Letting Go with Bodily Awareness and Somatic Movement

Letting Go and Somatics

On a physical plane, one approach to letting go is to see it as a release of muscular tension and tightness in the body. Somatic practices such as the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and the Skinner Releasing Technique focus on releasing muscular tensions and unnecessary muscular holding patterns in how we sit, stand, sleep, eat, work, or do any daily activities. The goal is to find more ease and harmony in the body and in movements and to prevent fatigue, irritability, chronic tension, pain, tightness in the muscles, and imbalances in posture that can result from holding the muscles in a contracted state. In these techniques, participants learn to detect their often subconscious physical habits that underlie these holding patterns. ³ On some level, this aim to release, relax, and find ease is a part of all somatic practices.

Another way of viewing letting go in the context of somatic dance practices is to dance without judgment, to express oneself freely. Somatic dance practices such as Nia, JourneyDance, 5Rhythms, Gaga dance, SuryaSoul, Continuum, Shake Your Soul, and Biodanza, among others, support letting go of inhibitions and excessive self-monitoring when we move. Dancing freely, however participants want to, without pre-given choreography, is a key element in somatic dance practices. In free dance, we do not need to know what the next movement will be like—we let movements emerge on their own and let ourselves be surprised by what the body is showing us through these movements. We let go of control and the need to know exactly what movement will happen next. We let go of the grip of an inner judge or critic who gives orders about proper or improper movement or how we are supposed to move and behave. Somatic dance practices can therefore have a liberating effect and connect participants with the creativity and expressivity they might not know they have.

This sense of “abandoning oneself to movement” or dancing freely is something many people desire but find hard to accomplish. Somatic dance practices provide a safe, non-judgmental space in which to start exploring this realm. In a Nia dance class, repetitive simple choreography alternates with free dance. This element of choreography and pre-given steps that are easy to follow allows the participants to start to come into their bodily awareness and physical sensations. The choreography gives tools and ideas as to how to move and stimulates the cognitive system and the nervous system to learn new movements. It gives a base from which the participants can move more easefully into free dance and exploring movements on their own.

The repetitive movements, often slow and sensual, can also help participants enter states of flow and absorption as well as meditative states. In these states, we are completely present in the present moment, one with the body, movement, music, rhythm, and breath. We give over to the power of movement and move with focus, high awareness, and also with ease. Repetitive movements, done individually or in a group, in the same rhythm, can create a feeling of a ritual. Ritualistic movement can calm the nervous system and lead to states of meditation and connectedness to one's inner intention, the other dancers, and the space itself.

Movement Metaphors and Explorations with Language

To explore letting go via movement, we can use the imagination, and bring inquiries with us as we dance. I might ask the question of “what will help me let go today?” and hold this question in my mind as I dance. As I move, I explore with my body different ways to “let go” and see whether and how I resonate with these movements or find a new insight with the help of movement. For example, I can hold in my awareness the person and the relationship that I need to let go of: I can “walk away from” this person and “turn my back” on him or her. I can “retreat” with my back leading and the eyes still looking at the person and feel the effect of more and more distance between us.

Adopting martial arts kicks, blocks, and punches, I can imagine holding a sword and “cutting ties” that are toxic or unfulfilling. I can “run away from,” “shake off,” “blow away,” “efface,” “chop,” “bury,” or “say goodbye to” any situation that does not meet my deep needs. I can dance and feel what it is like to no longer “hold on to” a rope and “drop the weight off my back” or to have my “hands empty.” I can use the space to “change directions,” “leave behind,” and “move toward the new.” As I dance freely, I can play with the word “let go” itself: I might give myself the direction to “let go of my pelvis,” “let go of control,” “let go of seriousness,” “let go of guilt,” or “let go of this thought.”

All of these words and phrases open up a different way to move. Once we put these words to movement, we might see a range of options for letting go. Moving with these words, the imagination might open up in a new way and we might get insights about what to let go, how, and when. We can feel out in movement what the body is telling us to do, what feels more “right” or where the energy is flowing naturally. These explorations can be playful, light-hearted, surprising, as well as deep and emotionally and psychologically impactful. As we move in these ways, emotions might surface—we might feel empowered, sad, lighter, enraged, or at peace, among others. Instead of rejecting these feelings, we welcome them, pay attention to them, and see if they can guide us toward further action. We can choose to let them move through the body: they subside or transform into another emotion.

