The Canine Guru’s Guide to Letting Go

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

“Jump off the cliff, right now!” yelled the scary man. 

Kneeling on the grass, head bowed, tears stinging my eyes, I blubbed about, “coming to some arrangement.” Two men, carrying tools to witness the torture, told me it would be quick, painless. “Over before you know it.” I didn’t want to go out like this. Surely there was a less terrifying way to hit bottom.

“For fuck’s sake, Jess! The programme is called Alpine Adventures, not Strolls in the Meadow! Just let go. You said you were up for ANYTHING.”

“But when I said ‘anything’, I meant working all hours, possibly a little light martial arts combat, a tattoo perhaps, or even one of those retreats where you have to give up everything, including food, in the name of good TV.” 

What I hadn’t counted on was abseiling down a 2,500ft cliff face and then learning how to climb back up from a midway point with some bouncy ferret of a French man called Jean-Luc, who had already disappeared over the top and was calling up, “Allons-y, Jessy, be brrrrav!”

More on that later…

I think it’s time we took a look at this concept of Letting Go. There are some people who bungee jump through life, all for the buzz, and there are others who hold on to whatever they can in order to stay right where they are. I am in the latter camp. Now we’re all grown-ups here, so I’m not going to bang on about the reasons why some of us cling on to the past, people or possessions. Abandonment issues, sense of security, lack of self-esteem are the obvious culprits, and some argue that this Letting Go business is the key to a door that lets those ill-formed and over-fed emotions run out to frolic in the Field of Opportunity. It might be that we could all do with one of those keys, especially in A Time of Covid, where every damned thing is changing – from secure careers, to relationships, to eating habits.

“Mum, did you hear me?” said my daughter. “I’m thinking about becoming a vegetarian, perhaps even vegan, that means I will never eat eggs again!” 

“FFS, you know my theory of longevity through daily egg consumption!”

“You got that bit of wisdom from a 104 yr old, who said she wished she let go of living years before.”

This is true.

Alan W. Watts, a guru I admire, had this to say on the subject.“Let go and walk on! Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life.”  

Ah, creamy words, Alan, words you can swallow like mouthfuls of hot chocolate on a cold afternoon after a leafy wellie walk. Us mere mortals, however, living in the winter of our discontent, are doing the opposite, we’re clinging on for dear life and with good reason. Most of us don’t know if we will have jobs to return to, houses to live in, or kids with full bellies come Christmas. Letting go and embracing what is right now, feels like defeatism, nay, masochism.

Our family pet, Inca, may just be a dog, but I admire his attitude. What would he be if he ‘let go’ all the time? Ball-less, that’s what. (Well, he is actually, but I am talking about the rubber kind). 

He has taught me valuable lessons, such as, if you unclench your jaw then your favourite toy could be taken away, permanently; if you don’t hurl yourself at the back of the door when someone you loves leaves, how will they know you care? And, of course, you must sleep on your loved one’s face every night, so they feel protected.

Your memories, your hang-ups, petty grudges and obsessions are you. If we strip them all away, what have we got? Amnesia, that’s what. If you become too one with life’s vibrations and just float down the river of life, never looking back, you open yourself up to all kinds of suggestion and self-improvement that might not be beneficial. In that malleable state, you could be reprogrammed into a blissfully happy single mother living on the Kentish coast, rather than a militant feminist whose sole mission in life is to take on misogyny and stamp it out…wait a god damned second. 

You’re meant to retain your experiences, that is how we learn not to touch boiling kettles twice or dye our hair green for the second time, or go on internet dates – ever again.

When people advise you to ‘let it go’ they are normally referring to a bad experience. 

Your partner left you: “Let it go, sister/brother, that’s how you win.” 

You lose your job: “You were too good for that role in Les mis. You need to let it go and move onto a new career path, perhaps retrain as a truck driver?” 

“Thank you, Rishi. Good advice.”

If someone wrongs you, from bitchy behaviour to selling you a car with a faulting heating system and the dealer has the audacity to ask, “Did you try opening the vents, luv?” 

“Just let it go and enjoy what does work about it.”

In doing so you open yourself up to being taken for granted, trampled on, or fobbed off with a, “Well, you can’t prove the heating didn’t work when you drove out the dealership.”  

