Chapter Three: The Practice of Letting Go

Everything in this guide rests on one practice. It is simple enough to describe in a few sentences and deep enough to occupy a lifetime. Once you have it, it works on cravings and on the harder feelings the cravings were covering. It needs no equipment and no belief. It needs a minute, and a willingness that is smaller than you think.

Read this chapter before your day, so that the practice is familiar by the time you need it. But it is with a feeling in front of you that the practice stops being an idea and becomes a thing your body knows how to do, the way it knows how to float once it has floated. Nobody learns to float from a book. You learn it in the water, with the water holding you, and the surprise is that it was going to hold you the whole time.

You have done something like it already, many times, without calling it anything. You have felt a sneeze build and let it come. You have stood at the edge of the sea and let the cold reach your knees, then your waist, and known in your body that the only thing to do with cold water is to stop bracing against it. You have sat with a friend who was crying and said nothing, and it was the right thing, and the crying ended. Nothing in this chapter is stranger than that.

The four ways of handling a feeling

When a feeling arises there are, broadly, four things a person can do with it. You have done all four. Only the fourth is likely to be unfamiliar as something chosen.

The first is to suppress it. You push it down, look away, keep busy, tell yourself you are fine. The jaw sets. The hands find a job. The feeling does not disappear. It goes underground, where it gathers, and where it drives behaviour you cannot see. You snap at someone an hour later and cannot say why. You eat standing up. You reach for the device without having decided to.

The second is to express it. You act it out and vent it and let it drive what you say and do. The message goes before it is read back. The door shuts harder than it needed to. This can bring a moment's release, but it tends to feed the feeling rather than dissolve it, and it often does damage that leaves new feelings to deal with. Anger expressed at breakfast is shame by lunchtime, and now there are two feelings where there was one.

The third is to escape it. This is what the vape is for. You reach for something outside yourself that changes your state, and the feeling is bypassed for a while. Escape is the most seductive of the four because it works so fast. The vape is only the escape you happen to be here about. The phone in the hand, the third glass, the box set that runs on into the small hours. All of them are the same move. The feeling is still there when the escape wears off, and now you depend on the escape as well. And the vape has a cruelty the others share only in part, because the relief it gives, as Chapter Two showed, is relief from the vape itself. You escape into the thing that set the trap.

The fourth is to let it go. You allow the feeling to be present, without resistance, until it runs its course. It is the only one of the four that ends the feeling. The others postpone it. It sounds like the hardest of the four, and in one way it is the easiest, because it is the only one in which you do nothing. Suppressing takes effort. Expressing takes effort. Escaping takes a device and money and a walk to the shop. Letting go takes a minute of not doing. There is a smile hidden in that. The thing you have spent years avoiding turns out to ask the least of you.

How to let go

Here is the practice. Read it once now, and read it again with a feeling in front of you, because that is where it is learned.

When a feeling arises, whether it is a craving or anything else, stop. Do not act. Do not reach. There is nothing to decide yet. The hand that was already moving towards the pocket can stay where it is. The sentence in the head, the old one, can be heard without being answered.

Turn your attention inward and find the feeling in the body. Not the thoughts about it. The feeling itself, as a physical presence. Locate it. It is nearly always somewhere. A tightness across the chest. A pull at the throat, as if the throat itself remembers. A restlessness in the fingers. A hollow under the ribs. Something at the hinge of the jaw. You do not need the right name for it. You need to know roughly where it is and roughly what shape it has, the way you would know where a bruise was without looking down.

Now allow it. Let it be exactly as it is. Do not try to make it smaller or push it away, and do not call it good or bad. If it grows, let it grow on its own. If it moves, let it move. Your only job is to stop resisting it. Most of us have never once done this with a craving. We have fought it or we have fed it. Allowing it is a third thing, and the body notices the difference at once. Something in the shoulders that was braced comes down a little.