Mark Epstein, in his Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself (2018), points out that letting go does not mean “releasing the thing that is bothering you. Trying to get rid of it only makes it stronger.” ⁴ He talks about letting go as “learning the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self.” By backward step, he is referring to the act of “settl[ing] into yourself rather than trying to make the troubling thing go away. If anything drops away, it does so by itself. You cannot make it happen directly.” Via dance and movement, we can embody this “backward step”. We can act this concept out physically to see how it affects us emotionally and cognitively and notice whether we can apply this concept in the realms of our life where we are trying to “let go.”

This exploration of letting go does not need to happen via dance only. Other types of movement, such as somatic strength and flexibility training, can be used as well. In my strength training and flexibility classes, I invite the participants to notice how for any movement to occur, certain muscles need to contract and their opposing muscles need to release, or “let go.” Any strength training exercise is an opportunity to focus on the sensations of letting go and release that are taking place in the opposite muscle group. Doing a back exercise with an elastic band or the pulley system at a gym, I can sense how the chest muscles let go or expand in response to the back muscles contracting. The triceps muscles release and extend when the biceps muscles are contracting. These exercises show us, in our body, how releasing and letting go are necessary for movement. To move, we need to let go.

In my classes, I bring in the concept of letting go on an emotional and mental plane and ask questions the same way I would do when dancing. For example, during a chest exercise, I might connect to the heart and my emotions and ask, “Is there anything that wants to get ‘off’ the chest? Is my heart telling me to have a heart-to-heart conversation with someone? Or is there a certain story of the heart that is waiting to be expressed and released?” I might turn to the triceps muscles which we use to put objects away and ask, “What is asking to be released, removed, rejected? What do I need to say ‘no’ to today, this week, this month, at this stage in my life? Is there a habit I could let go of?” Both dance and strength training, approached somatically, offer opportunities to treat “letting go” as a bodily inquiry.

Permission to Let Go and Dancing the Archetypes

In her work, Allison Pagano, dancer, choreographer, and creator of the healing program Embodied Dance ©, has a two-part approach to letting go (for classes and offerings; see https://embodied-dance.com/). In an interview with the author, she noted that in the first stage, the clients look at what they want to let go of. “It is hard to let go of something without trusting that something will be there when we let go. Which is part of the reason why we don't want to let go to begin with—we don't trust that something will be there that will also be ok. There's a safety we must create around letting go. This letting go has to be met with an empowerment and a reclamation which is the second part of letting go. We let the body know that there is something else coming.”

Pagano's clients ask questions about the experiences that they need to let go of and explore how the body responds. “The body will show you what it is ready to process. There is a sense of safety and trust in knowing that the body will only bring forward what it's ready to process and move through.” Her clients uncover the story around letting go: what happened, who was involved, what the unmet needs were, and what meaning was given to that experience. “Oh this happened and I made it mean that I'm not worthy of this particular thing. Or that happened and I made it mean that it's not safe to show this part of myself,” Pagano noted.

She often works with the elements. Does this part of the body need to move like air? Does it need to a push pull, a metal energy? Does it need fire? Does it need to move like water—is it circular, spiral, a rush and a release? Is it like earth? We give it a frame and we give the body a chance to explore and express what needs to be expressed. We let the body express itself fully; we empty the tank out. We let that full memory, now that it's been seen, witnessed, and held, have its full expression through movement. And we give that fully until it's empty.”

Once the participants have let go of something with the help of movement, they see clearer and can choose to adopt a new way of seeing themselves. They enter the empowerment phase of Pagano's method. In this phase, Pagano relies on archetypes and the energies they carry: for example, the participants can tap into an archetype of a queen, a princess, a jester, a king, a mother, temptress, among others. “If we haven't done something before, it's not going to feel familiar so we won't know how to access it. When we can bring in the energy of what the archetype is and when we give ourselves the permission to be in the identity of how we might take that archetype on, it gives us the permission to step into something that's completely unfamiliar but also empowering.” Where do we feel that archetype in the body? How does that archetype want to move? The body starts to hone and practice this new quality.

