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Hello and welcome to Find Yourself, Change Your Life. I'm your host, Mary Clavieres. This podcast is here to help you rediscover yourself and become the leader of your life, however you want that to look.

For today's episode, I'm going to be talking about the concept of letting go and what it looks like to let go, how you actually do it. How do you actually let go? I've had this come up with a few clients recently, and whenever something starts to come into my world more than one time, as I watch it a couple times, I say, okay, interesting. There's an energy around this right now, and it's a topic that I'd like to explore more.

how to let go and go with the flow quote

The "Fold in the Cheese" Problem

When I was planning for this, I had this thought of, okay, well, how do I explain letting go, or how to let go? And the moment that came to me, the story that came to me in my mind was from a TV show. It's a TV show called Schitt's Creek. It had 6 seasons, I think, and there are a few scenes and scenarios from that show that have become really popular online memes. It's a really cool show. I highly recommend it.

But what came to me was a scene from the show where Daniel Levy and Catherine O'Hara are trying to bake something, and Catherine O'Hara's character is telling David, Daniel Levy's character, to fold in the cheese. He's following a recipe and he says, what does fold in the cheese mean? And she says, you just fold it in. And he says, I know that, but what does it mean? And she says again, you know, David, I can't teach you everything. And she says again, to fold in the cheese, you just fold it in.

And I thought about that with letting go. It sounds like maybe such a weird thing, but there's a part of me that wants to say, you just let go. You just let it all go. And I just thought about that folding in the cheese moment and how it can then seem like, but how do I actually do it? How do I let go? And so that's what I want to talk about a little bit today, those scenarios of how you actually start to practice it, because it can feel very hard and very challenging, especially when we're used to holding on to things so much and we're used to trying to control as much as we can.

We're Not Really in Control Anyway

Because at the end of the day, when you're not letting go, it's because you're trying to control things. But actually, we don't really have control over anything anyway. It's kind of like a strange illusion, if you will, because in the grand scheme of things, what's happening… the Earth is moving, the universe is going, we think in our human minds that we're controlling a situation or a narrative or something, but anything can happen in any moment. So we're not actually controlling it.

This is what I want to dive into today, because there can just be so much around this concept of letting go. And especially now as we're changing seasons—well, by the time this airs, I suppose we'll be a bit into spring. The spring season. And Spring is all about starting, beginning again. Things are blooming. If you just look at nature and the cycles of nature, this is a time for blooming. And you can't really bloom if you're holding on to things from the past. You can't really bloom if you're trying to control and not let go of things. And we all have these in so many ways.

phases of how to let go and go with the flow

My Story: Moving to France

I am so guilty of this myself, and it can look really sneaky sometimes because you might not notice it in the moment. You might not notice, oh, this is what I'm holding on to. So for example, my family has lived in France now for about 4 years. We moved from the US 4 years ago, and in the beginning I really tried to hold on to my old life in some ways. Not because I didn't want to start new here. I was trying new things here, but you still want what's familiar. Sometimes you just want what's familiar.

And I had to go through a period of understanding that my relationships were going to look different. My friendships that I had in person were going to change because now we have to be friends a little more online, and what does that look like? And then when do I have an opportunity to go back to the US and visit my friends? I had done this before when I moved for different things. I lived in Brussels for a couple of years for work back in my corporate days, and so I knew a little bit already, or I had had that experience, but that time that I went away was temporary. I knew it was going to be temporary.

And this time it's more open-ended. You know, who knows what will happen in the future? But we were moving here knowing that we didn't have a plan to come back in 1 year or 2 years or something. It wasn't a temporary assignment. So there was a whole process that I had to go through with all of that, and I had to let go of how things looked before. And not hold on to it the same way, because we are always in a constant state of evolution. We're always changing, transitioning, growing, or even if we're staying the same, even if we try to stay the same, the things around us are changing all the time. It's just part of life.

What Letting Go Is NOT

So this concept of letting go, and as we enter this spring season and as we maybe reflect and think about what's on the horizon for us or what we're creating next, it's a really good time to also take a look at is there anything you're still holding on to from before that really it's time to let go of? It's time to move on from.

And I think it's also important to name that when we talk about letting go, it doesn't mean that you're just sitting around and waiting for things to happen. And it certainly doesn't mean that you're giving up on your life in some way. I say the way it looks with letting go is you're still holding the intention, you're holding the vision on things, you're still carrying those dreams that you have. But what you're not doing is you're not trying to expect a certain outcome, or you're not trying to say that something needs to happen a certain way.

Because a lot of times what we can do is we can say, okay, I have this plan, and so this is my goal, and this is how I'm going to reach my goal. But if you try to do it in that way, you're just setting yourself up with expectations. It doesn't give the universe a lot of room to move around and make things happen for you in a different way. And so part of having the room and the spaciousness for that is letting go of some of those things and letting go of some of those expectations.

