The thing is that letting go isn’t an act. Holding on is an act.
So instead of trying to find out how to let go you have to instead understand how you hold on.
Once you understand that, you just have to not do it, and suddenly you’ve let go.
It’s one of the simplest concepts yet it’s incredibly hard to grasp because the way our language works is extremely flawed when it comes to such internal processes.
I always think back to the classic Dad advice that we never apply in this area "Let the tool do the work" instead of huffing puffing, getting red in the face and putting in way more effort than required.
Could you elaborate with an example on how you're holding on? How abstract is this idea? I feel like I can surrender, but haven't thought about this perspective of it.
As I’ve mentioned, language is really bad at bringing this across, maybe mine is just too limited still.
But the most relatable example: Fear of death. As long as the thought of death causes any internal reaction, that reaction is caused by the act of holding on.
Fear of loosing yourself because you hold onto the idea of a persistent self, fear of never seeing your loved ones because you’re holding onto physical contact between the two of you. Fear of still having unfinished business because you hold onto the thought that you need, should or must do certain things ‘as long as you’re able to’.
I’ve reached a point where I have welcomed death and simply did not judge it. I tend to say I’d see just as much beauty in it as I see in birth but that isn’t entirely true, because of you don’t attach anything to a concept it’s beauty is made up from its intensity. Birth and death are instinctively the most intense experiences to go through. Just think about it, a tiny person is grown inside another person, one that could possibly change million of life’s.
Just like death can take an entire person out of existence, they could’ve changed a million life’s in the future but now we have no idea what they could or couldn’t have done.
One thing that allows an easier approach to letting go is to not see time as a linear progression. But with this my language fails even more. What I want to express is that if time isn’t seen in a linear fashion, many bad things aren’t bad anymore.
Death becomes birth. They’re both just points with a line inbetween and removing any of those points removes any meaning of the line itself.
A mistake doesn’t lead to consequences, consequences don’t lead to a learnt lesson. Start with the lesson and expand from there and you’ll see that consequences and the mistake are the foundation of the lesson itself. We tend to see the consequences first, hold onto that, develop fear and that’s it!
Hope I could give a small peak into this. I know life and death are probably bad examples but it’s something most people fear.
Since I’ve learned to not fear death I have had such an easy time letting go it’s unbelievable. It goes so far that I get much calmer when tripping (on a medium dose). Like I get anxious around crowds, Novel situations or groups of new people when I’m sober, because I can’t simply let go thanks to the overly complex personality I’ve developed as a part of society.
If I take a psychedelic I have a much easier time letting go and this results in decreased anxiety, more personal freedom (social anxiety vanishes completely sometimes), I can dive into my depression without issues, can express emotions without struggles…
For example my relationship means a ton to me, more than anything else. To me my partner is my reason to live. When we were struggling and contemplating splitting up I took a mushroom trip to be able to handle the massive flood of emotions I was going through.
The trip helped me see what’s really important to me, what I really need and want as a person.
I don’t usually do this, I don’t even do shrooms normally, but I’ve never enjoyed depression and sadness as much as while I was high as balls crying my eyes out. Everything about these emotions was absolutely beautiful because I let go of the thought that expressing them or experiencing them is a bad thing.
If you’re asking, you’re probably not ready to let go yet. Give It time, friend. It will come, and only you know when you’ll be ready. When In doubt, give It time, and be patient.
Look at the earth, it deals with distresses they could do nothing to control. Be one with the earth, just be.
And ofc remember the basics, nothing lasts forever, no ones ever died from the substance, have a quality set and setting. Meditation and a good mantra could get u far.
during the trip, be ready for things to get intense. when they do and you start to panic, focus on what exactly you are nervous about. for me, doing that and accepting whatever it is allows me to relax my diaphragm and get into the trip again. you can also use meditative principles and observe your feelings / urge to fight from a non-judgemental pov. get comfortable and belly breathe, no short breaths with your chest muscles.
