Read time 3 minutes. Emotional Freedom is the first stand alone article in our continuing series regarding letting go.
What would it feel like to experience true emotional freedom?
What steps would we take to begin?
For many of us, even on good days, there’s a weight—an untraceable tension that hangs beneath our other experiences. A hum of distress that never quite fades. The dream of dropping that weight, for good, becomes its own kind of holy grail. Imagine moving through life simply—interacting with it directly, cleanly, without that old background buzz.
It’s a big topic, and one we’ll return to often. But for now, maybe the most honest place to begin is with letting go.
Let’s look at how we’ve typically framed it—and how Zen reframes it.
Letting go: The weight and the grip
This connects to a lot we’ve covered already—especially around progress, not-doing, and neutral observation. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s step back and regroup around the phrase itself.
Letting go. What does it mean?
We might associate it with words like freeing, liberating, detaching. The common thread? If we can’t let go of something, we’re not free. There’s a bond—an attachment. But not just emotional. It’s as if this thing has mass. It clings.
Consider the word disencumber.
Not just release. Unburden. Un-weight.
Mutual release: The paradox of the trap
When we say “I need to let this go,” there’s often a hidden assumption that we’re the one holding on. But if we feel trapped, is it that we’re doing the trapping? Or being trapped?
Maybe it’s mutual.
Maybe even if I loosen my grip, the thing still has hold of me.
So what now? Wrestle with it? Rip its claws out?
You already know better.
That childhood finger trap comes to mind. The more you pull, the tighter it grips.
Relax.
Letting go is a mutual act. If you want to let go of something you must also allow it to let go of you.
We’ll go deeper into methods as we go. But for now, just watch. Don’t force. Don’t analyze. Experiment. Observe what happens—not just when you try to let go, but when you let yourself be let go.
Crack open the door to emotional freedom
Attachment is an important concept and hurdle in the teachings ahead. If your new to all of this, exploring the concept of non attachment even on a place such as Wikipedia can be a great place to start.
Let’s see if, over the course of the next few days, we can begin to experiment with a different type of letting go. One that entails compassion, allowing and observing. We aren’t even necessarily looking to achieve anything just yet. We are gathering information. What happens if we choose to observe all of that with acceptance, in the eye of the storm, and resist the urge to re engage by trying to push things away?
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