DW's Blog

Letting Go

by DW Green — February 18, 2026

“…letting go. Not a doing. An undoing…”

“It is resistance that keeps the feeling going.” — David R. Hawkins

THE GRIP

We think letting go is about the thing we’re holding.

It isn’t.

Letting go is about the holding. The grip itself. The white-knuckled, unconscious, so-habitual-you-don’t-even-notice-it-anymore clench of the hand around something that was never meant to be held that tightly.

A feeling arises. Fear. Anger. Grief. Shame. And before the feeling has even finished arriving, we’ve already done five things to it: resisted it, judged it, feared it, moralized about it, and tried to fix it. Five reactions, and the feeling hasn’t even had time to breathe.

That’s not experiencing a feeling. That’s mugging it in the hallway.

Hawkins saw this with extraordinary clarity. The first step, he said, is simply to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning it, or moralizing about it. Drop the judgment. See that it is just a feeling. Be with it. Surrender all efforts to modify it in any way.

Just a feeling. Two words that change everything.

THE FIST AND THE PALM

Here’s what I’ve come to see. Letting go is not an action. It’s the absence of an action. It’s what happens when you stop doing the thing you didn’t realize you were doing.

Make a fist. Squeeze it tight. Hold it. Feel the tension in your forearm, your wrist, your fingers. That’s resistance. That’s the ego gripping a feeling and refusing to let it pass.

Now open your hand. Don’t throw anything away. Don’t push anything out. Just open. Let the fingers unfurl. Let the palm face up.

That’s letting go. Not a doing. An undoing. Not adding something new. Removing what was never necessary.

The feeling was never the problem. The grip was the problem. And the grip was always optional.

THE FUEL OF RESISTANCE

Hawkins put his finger on something that most people miss entirely: it is resistance that keeps the feeling going.

Read that again. The feeling isn’t self-sustaining. Left alone, it would arise, move through, and dissipate—like weather. Like clouds. Like a wave that crests and falls and returns to the ocean it never actually left.

But we don’t leave it alone. We grab it. We squeeze it. We tell stories about it. We feed it the juice of our attention, our judgment, our fear of it. And then we wonder why it won’t go away.

It won’t go away because we won’t let it. We’re the ones keeping it alive. The resistance is the fuel. Without resistance, the feeling has no engine. It simply moves through and dissolves, the way every feeling is designed to do.

I know this from a place deeper than reading. I spent years resisting feelings with alcohol. Numbing them. Drowning them. Thinking that if I couldn’t feel the feeling, the feeling would stop. But that’s not letting go. That’s holding on with anesthesia. The grip is still there. You just can’t feel your fingers anymore.

Sobriety taught me that the feeling won’t kill you. Resistance might. But the feeling itself? It just wants to pass through. Let it.

THE PARADE

I think of feelings now as a parade.

They march through. Some are loud—big brass bands of anger and fear. Some are quiet—soft floats of tenderness and gratitude. Some are ugly. Some are beautiful. They all pass.

The problem isn’t the parade. The problem is when we run into the street and try to stop one of the floats. We grab it. We chain ourselves to it. We say, This one. This one defines me. This one is who I am.

Or we stand on the sidewalk screaming at the floats we don’t like. Go away! You shouldn’t be here! I didn’t invite you!

But the parade doesn’t need our permission. It doesn’t need our approval. It doesn’t even need our attention. It just needs us to stop blocking the street.

Letting go is stepping back onto the sidewalk and watching the parade pass. Not judging the floats. Not chasing the ones you like or fleeing the ones you don’t. Just watching. Allowing. Being with what is, as it is, for as long as it is.

And here’s Hawkins’s promise: when you give up resisting or trying to modify the feeling, it will shift to the next feeling and be accompanied by a lighter sensation. A feeling that is not resisted will disappear as the energy behind it dissipates.

The parade keeps moving. It always does. We just have to get out of the way.

AN ONGOING ACTIVITY

Here’s what nobody tells you about letting go: it’s not a one-time event.

It’s an ongoing activity. A daily practice. A moment-by-moment choice to open the hand again. Because the hand will close. The grip will return. The ego will reach for the juice again—the worry, the judgment, the self-pity, the righteous anger—because that’s what the ego does. It grips.

And that’s okay. That’s not failure. That’s the practice.

Letting go is not a destination. It’s an -ING. A continuous, living, breathing act of releasing. Not once. Not dramatically. Not with trumpets and resolution. But quietly, repeatedly, the way you breathe out. You don’t exhale once and declare victory. You exhale, and then you exhale again. And again. And again.

That’s letting go. The exhale of the soul.

THE PARADOX

And here is the beautiful paradox at the center of all of this:

You can’t try to let go. Trying is another form of gripping. The effort to release is still effort. The desire to be free of a feeling is still a desire—still juice, still lean, still the ego running the show while wearing a spiritual costume.

Real letting go isn’t something you do. It’s something that happens when you stop doing everything else. When you stop resisting. Stop judging. Stop fearing. Stop moralizing. Stop trying to fix, manage, control, improve, or spiritualize the feeling.

When all of that stops, what’s left?

Just the feeling. Passing through. Like weather. Like a wave. Like a float in a parade that was never yours to stop.

And behind the feeling? Stillness. The same stillness that was there before the story began. Before the grip. Before the lean. Before the juice.

The peace that was always there, waiting for you to open your hand.

WHAT WE’RE REALLY LETTING GO OF

In the end, what are we really letting go of?

Not the feelings. Feelings are natural. They’re the parade. They’re life moving through us, and we are not a body walking through the world—the body and the world are flowing through us.

What we’re letting go of is the belief that the feelings are ours. That they define us. That they mean something about who we are. The belief in a separate self that owns the anger, possesses the grief, earns the joy, deserves the shame.

That self—the one who grips—is the first and last belief. The mistaken sense of limitation. The perceptual error that says I am separate from what I experience.

Letting go of a feeling is practice. Letting go of the one who grips—that’s liberation.

And it doesn’t happen once. It happens every time you open your hand. Every time you step back from the parade. Every time you see the grip and choose—gently, without judgment, without force—to release.

The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao. And the letting go that can be achieved is not the eternal letting go. It’s not a trophy on a shelf. It’s a breath. Ongoing. Always now. Always available.

CODA: OPEN HANDS

This morning I woke up gripping something. I don’t even remember what. A worry. A thought. A story about tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the moment I noticed the grip.

I didn’t fight it. I didn’t judge it. I didn’t moralize about the fact that here I am, seventy-five years old, writing essays about awareness, and still waking up with a clenched fist.

I just opened my hand.

And the feeling shifted. Lighter. Freer. Not gone—just moving. Passing through. The parade continuing down the street.

That’s the practice. Not perfection. Not arrival. Just the willingness, again and again, to open the hand.

Letting go is not a skill you master. It’s a kindness you offer yourself, one moment at a time.

Open hands. Open heart. Open road.

Let it pass. Let it all pass. And see what remains.

What remains was never holding on to begin with.

Notes IN Being.

Always NOW. Always ON.