I’ve been teaching people healthy and do-able ways to let things go for almost 10 years now. I say healthy and do-able because a lot of approaches are just too intense. As much as we might want to snap our fingers and let go of habits, behaviors, relationships, or things that happened in the past, the process of release is usually ongoing.
So many of us get wrapped up in the all-or-nothing mindset, but what if there was a way to evaluate what’s actually possible to let go of so that it doesn’t take up as much space in our lives? In this episode, I highlight how to determine when it’s time to move on completely, take a pause, or simply deprioritize things.
I hope the examples that I share illustrate ways that you can let go with more ease and compassion for whatever you have going on in your life.
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In episode 421 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:
(2:55) Why I created the REAL Uplevel Interview Series
(5:15) The deeper nuances and complexities of letting go
(9:37) How I let people in my life know when our connection feels energetically complete for me
(11:30) Why endings don’t always have to be bitter or hurtful
(13:16) Letting go for a time without certainty if you’ll be back
(16:34) Practicing healthy and intentional decompartmentalization
(18:34) Honoring the seasonal and cyclical nature of life
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Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:
- Letting things go to whatever degree is possible is better than not even trying it all.
- Energetically, I can always feel when something is complete. It’s the feeling of when something has run its course and continuing to engage with it just feels pointless, draining, or agitating.
- What is the damn point of doing all this healing and liberation work if we actually don’t get to just be a more healed and liberated person for a period of time without working on shit? Take some time to just live as the person that you’ve been striving so hard to become.
- Just because something is relevant and important doesn’t mean that you need to deal with it right now.
- Sometimes we just let go of things for a time and we don’t know if we’ll come back. But, we can be okay with that and just trust that if it makes sense to return to it, it’ll be clear and we can do that.
- When things end, it doesn’t always have to be bitter. There doesn’t have to be hostility or animosity. We can actually just honor what was beautiful and move on.
How was this episode for you?
Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!
About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto
Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.
If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussions on Instagram here.
Transcript for Episode 421 “Different Ways to Let Go“:
Elizabeth DiAlto 00:00
You got to take some time to just live as the person that you’ve been striving so hard to become. Right not every season needs to be a healing season or a growth season.
Elizabeth DiAlto 00:17
Hello, everybody, this is episode number 421 of The Embodied Podcast. And today’s just a short episode about different ways to let go. Those of you that have been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, probably know this about me. But I am about nuance, context, complexity, and discernment. Right with the dawning of social media, and the soundbite age and culture that we live in. It used to be tweets, write everything in 140 characters, and things being tweetable. And then I think Twitter does like more characters now. But then with like Instagram, and Facebook, evolved microblogging, where people write these long epic captions about things. But still, a caption can only encompass so much depth nuanced, and be so inclusive of different types of experiences, right? And now we have reels and tiktoks, the short form videos, or I think, what is it called on YouTube shorts, were still in like, anywhere from 90 seconds to I think up to 10 minutes, people are diving into all kinds of material and subject matter. But often, it’s more of a hot take, then bringing in any kind of depth, historical background, Nuance context and stuff like that.
Elizabeth DiAlto 01:53
And listen, some people do try to do those things. So I’m not not being absolutist. Here. I’m not saying never, I’m not saying there’s no utility to these things. But what happens is it accustoms people, it’s like eating junk food, right? When you eat junk food, all it does is make you crave more junk food, because there’s not really any nutritional value to it. It’s not ever really like satiating or satisfying. All it does is make you crave more things, or it’s satiating or satisfying for like a short time, but then you’re hungry again, relatively soon, because your body is craving actual nutrients. And so it’s very similar with the content that floats around on the internet. And I get it like I also create that content. So it’s very conflicting. But this is what I love about having a podcast, being able to take a little more time to dig around, talk about things give more nuance and context, get into the complexity of things, look at things from different angles, explore different lived experiences and stuff like that.
