Letting Go Meditations

Rewire Your Brain for Happiness with These Meditations

This is the fastest way of demonstrating your mastery of your emotional self. When you find yourself in an emotionally challenging situation, you just let go of the emotion and the story and the history. That's it. You just drop it.

Unfortunately, you believe you can’t just let go. Because you think it can't be that simple it may require some practice and success at letting go through some of the other techniques in this Training section before you have the confidence to be able to enable this method to work.

In Swami Rama's book “Living With the Himalayan Masters,” the Hindu guru tells the story of how his master illustrated this idea of letting go.

After bathing in the Ganges, Swami Rama and his master were walking back to their cave when the master suddenly wrapped himself around a tree. "He cried : 'Help me! Take hold of my foot and try your best to pull me away.' I tried with all my might, but I could not separate him from the tree... Finally I stopped to think and I said to him, 'How is this possible? The tree trunk has no power to hold you. What are you doing?'" The master laughed and let go, illustrating how easy it is to just let go. "'When we devote our mind, energy, and resources to believing in that which is non-existent, then it appears to exist'."

A simple exercise you can do to help develop confidence in this method is to hold something not too heavy in your hand like a sock or scarf. Hold it out in front of you. Look at your hand holding it. Tell your hand to let it go and watch the object drop in front of you. Then say to yourself "You see, I can let go just by choosing to do so." Remind yourself of this ability when the emotion you want to let go of is particularly sticky or difficult. Imagine holding the emotion in your hand, instructing your hand to open, and watching the feelings fall away.

Or try one of the Happy Mind guided meditations on letting go: