How to Let Go

To find freedom, give up something you care about.

Heading down after a recent foraging walk in an ancient city that might have been built by King David.

Dear Healthy Jew,

Letting go, as I wrote in these pages over a year ago, is the heart of healthy living. Everything unhealthy - temptations, distractions, habits - stems from holding on to one extreme or another, identifying ourselves with a specific aspect of life instead of the larger whole. Healing results from letting go and returning to the middle, balanced path.

I explained this with a simple analogy.

When we’re driving anything with wheels, if we turn hard to the right or left, we’ll just end of going in circles around ourselves. That’s unhealthy living: it’s all about my own pleasure, prestige, or power.

Image from tenor.com

By letting go, we return to the middle, and can drive forward into the beautiful world around us.

Image from giphy.com

But letting go is easier said than done. It’s not even something to do. If anything, letting go is about undoing. How do I do something that’s not doing?

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Letting Go or Holding On?

Even if I find the thing to let go of, it can be hard to let go without unconsciously holding on even stronger.

Let’s say I want to check the news and social media less often. Maybe I’ll decide to log in only on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings at 9:00 for half an hour only.

That could be letting go. Or, perhaps, I’m trying to control my use by locking it into certain boxes of time and mustering up all my strength to keep away the rest of the time. That would be holding on: instead of running toward the screen, I’m running away from it.

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In recent months, I’ve learned a valuable, practical lesson on how to let go.

Letting go includes losing something I want.

Of course, I hope to gain something more valuable in return. But when I let go, I don’t yet know what that will be, because I’m still in my old way of doing things, just opening up to new freedom.

One place I learned this from is social media. I’m on some social platforms for my work here at Healthy Jew. (Otherwise, how will folks know they should book foraging walks, buy my book, or subscribe to Healthy Jew?)

In all honesty, I don’t like any of it. But I still get sucked in to The Feeds, finding myself distracted and emotionally drained.

Several months ago, right at the peak of the spring foraging season, I had enough. So I let go, and posted this note on all my social pages:

I knew that would limit my exposure to potential foragers around Pesach. There’s a good chance that indeed less people booked foraging walks, which means I today have less money to buy cucumbers for my kids. (Although I really shouldn’t complain: 140 people joined me in the Land of Israel where foraging made our holiday experience come alive in at least 6 ways.)

But because I was willing to lose something real, letting go wasn’t just an abstract idea, and I wasn’t just trying to control my relationship with social media. I purposely gave something up.

Perhaps our refrigerator today has less cucumbers. But stepping away from socials enabled me to gain valuable perspective on how they affect my mental and spiritual health, and helps me make healthier choices today around technology use.

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More often than not, this is how emotional and spiritual growth looks like for me: not in taking on something new, but in letting go of something I want because I’m willing to pay the price.

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Be well,

Rabbi Shmuel Chaim Naiman