Elizabeth DiAlto 02:55
There’s actually one of the reasons why I was obsessed with doing the real up level business interview series, which if you’re listening this in real time, it is Monday, April 3, and we are officially releasing the interviews as of today. So if you are a coach or healer, and you have not checked out the real up level business interview series yet, go to the real up level.com. And see if that’s something that interests you. Rather than talking about up leveling revenue, or followers, or influence or productivity or stuff like that, we are getting into up leveling integrity, leadership skills, inclusivity and other liberatory business practices. Not only do I firmly believe but it’s a big wild dream of mine, that the future of business, especially in the online business, coaching, healing, and health and wellness industries, it has to be liberatory. Otherwise, these industries are gonna eventually crumble, right? They’re just gonna pop, people are getting tired of this. I think there’s some people that will always be susceptible to it. And those are the people that are like pretty delusional. Anyway, they just like live in their privileged bubbles don’t really care what’s going on with the rest of the world. And they’ve insulated themselves in such a way that they can move through life like that, in relative denial, and like the ignorance is bliss bubble, but for the great majority of people ignoring and acting like systemic oppression is not happening isn’t really a reality for most folks. So for those of us who are getting coaches and healers desire to be of service, not just to, you know, a specific customer or client avatar, but to humanity to the greater, larger collective, who actually want what we’re doing, creating and putting out in the world to contribute to creating something better, not just for us, but for future generations. This is what this business interview series is for. I interviewed 18 incredible people their 17 interview Is there is a community portal on mighty networks, we could talk about them. When you go to the real uplevel.com, you can see who the speakers are, what all of the topics are. And it’s an incredible series, I highly encourage you to join us. So check that out if you haven’t already.
Elizabeth DiAlto 05:15
But let me get back to what we’re talking about today. Different ways to let go. And I wanted to get into this because in my self liberation framework that I’ve been teaching, for almost like, a decade now, it’ll be a decade in September this year. The first bundle of topics is surrender and release. And when we get into release, specifically, and we talk about letting things go, I’m always reminding people that we let things go in layers, in like increments and in pieces over time. It’s very, very rare that we can ever actually just like full stop, let something go. But often, we hear people talking about it, as if it’s just that easy. Just like, you know, we see memes let that shit go. Right? Like the Buddha. I remember there’s like a Buddha meme or a Buddha GIF where it looks like Buddha’s meditating, going, let that shit go. But letting go like release is actually a regular ongoing practice. And is it possible to let things go fully? I believe it is, it depends on the thing, right? There are some things that we could let go to the greatest extent possible. And they still like come back, or you know boomerang back to be reviewed here and there throughout the course of our lives. But there’s plenty of stuff. And again, it depends on what it is, you know, certain relationships, yeah, we could let things go, especially when it’s a person, we don’t have to see in the day to day, we don’t share any family or community or children or anything like that with if you move, you know, there’s certain circumstances that make it easier to let things go than others.
Elizabeth DiAlto 06:59
I’m thinking about all you solo parents out there who have to co parent with an ex, that you might wish you could completely have out of your life, and you can completely let them go. But that’s never going to be your reality, as long as they’re alive in your life. And you share this child or these children together. And so it can be frustrating if you find yourself in a situation where completely letting something go just isn’t a reality or isn’t a possibility. And people are being like, just let it go. Right? In a context like that. You might not be able to let go of the person or the relationship or the connection completely, or the dynamic, but you can let go to your attachments to certain things around that relationship. Right, you can let go of attachments to things that have happened in the past, you can let go of things that keep you from being able to move forward in the best possible way for everyone involved.
Elizabeth DiAlto 07:53
So again, rather than doing this narrow thinking thing, when we talk about letting go and being in this absolutist all or nothing place, where if you can’t let something go completely, you’re like, well, then I it’s in my life. Yes. And also, it doesn’t have to take up as much physical, mental, emotional, or energetic space in your life. If you assess what is actually let go wobble about it, like, what can you release, and again, things like hurt feelings, old wounds, attachments, right, any trauma that’s come from those relationships, it could be something that might be like really activating for you that might really trigger you. And eventually it just will not bother you at all or as much. And so again, letting things go to whatever degree is possible is better than not even trying it all right. So certainly there are some things we can let go of completely. There are some things that we could let go of, partially like I was just talking about.
Elizabeth DiAlto 08:58
Getting back to the completely. There’s so much conversation online these days about boundaries. And I see people critiquing the boundary advice of like cutting people out of your life and protecting your peace and stuff like that. And I kind of agree with this because sometimes we’re a little quick to cut people off, or we’re in a tender or a sensitive or overwhelmed place. And really, it’s our own sensitivities and lack of capacity or resilience in the moment. We sometimes turn that out on other people and think that we need to like get them out of our lives and that’ll solve the problem. When it’s not the case. Sometimes we just need space from things.
