Introduction
Our topic is letting go, one of the five essential inner skills – the others being awareness, insight, taking in the good, and using the will. (For background, please see the Five Essential Skills articles.)
We use letting go whenever we relax, get stress relief, release painful feelings like worry or anger, take things less personally, or drop thoughts that make us and others unhappy (like self-criticism or illogical fears).
Letting go is an action of the mind – just like letting go of a tissue into a trash can is an action of the hand. It is completely natural. For example, in terms of the body, you let go every time your exhale or use the bathroom. Fundamentally, letting go is the opposite of the clinging that leads to suffering. And thus, it is very much in line with mindfulness and meditation.
A word about experiential exercises:
This article will have some experiential exercises. As we’ve said before, when we do any experiential activities, feel free to opt-out of them if you feel overloaded or uncomfortable. This is a lesson on inner skills, not therapy, and it is no substitute for professional care of body, mind, or spirit.
That said, sometimes exercises bring things up – especially if a person has had traumatic experiences in the past, or is currently in the middle of a difficult relationship. Be kind to yourself first and foremost; as they say, “First of all, do no harm.” Feel free to skip an exercise, pull out of it once it starts, or deliberately take a fairly superficial and safe slice at it. And if anything comes up for you that is significantly difficult, we invite you to contact us.
Also, please know that some of the exercises will suggest that you try to become aware of something, or do something, within your own mind. If you are unable to become aware of or do that something, that is all right. Maybe that is a sign to yourself to be cautious and take your time with that particular material. Or a sign to investigate it further, on your own.
As a closing note, the Train Your Brain course values and includes contemplative activities. We hold these not in any context of religious advocacy, but as tools for personal well-being and development whose foundation in brain science is being increasingly established. And of the contemplative traditions, the one we are most familiar with is Buddhism, so we may speak in terms of it. But there is no attempt here to “convert” anyone to anything, and it is fine to relate to the material in the class however you like. As the Buddha himself said, see for yourself, always judging within your own independent mind what seems to be true and useful.
Saying Goodbye
To get into the topic of letting go, make a list of some of the things that you’d like to say goodbye to. You can pick things that alas will stick around even if you say goodbye to them, like an annoying brother-in-law or a political leader you don’t care for. But you could get the most value by listing things that you can actually let go of, like tension in your back, excess fretting, or having one glass of wine too many.
All right, now take a look at your list, and see if there is anything on there that you do not actually want to let go of. For example, look at each item and imagine that some powerful force like the Fairy Godmother or the cosmic vacuum cleaner or God or whatever could make that item go away – and then ask yourself if you would like that to happen. If the answer is yes, move onto the next item, and if the answer is no, cross the item off your list.
Now, if you like, you can tear up your list and truly let go of everything on it! If you like, say goodbye in your mind as many times as you want to everything on your list as you do this. Really try to experience a genuine release or casting off of what you are releasing. You could say goodbye again in your mind as you toss your pieces into the trash.
Letting Go vs. Aversion
How was this for you? What did you experience while doing it? What have you realized or learned?
As we think about letting go of things, it is natural to consider the element of aversion, which means disliking, resisting, hating, or fearing something. We often have an aversive reaction to whatever we want to let go of. But as we will see in a moment, there are a lot of problems with having aversive reactions to things. So let’s consider where aversion comes from, its costs, and how to let go without aversion.
In the brain, aversion is the result of deep, evolution-driven brain structures that kept our ancestors alive and enabled them to pass along their genes. For example, a kind of epitome of aversion – vomiting – is controlled by circuits deep in the most primitive part of your brain: the medulla, in the brain stem, sometimes called “the insect brain” because it’s so ancient.
As a quick and simplified summary – and please look to our website, WiseBrain.org for more on this subject – information is continually streaming into your brain from the world, and being generated within your brain by internal processes of thinking, feeling, imagining, wanting, remembering, etc.
That information is being continually evaluated by different regions and circuits within your brain in terms of three fundamental dimensions: helpful to survival, harmful to survival, irrelevant to survival. By “survival,” we mean both life and death stuff and intermediate proxies, such as hunger and satiation, pleasure and pain, anxiety and confidence, frustration and satisfaction, etc.
If it is helpful, it could be registered with a pleasant feeling tone. If it’s harmful, there’s usually an unpleasant feeling tone. And if it’s irrelevant, the feeling tone is neutral. This feeling tone is generated mainly by a part of your brain called the amygdala – there are two of them, actually, little almond-shaped nodes in the center of your brain resting on top of the brain stem.