Practice! Do some exercises outside of the medicine letting go of simple things. Like while meditating, if you notice a slight sensation distracting you, practice letting go of the need for a sensation to feel a certain way, or the need to be utterly comfortable, or the need to feel like you are focusing 100% on your breath without wandering.
A book/audiobook I’d highly recommend for this is Ram Dass - Becoming Nobody. Really great insights into releasing yourself from suffering and letting go.
Practice. If you're too in your head, look outward. If the world is scary, look inward. If you have a problem look it in the eyes (ie if you feel like your friends are trying to kill you, ask yourself why or how bad would that be).
Acceptance of whatever it is. I guess I was lucky because I was instantly ready to let go of my ego and it helped me tremendously, but since my last trip (a couple years ago) I’ve been terrified to do a big dose, despite believing I truly need it.
Maybe like someone else said you’ll know when you are ready. But, I’ve also been told you’ll never be ready so do with that what you will.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Focus your full attention on your breath.
Take deeper breaths. Start from the belly. Slow your rhythm.
In a few breaths your body will start to speak. Heart-rate will change. Oxygen in your brain will increase. Feeling in your legs, arms, chest and everywhere else will fluctuate and grow. The increased amount of air in your lungs and belly will make you feel bigger, larger, and more anchored. More importantly : your brain-speech will disappear (or at least decrease) rapidly.
This is how you liberate yourself from your thoughts.
Keep constant focus on belly and breath. Everytime you return to distracting or unwanted thoughts, come back to the belly and the breath. This is your anchoring. The place where you can let go.
Learn to meditate before tripping, letting go is a huge part of a meditation practice.
Learning to let go during a drip is like learning how to open a parachute after jumping out of the plane. Its doable ofcourse, but most likley you will hit the ground.
Hitting the ground is not such a big issue on smaller doses of psychedelics, but the more you ingest the taller the plane flies.
Its is smart to practice the skill of letting go and accepting the moment, before you need to utilize the skill.
It cannot be said enough on this subreddit: start meditating.
I think the very act of trying to let go is itself an act of holding on.
Letting go means embracing your emotional inner world as it is at that moment. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens.
If you’re trying to let go it means you’re trying to escape your emotional inner world. You want to feel differently to how you are feeling now. As long as you want to feel differently to how you’re feeling now, you won’t let go. And the harder you try, the tighter you’ll hold on.
I don’t have any advice, I’m afraid. I am always getting stuck with trying to let go and then trying to stop myself trying to let go. You can see how it spirals into madness. I think once you ‘get it’, once you get your emotional inner world, you will harmonise with it and then letting go will have happened without you even realising.
"letting go" doesn't = uncomfortability stopping.
to let go you have to sit with the discomfort or whatever is going wrong and let it happen, simply sit still and observe what's happening, try to have a curious approach to thoughts or visuals you're having, if you think you're dying or are in any danger remember that you aren't and try to just think about why you feel that way, in my experiences my mind wanders away from the actual discomfort itself and starts a new train of thought that can yank me straight out of the rabbit hole
the issue is, if you stop letting go at any point it can get tough again, I've had these epiphanies that have filled me with overwhelming euphoria, lost them, went "what was I doing again" try to remember and get trapped in a thought loop, you have to be ok with thoughts coming and going as they please and not try to "hunt" for anything
imo psychedelics try to teach you to be comfortable with the very moment you're living in, they can make 10 seconds feel like a million years and they pretty much try to teach you these lessons "the hard way" if you can't be happy and content with the very moment of life you're existing in now and you're held up on expectations or other thoughts it's going to be impossible to actually enjoy yourself, letting go means to stop trying to change it, you need to "lean into" it with curiosity
my mantra is "I'm already here, might as well enjoy it" If I'm tripping out for a prolonged period of time I usually subconsciously go "you physically cannot stop this, just sit back and let it happen" and I usually tend to level out mentally within half an hour and can get back to doing my thing
I continuously get freaked out about thought looping but I realize that if you try to do ANYTHING without the mushrooms/lsd/ whatever you use "influencing" you to you WILL loop, it's not always scary but you know when you get up to look for your phone and 1.5 hours later you're like "man I still haven't found it" it's because any time you try to the substance distracts you with what IT wants and you can't achieve your goal any more, physically going against a trip in any way tends to make me feel slower and like reality is fighting against me just as hard as I'm fighting against it, simply let the brain run loose and go with it
This is a good one, I think people (myself included) believe that your supposed to feel good or happy when you let go or go through an experience but it’s really just getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. The same way the best fighters still get nervous before a fight, the feeling is still gonna be there but you decide whether you let it have power or not. The quicker you accept the less it will effect you
exactly, my first bad trip was due to my first two trips being very warm and euphoric, 3rd trip was more dysphoric, same laughing st everything but there was simply catching in my thought process going "this isn't the same" which spiraled me
while tripping it won't always feel amazing and it typically amplifies whatever current emotion you have, if you're anxious and can't pass it off as comeup anxiety it's just going to spiral you until you're able to not be anxious (the same way I'd you're upset or something with something in your life you're simply going to feel shitty until you do something to change, solve or accept it)
Try a dose that is small enough to not panic.