Elizabeth DiAlto 09:37
But sometimes we do need to like actually do breakups. I recently broke up with two people. I broke up with a friend and I broke up with a lover, the lover I had been seeing for like seven or eight months. And it was just energetically for me I can always feel when something is complete. It’s the feeling of when something has run its course and continuing to engage with it just feels like if feels pointless, or it feels draining, or it just feels agitating. And it was similar with this friend, it’s not a person I had been friends with for a long time, or very close with for a long time, someone had kind of been in my orbit for a while and was actually more of like a, she’d been listening to podcast, she would like, comment on my stuff on social media. So we were kind of acquainted in that way, similar to how I’m acquainted with a lot of you. And then at some point in 2022, or 2021, maybe the fall of 2021, maybe we got a little bit closer, we started talking more. And this is a person who lives far away. So it’s not like I see them, I’d actually never even met her in real life. But after getting like relatively close, it was cool that there was an experience, there were some parallel experiences we were having that we really helped each other through. And then about a month or two ago, it just really started to feel like there’s that quote, about how some people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime, it just started become very clear to me energetically, that this person was a season, and the season was over. And so you know, I sent her a beautiful message, just like honor and appreciate everything that had evolved over the course of the time that we were connecting more deeply, and also shared, like the energy has just shifted for me, and this just feels complete. And you know, she’s a very emotionally mature person. So I knew she’d be able to not take it personally and just honor the shift, she had been experiencing a shift on her end as well. But it wasn’t towards completion the way mine was. So that was the end of that. And it was a beautiful ending.
Elizabeth DiAlto 11:30
And I share that too, to let people know, you know, sometimes when we end things or when things end, some people don’t realize that it doesn’t always have to be bitter. There doesn’t have to be hostility or animosity, we can actually just honor what was even if we have like, before complaints or critiques or agitations, we can still just honor what was beautiful, and just move on. And that’s what I did with her. And that’s what I did with my lover guy, it was the same thing. I just I thanked him for the amazing time we spent together and share that I was feeling like, you know, it had run its course for me. And you sent back a beautiful response that of course, he wanted me to be happy, he was obviously going to be sad about it, but respect to my choice. And that was that.
Elizabeth DiAlto 12:11
And I was really proud of both of those experiences. Because, you know, formerly in my life, I had been a person which I’m sure some of you can relate to who needed bitter endings to be able to move on. Like, it’s almost like I needed to find a reason to make someone an asshole to move on. And that’s not always the case, you know. And listen, sometimes we have to play roles in people’s lives where people have to play roles in our lives, when they need to put the face of the bad guy on you. Or you need to do that, for whatever reason. It happens in all kinds of contexts. And when that’s the case, that’s the case, but the possibility of beautiful endings, and separations and uncoupling or unfriending, or whatever, that’s real, too.
Elizabeth DiAlto 12:49
So as we talk about different ways to let go. Again, we don’t have to blow things up. If it’s relational, it doesn’t have to be like a big dramatic ending doesn’t have to be filled with hurt feelings. You know, there might be grief, or regret or resentment. But again, we can honor it, we can honor the people we can honor everyone’s humanity and just the shift and season or energy or necessity, and move on with love and compassion and grace and respect.
Elizabeth DiAlto 13:16
Another way of letting go that I want to talk about is just letting go for a time or taking a pause. Sometimes we just need to get distance from things. And so we need to let them go. There’s another you know one of those classic quotes that’s like, when you let something go and let something go. And then if it returns to you, it’s really yours or something like that. And you know, that could do with people that could do with things. For those of you who run businesses, sometimes its products and services. For example, in 2020, I retired my Power Program, which is the program where I guide people through my self liberation framework. I retired that in 2020. And I said, I don’t know if I’ll ever run this again. And I actually am rebooting it and bring it back this summer. And I’m really excited for that. But I needed some distance from it, I needed a break from it. I’ve been running some iteration of that program for like seven years straight. And so I needed a break, I needed to go off and do some other things, create the wild soul archetypes, create the self love framework, the mini course do an immersion for that open my membership, like there were just other things I needed to do. And now that I’ve done that I’m circling back to, again, just revamp and reboot the power program in a new and different way.
Elizabeth DiAlto 14:31
That’s a perfect example. Because when I let that go, I wasn’t sure I was ever going to pick it back up again. I had no intention of going back to it unless it like came back to me and wanted a new new form new format, new expression or something like that. And that that is what happened. And that happens to us with people sometimes too, right? We can just not everything has to be so formal, right? Like we don’t need big conversation. Sometimes we just like drift from people and then come back together, and it all just happens like very cyclically. You know, I’m sure some of you can relate to just having people in your life that you might go years without seeing or talking to someone. But then when you do, you just pick it up, like it was nothing. And I think it’s important to honor that. There’s so many different flavors and nuances and textures, to relationships and interactions with, again, all kinds of things. It could be people ideas, hobbies, communities, programs work, even, you know, some of you listening to this podcast, have been listening since 2015. But you’ve probably taken breaks from me too, right?