So it can feel scary. It can feel scary and kind of disorienting sometimes. But the important thing that I want you to know from this is I don't mean that it's you sit around or that you give up. It's really about deepening your trust into knowing that things will work out for the highest good and trusting that where you are now is exactly where you need to be. There's a big layer or level of surrender in this process too, because it's really about saying, okay, I'm releasing control. I'm handing this over to the universe. This is what I'm putting in. This is my intention. This is my order. And I'm letting go to see what happens.

3 practices for how to let go and go with the flow

Letting Go of Old Stories

Another piece of this with letting go is that sometimes we can hold on to stories from the past. We can hold on similarly to how I said how my friendships would look different. We can do that with all different kinds of stories in our lives, stories from when we're younger or growing up or relationships with parents or any of those kinds of things, or a teacher that you had one year that was really not supportive. Any of those things can—if we keep holding on to that, it tells us that that's what we're expecting for our future too. Because we're not allowing ourselves to be open to other things.

It's kind of like, well, this is the story that I had and I'm going to hold on to this story because I'm familiar with this story and it's comfortable for me. That's another part of letting go—you have to recognize those things. You have to recognize what you're holding on to in order to be able to let go. Or unless you just kind of have a blanket statement of, I'm just going to practice releasing everything, I'm going to practice being in the present moment. That is great too.

But usually what happens and what I see with clients is that you're picking up or you're holding on to a couple of specific things. A couple of specific stories, whether it was you always had to deliver and prove yourself in some way in order to get the recognition from your mother, father, whoever. Anything like that that you might be holding on to is going to impact where you're going in your future. So that's just another thing to be aware of within this concept of letting go.

3 Simple Practices for Letting Go

Okay, so what I'd like to do is just share a few simple practices with you of how you can do this, how you can practice letting go so that you build a relationship with yourself in a different way that supports where you're going and where you want to go in life. Because if you really want to change and have different things in your life, this is a very important concept to learn and to practice over and over again.

It doesn't necessarily go away, you just get better at doing it. Whenever the things come up and in the mental chatter, you can go to a place where it makes it easier for you to identify it and then release it. This can take time. I just want you to know that it can take practice, but it's an evolution. It's an evolution. So just keep that in mind.

I want to give you a couple of resources to go with this. So I want to share 3 simple practices or tools that you can use. They are things that I have found helpful that I also share with clients because I'm always of this belief that we have tools in the toolkit. We find what works for us, so it's always take what resonates and leave the rest.

Practice 1: Talk to Your Body

The first one that I want to share is to identify where the feelings are coming up in your body. There's so much in paying attention to our bodies. Pay attention to what they're telling us. They're communicating with us all the time. It's wild once you really start to learn and understand that. And so is there a place where you repeatedly have tension that might be from holding on to things? And if that's the case, how can you release that?

A great way to do it is to start talking to that part of your body. So say you're having something always in your gut. How can you start talking to your gut to say, hey, actually, we're safe. I'm safe, you're safe, and let's try to release this together. I know it can sound so strange to say, okay, talk to your body like it's a person, but it really is part of you. So why not try it?

When you build this relationship and start speaking to it in a different way, or just speaking to it at all if you haven't been already. But when you speak to it in this way and hold these intentions and share and talk through what you want to actually happen, that you don't want to hold on to these things, that you want to be able to move on, you will start to see things shift. Because there's so much of all this—thoughts become things and what we think about expands. And so if we put ourselves in the stories and repeating the stories, we'll keep repeating that.

But if you start to talk to your body and name the feelings that are coming up in your body or the emotions that you're going through and say, okay, how do we work through this? How do we let this go? That is one way that you can take this and really say, all right, I'm setting myself up for something different, and you'll see things change for you over time. This is not just, oh, I talked to my body once for a minute and now everything should be fine. No, it's about observing and naming it and having the ongoing conversation and seeing, okay, well, what are the situations where I see this tightness come up, and how can I maybe not have those situations, or how can I work with my body beforehand to not have those situations?

So that's one, getting curious and starting to talk to your body. I know it's probably half of you are thinking, oh yeah, of course that's fine. And then another half are like, what are you talking about? But I'm telling you it works.

Practice 2: Use Your Human Design

Another thing you could do is you can start to look into your Human Design. If you have not heard about Human Design, I have a few podcast episodes on it. Human Design is a really great tool to show you and teach you a lot about your mind-body connection. And there's a lot in there about how you operate and also where you may take on from others, where you may hold on to things. So then you can use that as a tool to help you release, that awareness from using that tool can help you to then release things and help you to let go in a different way. You can grab your free chart here and learn more about the basics of Human Design on this podcast episode.