“It is very affirming to give it a dance and a movement. To say, ‘I hear you, body; you want to dance and move like this right now. You get the whole self on board. That in itself provides such a healing integration where things come together where the mental body couldn't do it on its own or moving the body around without understanding all the parts,” Pagano pointed out.

This work can culminate in a choreographic piece: the participants can create a dance out of their process. “The choreography provides a thread of repatterning. When we source the movement through the body in terms of its letting go and its reclamation and we put it together in a structured piece, it allows for a new body language. This new body language is giving our psyche, our mental body, our emotional body a new rebooting. We're declaring through our physical self—which is the most powerful way—a new story,” Pagano noted. “When we are dancing, our brain is very active. Through this structured choreography you are reclaiming your story and repatterning your brain and your behavior.” Performing the dance piece in front of an audience builds confidence and functions like a rite of passage. “There is something in this space that you share it in that can be very nourishing. To know that you can move through it and still be okay,” Pagano added. Performing a dance piece of one's own in front of an audience that holds space solidifies the performer's intentions with the piece and the new life story they are crafting. ⁵

Letting Go as a Process and Discipline

Letting go is a process that happens over time. Health and wellness coach, organizational psychologist, and author of Strong Women, Fed-Up Men, Defeated Sons, Broken Daughters: Healing Generational Pain and The Power of You, Mark Momplaisir explained his 5-step approach to letting go in an interview with the author The first step is awareness: What is it that you have to let go of? What is not working in your life? Are you aware of it? The second is acceptance: Can you accept letting go and accept the potential outcome? Can you accept letting go of something that you know and are familiar with? Can you accept adjusting to something different? The third step is action: designing the steps that to let go, preferably with the help of a coach. The fourth step is guidance: relying on a support system, a guide, coach, or a therapist who understands the person's journey and wants the best for him/her. The fifth step is evaluation: going back to see what is and is not working and making adjustments (for more information; see https://linktr.ee/Markmomplaisir).

Discipline is key in letting go. Momplaisir noted, “It's already hard enough letting go. Whenever you're familiar with something, it's hard to let go. And without discipline, it's even harder. Discipline helps because when you set goals, when you set intentions, discipline is going to help you to hold on to these. Even not being able to let go requires discipline: you're so steadfast in whatever is not working for you to keep doing it. You know that it's not working but you're so conditioned to doing it. Discipline is a conditioning. You have to recondition your mind and your habits. When you choose to let go, you can reject everything else that's not working.” Momplaisir noted that without discipline, letting go is temporary. In his view, it is important to have clarity about what one wants to experience and then have discipline to do what it takes to lead one to that outcome.

Momplaisir pointed out that letting go is not just a mindset but a physical and spiritual practice as well. “If I'm letting go of this, what do I need to change physically? If you're trying to get a real breakup, and you're going to say, ‘I'm just not going to think about it’ but you're still hanging out with the person you want to break up with, it's not going to work. Your habits, patterns, thoughts, and feelings all have to work together to be successful at letting go.” Momplaisir said, “When it comes to relationships or unhealthy thoughts and patterns, I ask people ‘what are you ready to do about it?’ If people are not ready, you can't embark on a process. Sometimes we need to spend more time in the awareness stage. Sometimes we may need to stay in that unhealthy relationship a little bit longer to realize it's really not working. Sometimes the stage you're in is the stage you need to prepare you for the next stage. If you prematurely bypass it, you're missing that growth stage and you end up repeating that stage later on in life.”

Momplaisir added that it is important to understand what, when, and how to change. “Change is going to happen regardless but if you're not intentional about the change, you can't grow from it. When you're aware, you can dictate how that change process takes place. You can't necessarily design the outcome but you can be intentional about what you want to experience during that change.”

Meditation

Meditative practices play a key role in learning how to let go. Letting go involves the mental realm: it is hard to let go if we end up thinking about the same experience, person, or event that we want to let go of for a long period of time. Practicing meditation teaches us how to observe our thoughts and make changes in what we think about as well as change our relationship to our thoughts. In the words of psychotherapist and author of Can't Stop Thinking (2021), Nancy Colier, when we meditate, we create an “inner witness who can see thoughts without being identified, merged, or collapsed into them.” ⁶ In her work, she teaches people how to break free from attachments to thoughts and practice “not being your thoughts.” As Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard explains in his Why Meditate? Working with Thoughts and Emotions (2010), the goal of meditation is not to “shut down the mind or anesthetize it, but rather to make it free, lucid, and balanced.” ⁷ We do this by “cultivating a way of being that is not subject to the patterns of habitual thinking” and “freeing ourselves from the constraints and afflictions that dominate and obscure our minds.”

