Could you let it go

releasing invisible clutter

In the spring of last year it occurred to me to clean my studio. I went top to bottom. I threw out piles of painting tests, laser cut extras, the what-ifs and maybe-next-years, the cartons of stuff waiting for a day that never came. Then I cleaned out my apartment. I emptied the drawer of kitchen utensils I hadn’t used in a decade. I filled my trunk with old linens, xmas gifts I’d never unboxed, awkward breakfast trays, the too small and too large just-in-case-jeans, and gave it all to Goodwill. I could swear my rooms got physically lighter, but it paralleled something deeper. 

That’s when the real decluttering started. 

One afternoon on a zoom, a friend made an offhand reference to the Sedona Method. We never got into whatever that was in our chats, but the reference stuck with me for some reason. I’m a bit mystical about information—on more than one occasion mere offhand comments by strangers have changed the trajectory of my life. So I googled. 

The Sedona Method, it turns out, is a simple technique for letting go of emotions. 

In my early twenties, I lived next to a guy who constantly brought bags of stuff into his tiny apartment, but never out. One day the city came by, declared it a health hazard and didn’t leave until they’d filled up three dumpsters. My apartment at the time featured a single saucepan from the charity shop, two of each utensil, a twin bed, a desk and table I’d welded from scrap metal. I kept all the clothes I owned in a suitcase. That fall I received an MA in Sculpture with Distinction.

By the time I was nine, there was always something more to achieve. In school we had book reports due every month—it was somehow a Very Big Deal to read a book, write about it on a deadline set by Mrs. Hoffman, and receive a grade for this production. In sports, there were always competitions to strive to win, so I left sleepovers at the crack of dawn to get to practice in time. I remember when I learned that you could get an A+ instead of just an A, and in that moment my bar was permanently raised. But no achievement was ever enough. There was always a next thing. 

None of that took up much physical space. Somewhere in my closet is a picture of me—fresh-faced at eighteen and a little surprised—on a podium winning double gold in the North American championships for my chosen sport. I still have a couple tarnished trophy cups from those years, blending in with my vintage home décor. But I don’t hold on to many material things, I’d tell you. And for a long time, I thought that’s all you could accumulate. In the next breath, I’d rattle off ten projects I have going, veering from one ambition to the next. All along there were these other, more insidious ways in which I grasped and heaped and piled.

I didn’t know how to let go. 

I needed someone to explain it to me. Just like you would to a nine-year-old.

That’s when I got an old edition of the Sedona Method book. 

When we’re little, the book said, emotions pass through us like waves in water. As we grow up, we’re taught a million ways to stuff them, and that natural flow is throttled. But it can be refreshed. 

Letting go is actually the easiest move to learn of all, the book said, because it’s the anti-move—a release. Imagine holding your hand straight out in front of you, with your fist facing down, clenched tight around a pencil. As you gently relax your hand, the pencil slips away. That’s the feeling of a release. 

I didn’t know where to start. My mind was an invisible, emotional garage into which I’d been flinging thousands of unanswered emails, browser tabs and let’s-get-lunch-sometime promises I couldn’t keep for the past forty-odd years. Like, this lil thing won’t matter. 

Except it did. 

There’s always a price.

And the price had to get astronomical—my mind-garage utterly stuffed and my emotions literally overwhelming—before I was finally ready and willing to Marie Condo that shit.

But I couldn’t make myself let go.

In our everyday 3D lives, we apply force to matter and get predictable results. We unpack groceries, chop garlic, and switch on a stovetop to boil water for spaghetti. These familiar objects appear to be inert. They do what you make them do. But this model doesn’t port to inner moves. In the subtle realms of mind and emotion, applying force creates resistance. 

That’s super counterintuitive. This batshit mental culture trains us to make things happen, hustle and grind, just do it or whatever. But you can’t boss around your inner life, and attempting to, sooner or later, hatches a rebellion. Even subtly, exerting force to rid yourself of, say, an anxiety, just makes the attachment to it stronger.

