Part 2: Letting Go Soulfully
Here’s Part 1 in case you missed it.
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Howard Thurman
Howard Thurman's invitation sounds simple, until we realize how much of this aliveness he refers to is actually buried inside us. The ego-level letting go we explored in our first post is real and necessary work, but it tends to happen near the surface. There's a deeper layer. And coming more fully alive requires going there.
Soul work asks us to descend. And this happens more in the heart than in the head.
The Feelings We've Been Avoiding
David Hawkins, author of Letting Go, identifies four habitual ways we keep difficult emotions at arm's length:
we repress them (push them down unconsciously),
suppress them (push them down on purpose),
express them (dump them, usually onto someone else), or
escape them (yup, food, phones and Netflix).
These are very human strategies. They just don't actually work, not at the soul level. They manage the surface while the depths stay unsettled. Those buried feelings cost us in Lifeforce and daily energy. They narrow our perception, fog our creativity, and quietly drain the aliveness out of us.
The path to coming alive runs straight through - not around - this soulful terrain where we excavate emotions.
These Feelings Are Actually Doorways
Grief, fear, apathy, buried dreams - none of these sound like invitations to aliveness. But they are. Each one, if we can stay present with it rather than flee, carries information the soul has been trying to deliver for a while.
Apathy, beneath its sullen withdrawal, usually conceals fear. An antidote is moving our inner narratives from "I can't" to "I won't". This surprisingly powerful small shift activates inner agency. It’s now a choice rather than a concession.
Grief, which our culture treats mostly as a problem to get over, is in some traditions considered sacred. The Lakota say the grieving person stands at the threshold of spirit, that their prayers carry particular weight. Grief, held with reverence rather than resistance, becomes a kind of aliveness all its own. Raw and real and tender.
Fear governs most lives from the background, rooted in a sense of threat and scarcity. Unexamined, it becomes self-reinforcing. But at its edges, fear is always reaching toward something - courage, usually. Stay present long enough and you can tend to the deeper needs it is pointing to.
Buried dreams are gold we have not dared to mine. Small or sweeping, modest or magnificent, they hold the soul's most honest yearnings. They’re charged with guidance, and alive with life-force. Patient and persistent, they wait just beneath the surface of the life we have been living. They become a treasure chest the moment we dare to excavate them.
How to Actually Do This Excavating?
Hawkins describes the letting go process this way:
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it.
That's kenosis (self-emptying) at the soul level - not willpower or technique, but presence. The 4 Rs offer a simple structure:
Recognize the actual feeling beneath the thought.
Relax the body - a crucial move for soul work.
Respect what you find. And then…
Release, trusting the soul's own wisdom to do what it naturally does when we stop interfering.
What's on the Other Side
What emerges when we stop running from our depths is not more darkness. It's spaciousness. Capacity. A quiet aliveness that wasn't accessible before. The things that were consuming our energy - managing, suppressing, escaping - release their hold. And into that freed-up space comes something we can only call more life.
The soul depth we've been avoiding turns out to be a wellspring, an upwelling of Spirit that lightens us from within, further releasing us from egoic fear, and guiding us into a more expansive life.