What it means to let go

Sasha Chapin

Oct 28, 2026

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“Let go” is one of the most frequently proffered meditation instructions. It’s also one of the most confusing for a lot of people. Even some reasonably advanced practitioners have asked me—what does that mean? Let go of what?

For the sake of this discussion, let’s divide the self into two parts: the elephant and the rider. The elephant is our emotional/instinctive/physical/unconscious self. The rider is our cognitive/rational/planning/judging self.

Letting go simply means allowing the elephant to do what it wants. It means “let go of the wheel.” Not “try to drop emotions” or “make thoughts slow/decrease.” It means “let what’s already happening continue to happen.” If you’re experiencing an emotion, it means “stop trying to control the emotion,” not “stop having the emotion.”

For many people, this allowing motion is most familiar from moments of physical or social abandon. Like:

Saying the stupid joke that floats into your mind as soon as it arises

Hitting things with a baseball bat in a rage room

Surrendering into intense physical intimacy

Allowing your body to “walk itself” during a long walk

Though different in mood and intensity, all of these examples share the feeling of yielding to the process. This is what you’re looking for. Yield to the flow of experience, while remaining still. Allow breathing, feeling, perceiving, to be as they want to be. Notice that hearing happens without you needing to “do hearing,” and see if you can apply that principle to everything. (Except maintaining the posture of your choice.)

Here are four questions you might have about this.

Not really. Meditation’s most profound effects involve opening to the parts of us we can’t control: our unconscious motives, deepest emotions, and automatic mental constrictions. This process is about releasing the rider’s inhibitions, not kicking the elephant. Intentionally decreasing self-management through structured mental relaxation is not usually what we think of when we say “control,” although, sure, it could be described as a form of control. Even in highly structured practice, like jhana practice, we are trying to do way less mental self-management than is typical in the workday.

If I stop controlling my emotions, won’t they get more intense?

Yes. Letting go can initially produce effects that seem like bad meditation. For example, many of us use the rider to manage our elephant’s anxiety, or anger, or other challenging emotions. Letting go of the reins, in the short term, can cause these feelings to grow in prominence. As well, many meditators seem to have the false impression that they’re supposed to forcefully stop thought. But letting go makes us aware of just how much automatic thought occurs.

However, over time, letting go does tend to produce tranquility. When you stop managing, feeding, or otherwise participating in the automatic thought stream, it tends to slow down. When you allow uncomfortable feelings to bubble up and course through the system, they tend to subside (and/or grow into rich and valuable experiences). When you stop trying to grab onto sensory experience, you notice that open, receptive attention is richer and more beautiful than grabby, rider-directed experience.

But isn’t sitting through intense emotions a form of self-management?

Fair question. For most people, the intuitive response to anger is not sitting still. So perhaps a more accurate instruction, in these circumstances, isn’t “let go of all control,” it’s “let go of all control except the minimal control you need to keep sitting for some allotted time.”

Some of the most beautiful meditations of my life have involved sitting with feelings I’d usually distract myself from—grief, anger, disgust. Once, on a meditation retreat, I drank two cold brews for some reason, and in a caffeine haze, I fearfully imagined that everyone I loved was abandon ing me. I chose not to believe this hallucination while experiencing it fully. This was immensely useful for my future stress-handling ability. Another time, at home, I was angry with a colleague, and when I closed my eyes and let the anger wash over me, I went to a place I think of as “infinite anger realm,” where the rage became a giant, pulsating space, like a plane of phantasmal magma, neither good nor bad. This was memorable, and after that experience, I became more comfortable with anger, period.

If the emotions are really intense, and it’s just too hard to sit still, it might be helpful to get up and do some non-directed body movement, or dance, or whatever you need. There’s no absolute rule that you must sit through it. However, if your self-regulation and mental health is good overall, consider trying to sit with, and welcome, emotions that feel like they might be a little too intense for you.

It might not work. For most beginners, letting go isn’t a sufficient practice on its own—the tranquility never arrives, the automatic herky-jerk mental activity is too strong. If this is you, then “let go, then practice with a meditation object, and softly, continuously let go of everything that’s not that object” is a better instruction. After dropping intention, pick up a mantra, or loving-kindness, or breath awareness, or verbal noting, or whatever focus assist you want. I will again remind the readers of this blog that most beginning meditators are insufficiently experimental—when you’re starting out, play with a bunch of techniques for a few days at least.

However, once you’ve picked up some stability, letting go, as a stand-alone technique, can quickly lead to startling depth. And some unusual beginners do find letting go effective right away.

Letting go is a skill that takes most people at least a few months of practice to acquire. This is what the skill acquisition process looks like:

Once you reach the “skilled” level, and start having sits of at least 45m in this mode, you begin noticing the bodymind’s intuitive wisdom. Old grievances will surface and mend themselves. Long-neglected layers of your heart will present themselves. Automatic tension loosens, and life takes on a new freshness as a result. You may learn that you don’t have to do or be anything, that you can act from a place of choice and true desire rather than obligation and resentment. Rider and elephant thus become more thoroughly integrated.

With time, letting go appears to be the most reliable way to meet God.

Thanks to Erin Shetron for editorial help, photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.