The mistake is to try to let go.

Really, your only responsibility is to create the conditions for letting go to happen. 

The Sedona Method is deceptively simple. It’s just a series of four questions. You could have a trusted person ask you the questions, or you can sit quietly for a moment, asking and answering them for yourself. There’s no need to try or force. The questions are invitations, and whatever unfolds is right.

And so on a summer afternoon last year, I sat in the soft sidelight of my newly-cleaned studio feeling particularly oppressed by my invisible garage of unprocessed emotional junk, too overwhelmed to even begin. So I began with overwhelm.

I asked myself the four Sedona Method questions:

Could you welcome this feeling of overwhelm?

Yes, I said. And with that tiny welcoming yes I felt a bit more relaxed. Because newsflash—trying not to feel overwhelmed when you’re overwhelmed is really fucking exhausting.

Could you just allow it to be here?

Yes, I said. And very strangely, when I finally stopped resisting my overwhelm, and with a new gentleness allowed it all the spaciousness it wanted, of its own accord it began to soften and fade.

Could you let it go?

Yes, I said. And even more strangely, in the moment of merely admitting that I could let go of this overwhelm, and in the absence of any trying or doing on my part, it dissolved into the background of just being.

Would you?

Yes, I said, and with a slow exhale my shoulders dropped, my belly loosened, and I felt my heartbeat in a way I hadn’t been present to before.

When?

Now, I said, and there was just presence. 

I felt a little lighter. A little more free.

It’s like, if you were carrying a bunch of heavy luggage and suddenly realized it wasn’t yours, you’d set that shit down immediately. That’s the feeling of a release.

I practiced those four questions pretty religiously for a month and a half, so much so that I forgot them. They’d been assimilated, just as riboflavin in a fried egg you had for breakfast eventually becomes the substance of your eyelashes and spleen. Because turning this into a to do list would have been another form of holding on. The point is to live what we learn, absorb it, and become reconstituted ever so slightly anew. 

My experiment led to surprising outcomes: Tasks were pleasanter and faster, my voice in writing loosened and romped, I dared more and put myself forward for opportunities I’d been afraid to reach out for. I felt clearer, less encumbered and more decisive. WHO KNEW?! Who could have predicted that emotional clutter was gunking up my creative work and decision making—nay, damming the very flow of my life force. 

And I’m only being partly cheeky, because seriously, no therapist ever told me how to let go. It’s weird to me that psychostuff these days doesn’t teach you that, but also not surprising. Our culture is a one-way valve of more—an unquenchable lust for more sensational experiences and more make-that-number-go-up metrics, and at the same time an exponential cascade of more wtf-is-that?? on the news, more burnouts and depressions. Only much later did I learn that Ayurveda—the ancient Hindu tradition of healing—considers the first stage of disease to be accumulation. As in, if you want to heal from a disease, or avoid one altogether, let go of your accumulations.

It wasn’t like I farted rainbows and everything got better forever. In some ways, after my month of question popping, I felt worse. I’d opened Pandora’s garage door, and piles of old emotions I hadn’t been ready and willing to feel before came tumbling out. The Ayurveda folk would probably say duh, that’s progress girl—in their model, I’d been lugging around a subtle body full of stagnant sludge, and now it had finally begun to flow. 

I let go of my resistance.

I let go of wanting to control the process.

I let go of wanting it to be any different than it was.

And ever so gradually, I realized that this moment was just the beginning of an expansive clearing out across all the levels of my being. A letting go I’m still very much going through. An unraveling not just of my emotional knottedness, but of my cramped stories and limiting beliefs, all the way down to the old and outgrown foundations of my thinking itself. The grasping mind fears loss, and I won’t Pollyanna you, I’ve lost a lot over the last few years. But loss is a passive verb. I choose to let it go, and in that release there’s a sense of stillness and spaciousness. As it happens, the German word for serenity is Gelassenheit, which translates to the condition of having let go.

Image credit: Morris Louis, Untitled