Jack Goldingham Newsom, meditator and leader of meditation groups, noted in an interview with the author, “So long as you're trying to let go of something, you're not going to let go. Because you're still holding on to it somehow. This idea of letting go is allowing the mind and the body to no longer be attached to a particular situation. The situation is there, the situation is not there—it doesn't matter. You learn to accept the existence of this particular feeling or this particular situation in your life and then the situation no longer has control over you but you determine how this situation is going to affect you. We can't imagine that if we let go of someone who has done something bad to us that it's going to disappear and we're going to forget about it forever. That's not going to happen. There will always be this relationship that has happened in our past. But we can get to a point to where that no longer affects us or influences us or where we no longer replay that situation in our head. It's at that moment that we can say we're letting go of it.”

Meditation is a good way to begin letting go of something because it brings the practitioner to the present moment. “When you're in the present moment, it doesn't matter what happened in the past or what will happen in the future because the only thing that's there is the present and the stillness and the certainty that the present moment can give you when you've found your meditative practice automatically means that you've let go. You might only let go during 20 minutes for three seconds, for one minute. But that one minute or three seconds of silence and of peace is your window into the world where you've let go of these situations for longer. For your whole life, for example,” Newsom noted.

Newsom shared his favorite meditation mantra that comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk, author, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh: “When you sit down, you say to yourself ‘I am home. I have arrived.’ You don't need to go anywhere, you don't need to do anything. You have already arrived at the place you want to go. By softly saying that to yourself, you're helping yourself let go of the things that you are holding on to because you're reminding yourself that that's already happened. You already have the potential to let go of the things you're trying to let go of. By saying ‘I am home, I have arrived,’ you're allowing yourself to go through these processes of letting go. I find it's very powerful for me when I find myself thinking over and over, ‘this person did this to me, why did they do that?,’ I can sit down and say ‘I am at home, I have arrived, the present moment is here for me. And that's all that there is.’ The key takeaway is to find that present moment and to find the beauty in that present moment. And you will have found meditation.”

Conclusion

In his Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (2012), scientist and physician David R. Hawkins writes, “Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom.” ⁸ However, for many of us, letting go is less of a sudden cessation and more of a process that unfolds in time and takes practice and patience. There are different stages in it and emotionally and energetically these stages can feel different. We might go through different phases of resentment, anger, acceptance, and peace, amongst others, but not linearly or predictably. Perhaps there is no “right way” or “the fastest way” to let go. We might feel down one day and then have a new burst of energy and gratitude the next. One day we might feel determined about our intentions and be on a good path and some days later fall back on earlier habits, negative self-talk, and excessive rumination.

In a somatic dance class, too, we move through a cycle. We move from one song to another and have an embodied experience of changing rhythms, moods, and movements. When we face the changing stages in the process of letting go, we can remind ourselves of the fact that we know how to face these changing rhythms through the dance practice: each rhythm and song bring something new, a new way of moving. We surrender to the knowledge that we will be able to move to and improvise to each new song. Somatic dance and movement help us look inside and, authentically and with honesty, bring to the surface our different, often complex, emotions, sensations, and thoughts.

Often we cannot have the full wisdom about this process of letting go from the very beginning: we need to let life happen and allow our emotions to change. As we keep living life—having new conversations, experiences, reading new books—these become a part of the letting go process. We see that the different phases of letting go have different faces. However, it is important to notice when the process of letting go has actually finished. It might be the case that we keep going back to certain thoughts and emotions no longer because of a true need to process them but because these thoughts and emotions have become habitual.

By way of conclusion, I offer the readers some tips about how to let go through movement and meditation:

Give yourself experiences with what letting go feels like muscularly throughout the day. Lying on the back on the ground, you can do a body scan: direct your awareness to different parts of the body, starting from the feet and ending with the head. As you move to these areas with your inner eye or awareness, ask what sensations you notice there and let go of any possible tensions.

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