The Practice of Letting Go

The hardest part isn't having the insight. It's what comes after—trying to live it.

I can tell you exactly when I realized I'd been performing my way through grief instead of actually experiencing it. But knowing that and embodying it? That's turned out to be two completely different things. It's like the difference between watching sparring footage and stepping into the ring yourself. One lets you analyze technique from a safe distance; the other puts you in range to get hit.

Take something as simple as sitting still. I've been meditating for years—apps with soothing voices promising enlightenment in ten minutes, guided sessions that felt more like emotional Pilates. I thought I was good at it. Hell, I had streaks. Badges. Affirmations. Meditation became another metric to optimize, another way to gamify inner peace.

I realize now that most of what I was doing was just spiritual consumerism dressed up as ancient wisdom. The apps were selling the fantasy of effortless transcendence. "Notice your thoughts without judgment," they'd say, as if judgment were a software bug you could simply patch out of human consciousness. "Observe your emotions like clouds passing through the sky," as if emotional pain were just weather you could wait out instead of something that lives in your bones.

I was never actually sitting with suffering. I was trying to mindfulness-hack my way out of it, to life-coach myself into a better relationship with pain. When difficult emotions came up during meditation, I'd redirect my attention to the breath, not to be present with what was happening, but to avoid it more skillfully. I was practicing advanced spiritual bypassing, complete with Sanskrit terminology and subscription fees.

The irony is that all those years of practice taught me to be alone with my thoughts, but not how to be alone with my reality. There's a difference between sitting in lotus position for twenty minutes while an app tracks your "mindful minutes" and sitting with the fact that you have essentially no one. That the relationships you do have exist mostly as text bubbles on a screen. That grief with no audience isn't a journey of self-discovery—it's just empty.

The meditation-industrial complex wants you to believe that suffering is optional, that with enough awareness and acceptance, you can transcend your circumstances. But what if some circumstances are genuinely terrible? What if some pain isn't a teacher or a gateway to growth, but simply the cost of being human in a world that doesn't care whether you exist?

So when I finally tried to actually be with pain, without trying to optimize it, heal it, or turn it into content, I discovered I'm apparently terrible at it. My mind has these well-worn grooves where it likes to go when I'm not actively managing the experience with techniques and therapeutic interventions. It wants to replay conversations and create narratives about what everything means. The first few times I tried to just sit with whatever was coming up—really sit with it, not around it—I lasted maybe ten minutes before I was reaching for my phone or suddenly remembering something urgent I needed to do.

There's this cultural mythology around stillness that makes it sound peaceful, zen-like. But honestly? Most of the time, it's uncomfortable as hell. All the stuff you've been avoiding doesn't just politely present itself for examination. It shows up angry, demanding answers you don't have. And there's this voice that keeps saying you should be doing something about it, fixing it, optimizing it somehow.

Which brings me to what might be the most pervasive challenge: we live in a world that has turned everything, including healing, into a project to be managed. There are entire industries built around helping you "level up" your emotional intelligence. And while some of that can be useful, I believe it's also feeding this idea that grief and loss are problems to be solved rather than experiences to be had.

The social pressure around this is subtle but relentless. People want to know how you're "processing" things, what you're "learning," how you're "growing" through it. I catch myself doing it too—turning pain into a curriculum, like there's supposed to be a lesson plan hidden in the wreckage.

Yet what if some things aren't meant to make you better? What if some experiences are just genuinely shitty, and the only thing to do is let them be shitty? Maybe sometimes life just hurts, and that's not a failure of character—it's just Tuesday.

This has created some weird dynamics in my relationships. There's a friend whose connection with me has been shifting—not dramatically, but in that slow, tectonic way where you only notice the change when you look back. He's been patient with my attempts not to try so hard to preserve what we had. But it's strange, learning to love someone without grasping at the form that love takes. I keep catching myself wanting to check in on where we stand, to get some kind of confirmation that we're still okay, still something meaningful to each other.

But that need for reassurance is just another form of clinging. It's me trying to control how the relationship unfolds instead of letting it be whatever it is in each moment. And the weird thing is, the less I grasp at it, the more natural it feels. But getting to that point of letting go requires constantly catching myself in the act of reaching for certainty.

My family relationships have shifted too, in ways I didn't expect. With my mother gone, there's this temptation to create a clean narrative about our relationship—to either sanctify it or demonize it. But she was neither a saint nor a monster. She was just a person, carrying her own confusion and pain, doing the best she could with what she had. Accepting that means giving up the story that she should have been different, that I should have been different, that any of it should have been different from what it was.

That sounds simple enough, but in practice, it means letting go of a lifetime of small resentments and unfulfilled hopes. It means not turning her into a symbol of anything larger than she was. And some days I'm okay with that. Other days I catch myself either romanticizing her memory or feeling angry about things that can never be resolved now. The practice is just noticing when I'm doing that and not making it mean anything about my progress or lack thereof.

The broader question this all points to—about meaning and purpose—is maybe the trickiest one. Because if you're not constantly improving yourself, not building toward something, not making everything count for something larger, then what's the point? What are you supposed to do with your life?

I think there's this weird assumption that life needs to have a point to be worth living. That everything you go through should add up to something—make you wiser, stronger, more evolved, whatever. It's exhausting, this constant pressure to extract meaning from every experience like you're some kind of spiritual archaeologist.

This isn't some grand philosophical breakthrough. It's more like a theory I'm experimenting with, and honestly, some days it feels completely wrong. Some days I desperately want my pain to add up to something, my losses to have taught me valuable lessons. There's something appealing about the old framework where everything becomes raw material for self-improvement.

Maybe practice looks less like dramatic insights and more like small, daily decisions to show up without expecting anything in return. To let situations be what they are rather than what I think they should be. To respond instead of react. To stay curious rather than rush toward certainty.

I'm not pretending I've mastered this. Most days I still catch myself performing, still trying to be someone instead of just existing. But catching myself feels different now—less like failure and more like useful information. I spent years treating my own mind like an enemy to defeat instead of a training partner to work with.

What I'm realizing is that it's not about getting it right. It's about staying engaged with whatever's actually happening, even when what's happening is that you're getting it wrong. Even when what's happening is watching everything you thought you knew about yourself fall apart.

And maybe that's sufficient. Maybe that's more than sufficient.