Spring Cleaning for the Soul

Thoughts on (and practices for) letting go

Outside my window, birds flit about, forsythia bushes bloom, tiny green leaves unfurl at the tips of bare branches. Unmistakable signs that spring is on its way. The spring equinox usually feels like the real new year to me (and I’m certainly not alone in that—happy Nowruz to those who celebrate!). As the natural world awakens from its winter slumber, so do I. And now that sunbeams are shining through the windows after the seemingly-endless gray months, I’m noticing how dusty things have gotten… and not just in my actual house. In my inner world, too. 

You know what that means. Time to do some spring cleaning for the soul!

Golden forsythia blooms against a blue sky

One of the things that strikes me as I get older is just how much we evolve and change throughout our entire lives. (Yeah, not that shocking of a revelation, but as a younger person I had this assumption that once you grew up you remained more or less the same throughout adulthood.) And part of the process of change is clearing out the old to make room for the new. Letting go of the memories, emotions, habits, and behaviors that may have been helpful at one time, but are now cluttering your mental space and making it harder to evolve into the person you want to be.

As with most things, though, letting go is often much harder than it sounds. It’s not like you’re just holding an old way of thinking at the bottom of a dangling thread, and all you have to do is release your grip for it to fall away into an abyss and stay there forevermore. Often, it will refuse to leave when you try to shake it off because you’ve been holding onto it so tightly for so long that its thread has woven into your bones. (Secretly, maybe you’re even a little bit relieved, because you aren’t even sure who you would be without that thing tethered to your fingers.)

I’ve been working on this post for a while, taking it all sorts of different directions, unsure of what I even wanted to say (other than whyyyyyyy is it so hard to let go??????). Upon reflection, there are plenty of reasons why it’s difficult to find clarity on this topic.

• Letting-go comes in many different flavors. Most of these carry an emotional charge and are things I’ve formed deep attachments to, even though I know they hold me back. To name but a few: harmful yet strangely comfortable coping mechanisms (hello, self-abuse!); lingering hurt and shame from past wounds; the need for social approval. 

• Things I want to let go of are often tangled up with things I want to keep. For example, I might want to release aspects of a relationship that are fraught and draining, but not want/need to cut off contact with that person entirely. 

• We usually think of “letting go of what no longer serves” as a positive step toward becoming a “better” person, but there is always an aspect of loss to this.

I’ll be exploring some of these issues more deeply in the future, but for now let’s focus on the last point.

It seems to me that letting go of what no longer serves is among the hardest types of release. Because, by definition, What No Longer Serves is something that once helped you. Whether it was “healthy” or not, it helped you survive. It can’t just be discarded the way you might let go of something you don’t have any emotional attachment to. 

And that loss has to be grieved before you can really move on. It’s a type of self-death, after all. Saying goodbye to what was familiar and striding forward into a new way of being is scary! I’ve often been eager to turn over a new leaf, only to have the effort fizzle quickly because I wanted to go straight to the good part without working through the pain of leaving something behind. (Of course, it’s also very challenging to change lifelong habits, which only adds to the difficulty.)

In addition, I believe it’s important to treat What No Longer Serves with some respect, and to thank it for the ways it served me and kept me safe. By doing this, I’m not necessarily condoning it or glossing over the ways it has done harm. It’s more about seeing it within the overall context of my life, and recognizing the ways it both helped and hindered me. I’ve found that often I can’t move on unless I have done this step.

So, how exactly does this work in practice? My old method was to tell myself, You don’t need to keep holding onto this. Just let it go! Did that help? Nope. The grip only tightened. The thread wove deeper, because the mind (at least, my mind!) seems to be hard-wired to hang onto things. It’s so tenacious that I’ve never been able to just think my way into letting something go.

Fortunately, the body is an expert at releasing what it no longer needs. Every exhale, after all, is a type of letting go. I’ve found that, for release to be effective, the body needs to be involved. 

And so, if you’re also in need of a little spring cleaning for the soul, here are some practice ideas for bidding adieu to things you’re ready to release. As always, these are just suggestions. Feel free to adapt them into something that works for you!

Letting Go Practices

1. Name exactly what you want to let go of. It’s hard to work with something nebulous and vague, so drill down as far as you can, and be specific. If you want, give it a shape, a face, a name.

2. If you’re saying goodbye to something that used to serve you in the past, be sure to pay tribute to it in some way, acknowledging specifically how it helped you. Did it keep you safe? Protect you? Teach you something important? This step can be as simple as holding it in your mind, but you could also bring it to life through art, dance, poetry, or song. 

3. Release it! A few ideas:

   1. Where in your body does the thing live? What part of you feels the tightest and most constricted when you think about it? If you can, rest your hands on that place and imagine that the thing is being transferred into your hands. Then, get it out of there! Turn on some high-energy music and vigorously shake your arms and hands (and whatever other parts of your body feel like moving) for the length of a song… or two… or three. Imagine it leaving your body and dispersing into the air.

   2. Write down the thing you’re releasing, or doodle a symbol representing it, on a scrap of paper. Then take it outside and bury or burn it (safely!). 

   3. If you have access to a stream of flowing water, find a fallen leaf and whisper into it what you want to let go. Then drop the leaf into the stream and watch the water carry it away from you.

   4. Imagine that the thing is a pile of garbage that’s been stuck in your house for far too long. Visualize gathering it all up into a big bag, walking outside and throwing it into the compost heap. (The good thing about psychological garbage: everything is compostable!) Now it is no longer stuck inside you, and can do its work of breaking down and transforming into something that serves you better. I like to finish this activity by bathing or showering to remove the “stink” from all the rotting garbage, imagining it all swirling down the drain, leaving me cleansed and refreshed. 

   5. If you’re celebrating/mourning a really big transformation/self-death, you could even hold a memorial service for the old you. This could be a solo activity, or you could invite some close friends for a more formal send-off, or hold a dance party that is secretly also a goodbye-old-self funeral… whatever feels right to you!

4. Repeat as needed. You may find that you thought you were done with something, only for it to surface again when you least expect it. That’s okay. It happens! Release it again, and again, as many times as you need to until it loses its charge (or it lessens enough so that you can live with it). 

If you have your own tried-and-true methods of release, let me know in the comments! This is a constant practice for me, so I’m always looking for new ways to freshen things up.