Stay with it. This is the part that takes a little courage, because the mind will insist that if you allow the feeling fully it will overwhelm you. It will not. A feeling that is allowed completely has nowhere to go but through. Watch it, and breathe. Not a special breath. The ordinary one, a little slower on the way out. Keep your attention on the sensation the way you would keep a hand on the back of a child learning to ride a bicycle, lightly and without letting go.

At some point you will notice that the feeling has changed. It may have shifted in quality, or softened, or dissolved, or given way to a different feeling underneath. Whatever happens, keep allowing. If a new feeling arises, allow that one too. Under a craving there is often something plainer. Boredom. Tiredness. A loneliness you had not admitted to. Allow that as well. It came up because there was room for it, and room is what you are making.

Then there is a release. Sometimes it is dramatic, a sudden lightness, a sigh, a sense of something lifting. More often it is quiet. You notice that the feeling is gone and you are still here, unharmed, a little clearer than before. You look up. The clock says a few minutes later than it did.

Feel it, resist nothing, and let it pass.

A word on how long. A craving, allowed, usually climbs, holds and comes down inside a few minutes. Some are shorter than that. A few go on longer, and those are usually the ones with something else underneath them. You do not need to time it. But it helps, the first few times, to know that you are not signing up for an hour. You are signing up for something about the length of a song.

And a word on stopping early. If turning towards the feeling makes it worse rather than looser, if it climbs and keeps climbing and something in you says no, then stop and look at the room. Name three things you can see. The lamp. The coat on the chair. The cup on the side. Look at the sleeve hanging down from the chair, the cuff just short of the floor. Feel the floor beneath your feet. You can get up and take the cup to the sink. The water runs over your fingers while you rinse it. The practice is for what is already here. It never asks you to go looking for a feeling, and it never asks you to make one bigger than it is.

It helps to be somewhere ordinary when you first try this. The car, parked, with the engine off. The end of the road, where you walked for no reason and stood a moment before turning back. The bath, while it fills. You do not need a quiet room or a cushion. You need a minute and the willingness to stay for it.

Here is one moment, so that you can see it whole. It is the middle of the afternoon, the slack hour when the vape used to fill a gap, and the pull comes. You stop. You find it, a tightness high in the chest with a restlessness under it. You let it be that size. You stay, breathing a little slower on the way out, and if you can you walk, to the end of the road and back, with the feeling riding along. At the corner you turn. The tightness is still there, but you can take a breath without lifting your shoulders. Someone is trying to get a bin through a gate that is too narrow. You stand aside while they turn it sideways, and then you walk back up the road.

Why it works

The reason it works is that feelings are not the solid, permanent things they appear to be. A feeling is movement in the body. When it is resisted, the resistance holds it in place, like a hand pressed against a door that wants to swing open. When the hand is taken away the door swings and the movement goes on through.

Watch a small child who has fallen over. The crying is enormous and it lasts about a minute, and then the child is looking at a dog. There is still a tear on the cheek. The dog has stopped by the bench and is nosing at something beneath it, pulling its lead tight. The child points. You look under the bench too, but you cannot see what the dog has found. A hand with grit on the palm takes yours, and you stand there together while the dog sniffs.

Suppression and escape are both forms of resistance. Both say, I will not feel this. And so the feeling stays, waiting. The vape is an unusually effective form of resistance because it changes the body's chemistry, so the feeling is ignored and chemically muted as well. Muted is not gone. For many people, the feelings they have vaped their way past are still in them, unfelt, stored like water behind a wall, and that stored pressure is part of what drives the next craving. Not everyone has much behind the wall. Some people have a pleasant habit and little buried beneath it, as Chapter Four says, and for them the craving is mostly the small thing the vape itself made. You will find out which you are by staying, and either way the practice is the same.

Letting go reverses this. Each time you allow a feeling fully you release a little of whatever was stored. Over days and weeks, for most people, the cravings become fewer and weaker, and the reason is that there is less and less driving them.