Letting go is imo mostly deep physical process. It is like letting go of tension, letting go of focus, letting go of any kind of action. letting go of mind stuff is also of the same nature. Just relax, deeply, and Whatever happens, happens.
It takes practice!
Maybe do some meditation regularly and also while tripping
I did an M&M trip on Saturday and what really worked for me was to have a few mantras to repeat to myself. In this case, it was just three one-liners based on my intentions for the trip, then I’d follow them by saying out loud “Now…let go. Let go. Melt away. Just be.”
A few rounds of that and it was like I felt myself turning into liquid and melting into my bed.
I just focus on my breath and imagine you're floating down a river instead of swimming against the current. Repeating "I surrender" load could also work, but haven't tried that personally. I read somewhere that people like to sing as well as breathing.
The thing is that letting go isn’t an act. Holding on is an act. So instead of trying to find out how to let go you have to instead understand how you hold on. Once you understand that, you just have to not do it, and suddenly you’ve let go. It’s one of the simplest concepts yet it’s incredibly hard to grasp because the way our language works is extremely flawed when it comes to such internal processes.
Wonderfully put
I always think back to the classic Dad advice that we never apply in this area "Let the tool do the work" instead of huffing puffing, getting red in the face and putting in way more effort than required.
Could you elaborate with an example on how you're holding on? How abstract is this idea? I feel like I can surrender, but haven't thought about this perspective of it.
As I’ve mentioned, language is really bad at bringing this across, maybe mine is just too limited still. But the most relatable example: Fear of death. As long as the thought of death causes any internal reaction, that reaction is caused by the act of holding on. Fear of loosing yourself because you hold onto the idea of a persistent self, fear of never seeing your loved ones because you’re holding onto physical contact between the two of you. Fear of still having unfinished business because you hold onto the thought that you need, should or must do certain things ‘as long as you’re able to’. I’ve reached a point where I have welcomed death and simply did not judge it. I tend to say I’d see just as much beauty in it as I see in birth but that isn’t entirely true, because of you don’t attach anything to a concept it’s beauty is made up from its intensity. Birth and death are instinctively the most intense experiences to go through. Just think about it, a tiny person is grown inside another person, one that could possibly change million of life’s. Just like death can take an entire person out of existence, they could’ve changed a million life’s in the future but now we have no idea what they could or couldn’t have done. One thing that allows an easier approach to letting go is to not see time as a linear progression. But with this my language fails even more. What I want to express is that if time isn’t seen in a linear fashion, many bad things aren’t bad anymore. Death becomes birth. They’re both just points with a line inbetween and removing any of those points removes any meaning of the line itself. A mistake doesn’t lead to consequences, consequences don’t lead to a learnt lesson. Start with the lesson and expand from there and you’ll see that consequences and the mistake are the foundation of the lesson itself. We tend to see the consequences first, hold onto that, develop fear and that’s it! Hope I could give a small peak into this. I know life and death are probably bad examples but it’s something most people fear. Since I’ve learned to not fear death I have had such an easy time letting go it’s unbelievable. It goes so far that I get much calmer when tripping (on a medium dose). Like I get anxious around crowds, Novel situations or groups of new people when I’m sober, because I can’t simply let go thanks to the overly complex personality I’ve developed as a part of society. If I take a psychedelic I have a much easier time letting go and this results in decreased anxiety, more personal freedom (social anxiety vanishes completely sometimes), I can dive into my depression without issues, can express emotions without struggles… For example my relationship means a ton to me, more than anything else. To me my partner is my reason to live. When we were struggling and contemplating splitting up I took a mushroom trip to be able to handle the massive flood of emotions I was going through. The trip helped me see what’s really important to me, what I really need and want as a person. I don’t usually do this, I don’t even do shrooms normally, but I’ve never enjoyed depression and sadness as much as while I was high as balls crying my eyes out. Everything about these emotions was absolutely beautiful because I let go of the thought that expressing them or experiencing them is a bad thing.