Interestingly, in Buddhism, the feeling tone is considered to be so central to human experience that it is one of the Five Aggregates of existence, which together comprise physical reality and our experience of it. As such, the feeling tone is supposed to be one of the four main objects of meditative awareness (called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness). The feeling tone is so important because it is our reactions to it – reactions of grasping after the pleasant, aversion to the unpleasant, and over-looking or delusion about the neutral – that lead us first to crave, then to cling, and then to suffer.
This matter of the feeling tone and our reactions to it is one of those areas where there is a deep and mutually illuminating intersection between modern neuroscience and ancient contemplative wisdom. It’s fascinating to think about, and very useful to practice.
To continue with the neurological theme, because survival programming in the brains of animals, including humans, is more a matter of avoiding the bad than enjoying the good, these evaluating regions and circuits are genetically primed to
perceive and react to negative information, which then trains them further to perceive and react to negative information. For example, the amygdala is pre-programmed to respond to facial expressions of fear or disgust in others, two key signals of threats to our own survival offered by other animals in our troupe, our tribe, or on our television sets.
By the way, this inherent “negativity bias” in your brain is why it is so important to deliberately intensify, savor and “take in the good” of positive experiences. That’s how you compensate for the brain’s natural tendency to hold onto and showcase negative experiences, and to let positive ones glide right by. For more information on that, please look at the materials and listen to the audio from the last Train Your Brain class, which are on our website.
So Mother Nature gave us aversive reactions to help us survive and have grandchildren. But as we have said before, she does not care if we suffer.
Aversion causes us to suffer in many ways:
- In and of itself, it is an unpleasant experience. As a sidebar, it’s worth noting that its unpleasant qualities can lead a person to become averse to aversion. You see this in what are called “counter-phobic” reactions, or in certain fundamental life strategies, such as the 7 in the system of personality types called the Enneagram.
- It activates the “fight-or-flight” sympathetic nervous system, sending a cascade of stress hormones throughout your body and pulling resources away from long-term projects like digestion or maintaining a strong immune system. As we all know, chronic stress reactions have serious long-term consequences for both mental and physical health. For example, chronic aversion in the form of hostility is a major risk factor for heart disease.
- Aversion often triggers the expression of negative emotions which have harmful effects on others and, thus, on oneself.
- It often leads us to act in impulsive, harsh, and exaggerated ways that harm ourselves and others.
- In a deep way, aversion divides us from the world by setting us against it or apart from it. This creates a painful inherent tension between “I” and the world, and adds to the sense of self which is itself a source of suffering.
In contrast to aversion, letting go in the sense we mean here does not include aversion – though some aversions may be arising in the mind at the same time, which is often the case this side of enlightenment!
Letting go without aversion means, primarily:
- Simply setting down and walking away. Releasing. Abandoning. Saying goodbye without anger. Exhaling. Taking out the garbage. Renouncing. Turning away from the bad.
- Turning toward the good. Planting flowers. Moving on.
More broadly, healthy letting go could also mean:
- Not attaching in the first place. Not taking the other person’s problem as your own. Not presuming that you are implicated. Setting a boundary between you and it.
- Firmly – though without aversion – pushing away, cutting off, or refusing that which is unwholesome.
Letting go does not mean being lackadaisical, irresponsible, or uncaring. You can care deeply about important things, and be inspired and motivated by heartfelt aspirations, without holding onto the results of your wise efforts.
In your brain, letting go is associated with three major regions or systems. Understanding these structurally gives a concrete clarity to the three main aspects of letting go: choosing, releasing/relaxing, and staying with it.
Choosing, releasing/relaxing, and staying with it:
- The prefrontal cortex, located behind your forehead, and especially behind your eyes, decides both what to let go of and sends signals to the emotion circuits of your brain to settle down and move on. It initiates and sustains your resolve – or what some might call Right or Wise Intention. This region does the “choosing” part of letting go.
- When the letting go cascade begins, the parasympathetic nervous system activates, fostering relaxation and contentment throughout your body, and dampening down the sympathetic nervous system. This is the releasing/relaxing part.
- The anterior cingulate cortex – one in each hemisphere (like the amygdala), shaped like a finger, close to the center of your head – monitors how well you are staying on your goal of letting go, and sends out a warning signal if you start holding on instead. This region handles the “staying with it” part of letting go.
So, when you let go, these parts of your brain are good friends; they are on your side. And it’s okay to make a little bow to them.
This article is Part One of a series. Part Two – Physically Letting Go and Being Your Best Self
