si dawson

Releas­ing is a pretty straight for­ward con­cept: sim­ply "let go" of any thoughts/feelings/problems you might have — just like drop­ping a hand­ful of dirt to the floor.

There are many releas­ing tech­niques avail­able. They're rel­a­tively sim­i­lar though, so I'll dis­cuss the two key ones I've found so far.

If you're inter­ested, both of these stem from dis­cov­er­ies made by a guy called Lester Lev­en­son about 40 years ago. Any­thing he's writ­ten is worth read­ing, & there are many great videos of him on YouTube.

Sedona Method

This is a rel­a­tively brain-centred approach. You ask the fol­low­ing ques­tion about any issue X.

1. Can you let go of X?
2. Will you let go of X?
3. When?

And, well, that's it. I've met sev­eral peo­ple for whom this tech­nique works incred­i­bly well. For me, if some­thing is really both­er­ing me, I can find it hard to detach emo­tion­ally enough to answer the ques­tions clearly.

I do like the grad­ual loos­en­ing of your attach­ment to the issue, along with the final "When" ques­tion. The impli­ca­tion being, of course, that if you can, and will, why not just let go of it now? A lot of times it's just never occurs that we're the ones in con­trol, & that we always have a choice about whether or not we focus on or attach to something.

RELEASE TECHNIQUE

This is more of a feel­ing based, rather than mind based approach (ie kinaes­thetic, not intellectual):

1. Become aware of the feeling
2. Feel the feeling
3. Iden­tify the feeling
4. Relax into the feeling
5. Release the feeling

By iden­tify, I don't think they mean "oh, that's the pain from being sworn at by my sis­ter when I was 3" (although you may get those kinds of real­i­sa­tions), rather "oh, it's just below my bot­tom rib, about an inch in."

This method is more or less what I've found use­ful to do, except I just instinc­tively stay relaxed, and aware/feel/identify all kinda blend into one smooth "oh, I have a dark blue pain about there" sort of understanding.

It's also help­ful that you don't need to even know what the feel­ing is about. It's just an 'it', so you just let 'it' go. A lot of times our sub­con­scious will pro­tect us by hid­ing cer­tain details from our con­scious mind.

The release tech­nique guys have a cou­ple of other vari­ants too:

1. Take each feeling/issue/thought back to its under­ly­ing core: Is it an issue about want­ing (or lack­ing) con­trol, safety or approval/love. Once you know then let go of that wanting/lacking con­trol, safety or approval.

This is super help­ful since let­ting go of want­ing (say) approval in one area of your life, you then let go of a lit­tle bit of it from every area of your life, so your entire life benefits.

2. Instead of push­ing the bad feel­ing etc down, by say­ing 'no' to it, or avoid­ing it.. do the oppo­site! Say yes to it, wel­come the bad feeling/thought up, then just let it go as it comes up.

3. If things are crazily over­whelm­ing, just say "not so bad" to the issue, let­ting it go as you do. This is sur­pris­ingly effec­tive at detach­ing & releas­ing things.

Of course, this is just a brief overview. There are sub­tleties to both these vari­ants. The impor­tant thing is to find one approach that res­onates and works well for you.

amaz­ing pic by just k

How to find a feel­ing (if it hasn't already popped up)

First, calm your­self down ("not so bad" helps a lot). Try to sit or stand still, and take 3 reg­u­lar breaths with­out think­ing any­thing at all.

Next, look down­wards (which trig­gers the kinaes­thetic part of the brain & helps you focus on phys­i­cal feel­ings). I also find it help­ful to tap the karate chop point (ie, the side of your hand between lit­tle fin­ger & wrist) with the fin­gers of the other hand. This helps "tune you in".

Finally, say 3–4 times (for exam­ple) "Want­ing approval from Pepe". If this is an issue for you, you will often feel unex­pected feel­ings aris­ing. They could be sharp pains in odd places in your body, or a rush­ing sen­sa­tion, or, as hap­pened when I did the Vipas­sana course and was very calm/aware, you'll feel like your head is on fire and your eye­balls are going to explode. Hehe.

The impor­tant thing is — it's just a sen­sa­tion. Don't become attached to it. Don't react to it. It'll pass if you let it go, as all sen­sa­tions do. The less you react to it, the eas­ier the let­ting go is. Just try to locate the feel­ing inter­nally, as accu­rately as you can. If you don't feel some­thing no mat­ter what you try, either it's not a prob­lem for you, or just keep prac­tis­ing. Like all things, the more you do it, the bet­ter you'll get and the more sub­tle the feel­ings you'll be able to detect.

The great thing about this is you can then sys­tem­at­i­cally clear every aspect of your life, with­out hav­ing to actu­ally be in that sit­u­a­tion. Any­thing you think you might have an issue with you can think about, feel, bring to the sur­face & let go.

A great start­ing point is to look for want­ing (or lack­ing) approval, con­trol, or safety, in any sit­u­a­tion or towards every per­son in your life.

How To Let Go

As well as the Sedona/Releasing approaches above, here are the other meth­ods I've tried:

• Imag­in­ing myself detach­ing from the feeling/problem, and it float­ing off
• Imag­ine a tube com­ing out of your chest or stom­ach (wher­ever the feel­ing is located), & the feel­ing suck­ing out into it
• Turn­ing my ground­ing tube into a vac­uum and let­ting that help me remove it
• Cre­at­ing a rose (neu­tral object), ground­ing that, then send­ing the feeling/problem to that
• Imag­in­ing the feeling/problem in my hand, and drop­ping it
• Cre­at­ing a rose around the feel­ing, send­ing it out over nearby water, and blow­ing it up

For a while I strug­gled a bit with "let­ting go", or "releas­ing". A big part of this is, of course, just my brain/ego mak­ing things more dif­fi­cult (after all, our ego feeds on this kind of non­sense). The whole thing, as with life, is only as drawn out & com­pli­cated as I choose to make it.

It's really just about prac­tice though. The more you do it, the eas­ier it becomes. After a while, you stop need­ing any kind of visual imagery, it just becomes "some­thing you do", as sim­ple & easy as drop­ping some­thing to the floor.

pic by kyle muraca

What it's all about

Given that the mind and body are intrin­si­cally linked, what I'm start­ing to realise is that by pay­ing close atten­tion to my body, what I'm actu­ally releas­ing aren't nec­es­sar­ily phys­i­cal issues at all. They're neg­a­tive thoughts, behav­iours, pat­terns, reac­tions. These pains that appear and dis­ap­pear are my body/mind try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with me, in the best way it knows how — through feeling.

The great thing about this is you really don't have to ratio­nalise any­thing or fig­ure out what any under­ly­ing cause is. Just being in a sit­u­a­tion, feel­ing the feel­ings and releas­ing them will auto­mat­i­cally clear out mas­sive amounts of junk. From my own expe­ri­ence, just going to a place with a large num­ber of unpleas­ant mem­o­ries, or inter­act­ing with peo­ple that typ­i­cally bring about aver­sive reac­tions can result in lit­er­ally hun­dreds or thou­sands of these feel­ings com­ing up in a sin­gle day. All of them you sim­ply drop.

The beauty is, once you start­ing doing this every­where, next time you're exposed to sim­i­lar stim­u­lus you can watch your­self barely react­ing, if at all.

An Exam­ple

Oh, & if this sounds like a whole load of hokum? Try check­ing this vid. It's a bit slow to start with (the first 20secs is just intro — but I can't seem to skip it with an embed­ded vid), but well worth perserver­ing with:

I see so many smaller exam­ples every sin­gle day, this doesn't sur­prise me in the slightest.