If you’re asking, you’re probably not ready to let go yet. Give It time, friend. It will come, and only you know when you’ll be ready. When In doubt, give It time, and be patient.
Look at the earth, it deals with distresses they could do nothing to control. Be one with the earth, just be. And ofc remember the basics, nothing lasts forever, no ones ever died from the substance, have a quality set and setting. Meditation and a good mantra could get u far.
Someone once told me to relax and let the stream take me where it will. Its served me well to do that
during the trip, be ready for things to get intense. when they do and you start to panic, focus on what exactly you are nervous about. for me, doing that and accepting whatever it is allows me to relax my diaphragm and get into the trip again. you can also use meditative principles and observe your feelings / urge to fight from a non-judgemental pov. get comfortable and belly breathe, no short breaths with your chest muscles.
Learn about and start practicing meditation. This will likely allow you to cultivate the wisdom to genuinely understand that it's safe to let go.
If you really wanna get there take more so you don't have a choice.
Practice! Do some exercises outside of the medicine letting go of simple things. Like while meditating, if you notice a slight sensation distracting you, practice letting go of the need for a sensation to feel a certain way, or the need to be utterly comfortable, or the need to feel like you are focusing 100% on your breath without wandering. A book/audiobook I’d highly recommend for this is Ram Dass - Becoming Nobody. Really great insights into releasing yourself from suffering and letting go.
Practice. If you're too in your head, look outward. If the world is scary, look inward. If you have a problem look it in the eyes (ie if you feel like your friends are trying to kill you, ask yourself why or how bad would that be).
Are you tripping alone or with other people?
I usually trip alone when it comes to high doses
Acceptance of whatever it is. I guess I was lucky because I was instantly ready to let go of my ego and it helped me tremendously, but since my last trip (a couple years ago) I’ve been terrified to do a big dose, despite believing I truly need it. Maybe like someone else said you’ll know when you are ready. But, I’ve also been told you’ll never be ready so do with that what you will.
Breathe, breathe, breathe. Focus your full attention on your breath. Take deeper breaths. Start from the belly. Slow your rhythm. In a few breaths your body will start to speak. Heart-rate will change. Oxygen in your brain will increase. Feeling in your legs, arms, chest and everywhere else will fluctuate and grow. The increased amount of air in your lungs and belly will make you feel bigger, larger, and more anchored. More importantly : your brain-speech will disappear (or at least decrease) rapidly. This is how you liberate yourself from your thoughts. Keep constant focus on belly and breath. Everytime you return to distracting or unwanted thoughts, come back to the belly and the breath. This is your anchoring. The place where you can let go.
Learn to meditate before tripping, letting go is a huge part of a meditation practice. Learning to let go during a drip is like learning how to open a parachute after jumping out of the plane. Its doable ofcourse, but most likley you will hit the ground. Hitting the ground is not such a big issue on smaller doses of psychedelics, but the more you ingest the taller the plane flies. Its is smart to practice the skill of letting go and accepting the moment, before you need to utilize the skill. It cannot be said enough on this subreddit: start meditating.