Practice 3: Music for Releasing

The third one that I want to share is I want to share a couple of pieces of music. Now, music for me has been something that has been very—well, I want to say instrumental—instrumental in my mind-body practices because it can really change your state and change your energy. And so I have a couple of songs that I like to listen to. Again, take what resonates, leave the rest. You may or may not like these songs. They are definitely unique in their own ways.

But when you sit with the intention of really saying, okay, my intention here is to release and to let go, it can be so much more powerful to just kind of sit and just close your eyes and listen to the song and just sit with that intention at the same time. And it can really do a lot to release, kind of like a meditative state. But you can follow along with this music and just lean into trust with it.

The first song that I like is called I Release Control and by Alexa Sunshine Rose. And it's one that I really, really love. It's very repetitive, but it's really getting you in that state of just releasing and coming back to the present moment, coming back to the present moment, because that's where we realize we don't have to hold on to what's in the past. So that's one song.

reflection questions for how to let go and go with the flow

The Salt Cave Story

And the other song is called Divine Surrendering by Doe Paoro. I don't know that I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but I'll put the link in the show notes. And this song called Divine Surrendering, it is so phenomenal. I haven't done an episode yet on my second trip to Egypt that I was just on in December, and I'm planning to at some point, but we listened to this song in a salt cave at a blue lotus sanctuary.

So we went to visit a place that is growing Egyptian blue lotus flowers to kind of bring them back to Egypt and take care of them in a different way. So the sanctuary is doing that. And they have a cave there where they brought over—they hand brought all of this stuff. It's all been hand done. They brought salt from the Siwa Desert and they brought it into this cave. And we had this session where we just had a very simple meditation, but this song came on. We had this simple meditation, we sat there around the salt—salt is very cleansing—and we listened to this song, and it was all about surrendering and releasing what isn't meant for you and trusting in what is meant for you.

And it so completely changed my frequency and my being. And anytime I listen to that song, I am transported to that salt cave and sitting on those lands and releasing all of the things and just letting it all go. And so I really do believe music can be such a powerful way to heal, to release, to shed, to let go. And you don't even have to feel like you're really doing anything. You just stay in the frequency of that.

Like I said, you can sit with it. Close your eyes, very simply listen to it. Maybe you listen to it at night before you go to bed, or you take a pause in the day because something's feeling really hard and you just listen to it for a couple minutes. And it can really shift so many things. So the power of music is incredible. So I'll put those two links in the show notes because that's also another way that you can really shift and get into the practice of it.

It's a Practice, Not a One-Time Thing

Because again, this is not something that happens like, oh, you snap your fingers, say, okay, I just let everything go. No, we're humans. We have experiences, we have feelings, emotions, stuff happening all around us. It is a practice to let go. It is a practice to come back to self. It is a practice to stay as often as possible in a higher level frequency or with an energy that is more grounded, calm, and centered to go about your day. It's not something—for most of us, it's not something that just happens out of the blue.

When you start to practice this along with other types of things, of course, gratitude and some of these other shifts that I talk about in Mind-Body Connection Unlocked, for example, in my book. As you start to incorporate all these different little things in the ways that you want to incorporate them, you will see shifts in ways that honestly you couldn't even imagine. You couldn't even imagine beforehand. It's all about integrating them, and that's what helps you to actually see and do and show up differently than you have in the past.

The Power of Intention

This is what I wanted to cover today, and I hope that it resonates, that I'm speaking from this place of really anything where you can learn to shift your perspective, shift your energy in some way to get you having an awareness and then thinking about, okay, well, what am I holding on to? And then how can I let go of it? And what are some things that feel interesting for me to practice and try out while I'm on this journey?

So I'd like to leave you with that today. And to reiterate, I probably didn't voice this enough before, but intention is a big piece of this. It is a huge piece of this. When you set your intention to let go and you hold that as the vision, that's what helps you to shift things because you're choosing something different than the past. You're choosing a different story because now you're saying, actually, yeah, I know I had that story before. Now I'm setting this intention and I'm moving forward in a different way. I'm setting this intention and I'm letting go of what was there before. I'm setting this intention and I'm entering this new era without all the baggage from the past.

However that looks to you with whatever practices you want to do. But holding that intention is another really big piece of what you do as you follow through on the practices. They go hand in hand.

So I hope this supports you with where you are on your journey. And if you are having a challenging time letting go, give these practices a try. Feel free to reach out and let me know how they go for you. I'd love to hear. If you ever are looking for additional support, there are a few ways that I would love to work with you if you're interested. All of that's in the show notes, but I always like to start with a Decision-Making session because this is where you really start to learn about paying attention to your mind and body together and how that will help you to start to make choices for yourself that are different choices maybe than what you've made in the past because you're doing it from a different place.

So that's always there if you need it. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your support and being here, and I love you so much, deeply. All right, talk soon.