Elizabeth DiAlto 15:35
I have so many people who leave and come back, leave and come back, right? Even people in my membership, now that that’s been around for almost three years now. I mean, like, there’s some people who just joined in the beginning, and they’ve been there all the way through and they’ve stayed, they’ve never left. And then there’s a bunch of people who like pop in and out as needed, which is great. And they know, they can always come back, which I love. You know. So think of this of the images. I was just saying that was like a revolving door, right? Or like one of those, like flapping, I don’t know why I’m saying flapping, but you know, a door that you could push open from either direction, right? So it’s always coming or going. It’s available. It’s open. It’s openable. Right? So sometimes we just we let go of things for a time. And we don’t know, will we come back? Will it not come back? We don’t know. But we could be okay with that. And just trust that if it makes sense to return to it, or revisited, we will no, it will be clear, it will be obvious. And we could do that.
Elizabeth DiAlto 16:34
Then there’s something I like to call Healthy compartmentalization. I was just talking about this with one of my trainees in the sacred vitamin specialist training yesterday. This is a person who is oriented they had an extreme religious upbringing, and sometimes oriented towards like absolutist thinking like very black and white, this or that. Linda’s been so beautiful. Over the years that she’s been in my community, it’s been three or four years now, to see her soften around the rigid thinking and become more available to the gray area, or the nuance or certain exceptions, or certain contexts where things might be a little bit different, or when more than one thing could be true at a time, and figuring out how to engage in the paradoxical nature of things. And so there was something that she had going on that I was reminding her, just because something is relevant and important, and does need to be dealt with doesn’t mean that you need to deal with it right now. Like, there are certain things that you can look at and go, Okay, that is important in my life, I’m going to need to deal with that I’m going to need to face that eventually. And now is just not the time for any range of valid reasons, right?
Elizabeth DiAlto 17:47
I don’t have the bandwidth, I don’t have the capacity, something else. It’s just not a priority right now. And so the way that I like to describe this, sometimes describe it as putting it on a shelf, or I call it healthy and intentional compartmentalization. The other way I like to describe it as d prioritizing, right? Sometimes we just need to D prioritize things. Sometimes you need to be like, You know what, this just is not the most important thing right now. And those of you who’ve been listening to the podcast, and have heard my sacred sled updates, that was something really last summer, for sure. And into the fall, I was really prioritizing that experiment and that exploration and moving into 2023, I started to deprioritize, a little bit. And now I’m going to see somewhere that is just literally at the bottom of the list of priorities.
Elizabeth DiAlto 18:34
And so that’s just how life is right, the seasonal and cyclical nature of things, I do want to come back to it. And so the difference between putting something on a shelf or de prioritizing it, and the taking a pause, which I talked about previously, is that when we take a pause, we let something go again, with no intention, and no knowing of whether or not it’ll come back. When we do you know, healthy compartmentalization or putting something on a shelf or D prioritizing it. We do intend to return to it at a more appropriate time. And I want to emphasize why just said that that way to a more appropriate time. Because what are things that would make a time not appropriate, there are more urgent and important things going on. You might be tired or on the verge of burnout, there might be just other responsibilities and things in your life that that need your attention.
Elizabeth DiAlto 19:24
And listen, those of us who are committed and really devoted to collective healing and liberation know that as we heal over the course of our lives, there’s always stuff to work on. Right? But that doesn’t mean that we need to be working on stuff all the time. Because what is the damn point of doing all this healing and liberation work? If we actually don’t get to just be a more healed and a more liberated person, sometimes for a period of time without working on shit? Take some time to just live As the person that you’ve been striving so hard to become, right, not every season needs to be a healing season or a growth season, right. So this form of letting go letting go for a moment, de prioritizing something with the intention of returning to it at a more appropriate time is a really healthy practice to have, right?
Elizabeth DiAlto 20:22
Especially if you’re a chronic over function, or someone who just does the most, all the time with everything, zoom out on your life and go, What is just not urgent, might be important. But it’s not urgent doesn’t need my attention right now. The world around me is not going to come crumbling down. If I go, You know what, I’ll get to this when I get to this, and now is not the time.
Elizabeth DiAlto 20:45
So anyway, I was going to keep this episode short. So let’s wrap it up here. I hope that was useful. I hope those distinctions might have helped you see something differently in your life, or be able to make a choice about how you want to approach or handle something in a way that is just much more ease or Grace filled or gives yourself some compassion or some space if you might need it with stuff that’s going on in your life. As always, you can find me on Instagram, share it, leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast, any of those things to support the show are always greatly appreciated. And we will be back next week.