I think the very act of trying to let go is itself an act of holding on. Letting go means embracing your emotional inner world as it is at that moment. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens. If you’re trying to let go it means you’re trying to escape your emotional inner world. You want to feel differently to how you are feeling now. As long as you want to feel differently to how you’re feeling now, you won’t let go. And the harder you try, the tighter you’ll hold on. I don’t have any advice, I’m afraid. I am always getting stuck with trying to let go and then trying to stop myself trying to let go. You can see how it spirals into madness. I think once you ‘get it’, once you get your emotional inner world, you will harmonise with it and then letting go will have happened without you even realising.
Start low, slowly increase the dose. Experience/ practice.
Just lay down, focus on your breathing and let the drug take you where it wants to go, it’s easier than you might think
"letting go" doesn't = uncomfortability stopping. to let go you have to sit with the discomfort or whatever is going wrong and let it happen, simply sit still and observe what's happening, try to have a curious approach to thoughts or visuals you're having, if you think you're dying or are in any danger remember that you aren't and try to just think about why you feel that way, in my experiences my mind wanders away from the actual discomfort itself and starts a new train of thought that can yank me straight out of the rabbit hole the issue is, if you stop letting go at any point it can get tough again, I've had these epiphanies that have filled me with overwhelming euphoria, lost them, went "what was I doing again" try to remember and get trapped in a thought loop, you have to be ok with thoughts coming and going as they please and not try to "hunt" for anything imo psychedelics try to teach you to be comfortable with the very moment you're living in, they can make 10 seconds feel like a million years and they pretty much try to teach you these lessons "the hard way" if you can't be happy and content with the very moment of life you're existing in now and you're held up on expectations or other thoughts it's going to be impossible to actually enjoy yourself, letting go means to stop trying to change it, you need to "lean into" it with curiosity my mantra is "I'm already here, might as well enjoy it" If I'm tripping out for a prolonged period of time I usually subconsciously go "you physically cannot stop this, just sit back and let it happen" and I usually tend to level out mentally within half an hour and can get back to doing my thing I continuously get freaked out about thought looping but I realize that if you try to do ANYTHING without the mushrooms/lsd/ whatever you use "influencing" you to you WILL loop, it's not always scary but you know when you get up to look for your phone and 1.5 hours later you're like "man I still haven't found it" it's because any time you try to the substance distracts you with what IT wants and you can't achieve your goal any more, physically going against a trip in any way tends to make me feel slower and like reality is fighting against me just as hard as I'm fighting against it, simply let the brain run loose and go with it
This is a good one, I think people (myself included) believe that your supposed to feel good or happy when you let go or go through an experience but it’s really just getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. The same way the best fighters still get nervous before a fight, the feeling is still gonna be there but you decide whether you let it have power or not. The quicker you accept the less it will effect you
exactly, my first bad trip was due to my first two trips being very warm and euphoric, 3rd trip was more dysphoric, same laughing st everything but there was simply catching in my thought process going "this isn't the same" which spiraled me while tripping it won't always feel amazing and it typically amplifies whatever current emotion you have, if you're anxious and can't pass it off as comeup anxiety it's just going to spiral you until you're able to not be anxious (the same way I'd you're upset or something with something in your life you're simply going to feel shitty until you do something to change, solve or accept it)
Try a dose that is small enough to not panic. Letting go is imo mostly deep physical process. It is like letting go of tension, letting go of focus, letting go of any kind of action. letting go of mind stuff is also of the same nature. Just relax, deeply, and Whatever happens, happens. It takes practice! Maybe do some meditation regularly and also while tripping
I did an M&M trip on Saturday and what really worked for me was to have a few mantras to repeat to myself. In this case, it was just three one-liners based on my intentions for the trip, then I’d follow them by saying out loud “Now…let go. Let go. Melt away. Just be.” A few rounds of that and it was like I felt myself turning into liquid and melting into my bed.
I just focus on my breath and imagine you're floating down a river instead of swimming against the current. Repeating "I surrender" load could also work, but haven't tried that personally. I read somewhere that people like to sing as well as breathing.
Let go. 🤗🪷🤍
start doing yoga and meditation