There is a second reason it works, and it is about the craving in particular. The craving is a small discomfort that the vape itself made, and what the vape offered was relief from that and nothing more. So when you allow the craving instead of answering it, you are allowing something quite small. The addiction dresses the craving up as a hunger, a need, an emergency. Felt plainly, in the body, without the story, it is a few minutes of restlessness. That is what you are being asked to let go of, and it is nothing bigger than that.

What people find when they stay

What people find, the first time they stay all the way through, is that the feeling ended without them. They did not end it. They were there, watching, and it ended, and the difference between those two things is the discovery. Every other way of handling a feeling was an act you performed. This one was performed on you, by something that knew how, once you stopped interfering.

The second thing people find is that the craving was covering something, and that the something was smaller than they feared. A tiredness. A dull hour. A wish to be somewhere else. None of it is a monster. When the craving thins, the plainer feeling shows through, and it can be allowed in the same way, and it goes in the same way. The vape had made these small feelings seem unbearable by never once letting you find out whether you could bear them.

The third thing is that the ordinary stretch after a craving is longer than the craving. You let one go, and then there are forty minutes in which nothing much happens and you drink your tea and answer a message and notice the light on the wall. Even on a hard day, most of the minutes in it are ordinary minutes. The addiction had trained you to see the day as one long wanting. Seen from inside the practice, it is wanting in short bursts, and long, quiet stretches of your own life in between.

And the fourth thing is a kind of smile. It arrives, for many people, in the middle of a craving, and it is the smile of someone who has been frightened of a noise in the attic for years and has finally gone up with a torch. There is the noise. It is the water tank. You stand there in the dark with the torch and the pull in your chest, and a part of you is amused. The tank makes the noise again while you are looking at it. You lower the torch to find the edge of the hatch and put your foot back on the ladder.

There is another discovery, quieter than a release. Sometimes the feeling stays and you find that you can still do a small thing you care about. You can hear the next part of the song. You can listen while someone tells you about their journey home, the bus that went past without stopping, the long wait for the next one. You ask whether they had to walk in the rain. The tightness is still there as you hear the answer.

What letting go is not

It is worth being clear about what this practice does not mean, because the mind will try to bend it.

Letting go is not thinking about the feeling without end. You can trace a story through twenty turns and arrive back where you began. Remember the look at the prediction in Chapter One, where you put the conversation you can recall beside the thought that you will never follow anything without vaping. When that look has done its work, you can set the argument down. There is a time to think and a time to let the thinking rest.

The mind loves this trick because thinking feels like doing something. You can spend twenty minutes working out that you crave in the car because your father smoked in the car, and at the end of the twenty minutes you are still in the car and you still crave. The sensation was there the whole time, waiting to be felt, and you were upstairs in your head making notes about it. The notes may even be true. They are still notes. Come back down and put your attention on the tightness in the chest, and let the theory wait.

Letting go is not pretending you do not have the feeling. Nobody is asking you to say that everything is fine, or to rise above it. You go straight into it, with your eyes open. Pretending is a form of suppression with better manners. The feeling can tell the difference, and so can your body, which stays braced beneath the calm face. Honesty is the medium here. You cannot let go of a feeling you have not admitted to having.

Letting go is not giving in to the craving. Allowing the feeling of wanting to vape is a different thing from vaping. They are opposites. Vaping is the escape from the feeling. Letting go is the willingness to have the feeling all the way through, so that it can end.

Some people worry that allowing a craving means encouraging it, that if they turn towards it, it grows. What happens in practice is the reverse. A craving fought grows, because the fight is attention of a resisting kind, and resistance is what holds a feeling in place. A craving allowed rises as far as it was going to rise, and then it eases, and you were standing in it the whole time, unharmed.

Nor does nicotine support get in the way of it, if you use it; a patch on the arm does not stop you finding a feeling in the chest.

And letting go is not a one-time event. You will do it many times. Some feelings release in a moment. Others come back over days and are let go again each time. Nothing has gone wrong when a feeling returns.

Nor is it a competition with yourself. There is no pass mark on a craving. One day it goes in a minute and the next day it takes four, and the four-minute one was not a worse performance. It was a bigger feeling, or a tireder you, and you stayed with it.

