“Let go a little, you’ll have a little happiness. Let go completely, you’ll be completely happy.”

Letting Go of Body Sensations

• Ordinary breathing, focusing on exhalation, intending to let go.
• Diaphragm breathing.
• Breath of fire.
• Heartmath: Breathing evenly through the heart with a positive emotion.
• Scanning the body and releasing tension. Progressive relaxation.
• Using imagery to relax.

Letting Go of Thoughts

• Two fundamental errors of thought:

• Overestimating the bad.
• Underestimating the good.

• Systematically argue against errors of thought, on paper or in your mind.
• Identify “sub-personalities” generating errors of thought; thank them for sharing, ask if they have anything new to say, and then tell them to shut up.

Letting Go of Emotions

• As with any unpleasant experience, have compassion for yourself.
• As you release negative emotions, sense positive feelings replacing them, like security replacing fear, worth replacing shame/guilt, peacefulness replacing anger.
• Name the feeling, own it, and accept it. For bonus points, try to choose it.
• Imagine/sense the emotion leaving on the exhalation, or draining out of the body, or being released to the universe or even to God/the mysterious Divine.
• Use imagery, like standing in a cool mountain stream washing pain away.
• Sense the underlying softer, deeper, younger feelings, and then let them go.
• Venting safely, like writing letters you don’t send, yelling, hitting something SAFE.

Letting Go of Wants

• Same methods as with releasing emotions: Naming and accepting. Draining out of the body.
• Releasing via imagery. Sense the underlying, positive wants, and respond to them.
• Do a cost/benefit analysis, and choose what you really want.
• Reflect on the suffering that is embedded, that’s inevitable, in most desires.

Letting Go of Self

• Perspectives: The more we “self” experience – personalize it, identify with it, cling to it – the more we suffer: “no self, no problem.” The degree of self varies; it’s not an omnipresent fact; it’s continually constructed. When self is minimal or absent, notice that it’s not needed to function in life.
• Observe the activity of self and experiment with reducing it.
• When others are upset, see the ways it’s not about you: They’re on automatic; you’re a bit player in their drama; they are already punishing themselves; you are separate, with good boundaries.
• Each day, take time to sense the fact of your interconnectedness with everything.

In General

• Be the awareness of the experience, not the experience itself.
• Notice that all experiences change.
• Keep evoking positive feelings.

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What practices have YOU found to be effective for letting go? I’d enjoy hearing from you in the comments section.