come as we are. We come for what we truly are.

And we stay conscious in it.

→ Join the Daily N-Tone Session

With gratitude to Grandmaster Pang Ming, Teacher Wei, and Teacher Xu, whose teaching this rests on.