When it does not seem to work

There are days when you do everything in this chapter and the feeling does not release. You found it, you allowed it, you stayed, and it sat there like a stone. Here is what is usually going on.

Sometimes there was a resistance you could not see. You were allowing the craving with the top of your mind while the rest of you was gritting its teeth and waiting for it to leave. The feeling can tell. Notice the waiting. Waiting for a feeling to go is a polite way of pushing it, and the feeling stays in place under the pressure. Drop the waiting if you can. Let it stay as long as it likes. Feelings released in this way often go the moment you stop caring whether they go.

Sometimes there was a feeling underneath that you had not got to. The craving was sitting on top of a grief, or a fear, and it could not go until the thing beneath it was allowed too. You do not need to dig for that thing. Nothing here asks you to go looking. But if it shows itself, allow it, in the same way, for the same minute, and see what happens to the craving above it.

Sometimes the mind had smuggled in a story and you were allowing the story instead of the feeling. I cannot cope. I have always failed at this. Just one and then I will stop. Hear the words as words, and go back to the sensation under them. The sensation rises and it falls. The story only repeats.

And sometimes it did not work because you vaped. You allowed it for a minute and then the hand moved anyway. That happens, and it happens to people who go on to stop for good. Nothing about the practice is spoiled by it. Notice what came before the hand moved, because there is often one thing, a tiredness or an hour alone or a certain sentence, and one thing can be changed. Then the next feeling arrives, and you let that one go, and the practice is exactly where you left it.

The willingness beneath the practice

There is one more element, and it is the most important. Beneath the mechanics of the practice there has to be a willingness. A willingness to feel, and to let something other than your own will carry the process.

This is where the practice becomes spiritual. What you discover, when you stop resisting, is that the feeling passes on its own. You do not make it pass. You stop preventing it, and something else, some intelligence in the body or in life itself, does the rest. The mending is done for you. Your part is to get out of the way.

For someone who has spent years trying to control their inner life, this can be a revelation. You do not have to fix yourself. You have only to allow yourself to be mended. The help you need can be received, and you can stop trying to manufacture it. And a craving becomes a chance to practise the one thing that sets you free.

Willingness is worth looking at closely, because it is easy to confuse with something bigger. It is smaller than confidence. Confidence says I can do this. Willingness says only I am prepared to try, and to stay for a minute, and to see. Confidence is allowed to be low. For most people it is, and it decides nothing. What opens the door is the smaller thing, the readiness to let one feeling be here without obeying it, and then one more. You can be entirely unsure of yourself and entirely willing at the same time. Most people who stop are both.

The recovery fellowships have known this for a century, in their own words. The person who is going to be free is rarely the one who is certain. It is the one who is willing to admit what is so, and to try the thing that is offered, and to do it before they believe in it. Belief comes later, from having done it. You are not asked for faith. You are asked to let the next feeling crest, and to be willing to find out what happens.

It helps to see willingness beside the feelings that hold a person down. Shame hides. Fear runs. Wanting reaches. Anger pushes. Pride cannot ask for help. Courage is the readiness to feel a thing rather than flee it, and willingness is courage that has stopped bracing. These are descriptions of where a person stands, and nothing more. Nobody is awarded one. You find out where you stand by trying the practice once, with a feeling that is already here.

Try this, if the practice feels heavy in the moment. As the feeling rises, let the words be something like, I am willing to have this. Say it in your own head. Or say nothing and mean it in the shoulders, which come down a little when it is meant. That sentence is the willingness, and the practice runs on it. Nothing is being asked of the feeling. You are agreeing to be a person who is having one, for a minute, in a kitchen, or on a landing, or at the end of the road, and letting whatever carries feelings carry this one.

Months on, you can be clearing the table after a meal when your hand goes towards the pocket. There is a plate in the other hand, with a knife sliding across it. You stop by the table and find the pull beneath your ribs. Your fingers rest against the seam of your trousers. You stand for a moment, then shift the plate so that the knife lies flat and carry it to the sink.