As the last of the leaves start to fall away from the trees, brightly coloured in their final death throes, we get to see the most natural way of letting go in order to make space for the new.
When something needs to end, or has ended, one instinct is to let go and move on as quickly as possible, or maybe even find a replacement before the old has fully dropped away.
This doesn’t allow for the necessary process of grief, rage and despair, the many colours of loss. Instead, they are pushed away, to lie frozen but not gone, within us. We then carry each of these losses, taking up valuable space, to rise again later in the form of anxiety, dysregulation and depression, and somatically, as physical illness and chronic pain. Chaos and a general lack of peace within ourselves.
Of course this is understandable, because turning towards death and the pain that’s involved often feels intolerable, a pain that needs to be “healed” as quickly as possible. But grief and heartache, in its brutality, doesn’t need to be healed, it just needs to be seen and felt. The processing that happens as the tears flow is how loss doesn’t turn into a wound. The shattered pieces will come back together because this is the natural process of things.
The wounds we carry that actually need to be healed are the losses we weren’t allowed to feel, the ones we were forced to let go of. Any loss, tragic or chosen, needs to be given the time and grace it deserves. That might be the actual death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, deciding to let go of a role that was given and not chosen, a change in job or career or identity, a move to a new home, an illness that takes away time and opportunities, the end of a dream.
It’s also never too late to mourn old losses, to go back and acknowledge the loss of a safe and loving childhood, of innocence, of the rejected parts of ourselves that were seen as unacceptable. These are the wounds we need to shed light on and process so that those too can be let go of.
Imagine if trees just dropped their green leaves at the end of summer? How strange that would be. How shocking and sudden, to go from one to another, without a transition.
We’re used to the slow descent, the beautiful display of colours through the three months of autumn. It prepares the animal world for the stillness of winter, which will make way for the opening of spring.
Every part of nature needs transitionary periods of change, to make proper space for the new things to come. People will say that sometimes you have to just let go in order to keep going, to keep functioning. The popular belief is that grief and rage is so destructive that it could ruin us. But does nature stop functioning in autumn? Do the trees die? It’s much more destructive, in the long run, to try and bypass what needs to be processed in the time that’s naturally required for it.
So instead of forcing yourself to let go, blocking out the difficult feelings, distracting yourself with anything you can find, moving through life pretending you’re “fine” and have moved on, let the unravelling happen in the way it needs to happen. Let yourself feel the despair. Let yourself cry and rage and shatter. And trust that this is the natural order of things. Trust that you can survive the loss and the big feelings that need to come with it. Surrender to what is, surrender to all the colours of the process, to make way for whatever is coming next.
Things that will help the process
- Be still and let whatever emotions need to come, have space
- Breathwork – an amazing medicine for releasing what we may hold in our bodies
- Spend time with people who you feel seen and heard by
- Journal, write poetry, draw, embrace creativity
- Keep communicating and have the difficult conversations if that is what’s needed
- Move your body as often as possible – walking, yoga, dancing
- Radical self care with good food, good rest, holistic therapies, meditation
- Listen to music
- Cry
- Have some therapy
Charley Brinton 