Oh no, my friends, let’s stay up here on this cliff top, with our hands firmly in the blades of past-experiences-grass, that may be snapping against our weight, but we must hold on, don’t let go, you deserve to stay furious, vengeful. 

“Petty?”

Who said that? I’ll have your eyes out.

With every bad experience there was probably a good experience that went along with it. If you let go of the bad, do you have to lose the memory of the good too? Well yes, because it only serves to bring you pain, apparently. But what’s wrong with a little pain? Pain makes us feel as alive as joy does – ask any writer, except the dead ones whose pain was a bit too much to endure. (We don’t need your input, Virginia, and no, Sylvia, no one wants to hear a poem right now.) 

A parent with Alzheimer’s is losing the battle for their mind and what do we say to grieving relatives. “You have to let go of who they were, who you thought they were.” No, you bloody don’t! To them perhaps, but to the sentient person dealing with the grief, they need to be able to discuss, cry over and celebrate that loved one’s life. This obsession with Letting Go gets my goat.

But hey, what do I know. We are living in unprecedented times, and maybe learning to not hold on to the past is the only way we will get through the changes and troubles that hurl themselves against our doors on a daily basis.

As always, when I start to contemplate a topic, all manner of serendipitous events present themselves. This week three gurus accidentally taught me the error of my recalcitrant ways. Who knew two of them could be living under the same roof and related to this blundering idiot.

A few days ago, my son was in the kitchen, taking forever to put on his trainers and idly looking at our fridge door, which is populated by silly magnets, mementos and photos of importance. He pointed to an old photograph of me and a young man, who I once had the great joy of calling my partner. We were about twenty at the time and, from the state of our sleepy eyes, I’d say on holiday in Amsterdam. I had found it in a box while searching for something else and put it up because it reminded me of what it felt like to be in love, in that all-encompassing way you probably only get to experience once or twice in your life if you’re lucky.

“Do you think it’s helpful?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“That picture, being there. You’re pretty in it and he’s cool, but there’s the sigh you do sometimes when you look at it, like it hurts. Maybe you should get rid of it.”

I sighed (damn it) and told him to eat his eggs and concentrate on longevity. The little bastard was right. Now the picture is back in its box, where it can gather dust, until such time as someone who cares enough about me to go through it, will say, “Ah, she was so sweet, before she got all woke in her forties, got rid of her worldly possessions and went and joined that militant feminist commune!” That’ll teach the 11yr old know-it-all. 

Then, a few days later, hot on the heels of Alan Watts reincarnated in the kitchen, my daughter taught me something that made me loosen my grip on that cliff-edge grass still more.

Because we are a single parent family, things have been a little different in terms of raising emotionally healthy humans. I have tried very hard to be the parent and not the best friend, but I consider it a gift that the kids and I are really close. So much so, that they say lunatic things like they want me to move to their university town when they go (give it time) and that they will (somewhat oddly) own a farm when they’re older, and that I will get the coveted role of running it, whilst simultaneously raising the grand-kids – lovely, equal-opportunity-for-the-aged things like that. I grumble and insist I will be living in the Umbrian hills with Enzo my imaginary lover, but secretly I’ve already got my eye on a nice pair of mucking out rakes. 

Friday night: movie night. I was puffing up the couch pillows, preparing for an evening of what my son refers to as, “total chillaxing.’ 

“Mum, there’s this programme I want to watch, about vampires,” said my daughter. 

“Ooh, right up my street! When I was your age, I used to watch a film called The Lost Boys, I was obsessed with all of them. Couldn’t decide which one I wanted to suck my blood first. I’ll get the popcorn.”

“Erm, I need this to be just my thing.”

“What, like, alone?” 

“Yeah, on my own.”

I heard a broken-hearted ballad start to play in my head, but externally I showed nothing of my sadness. 

“Of course. I’ll just, you know, go write a blog about being told I am no longer needed.”

I sat in the kitchen and listened to young love being dismembered and reassembled over and over again, punctuated only by the sounds of my son calling out to his gaming community over a microphone, “Dude, I totally destroyed you,” and I thought, what will it be like when they leave home? When he goes to live in a Virtual reality man-cave, and she goes to live out her dream of bartending in Barcelona and selling street art. I put down the Spanish dictionary I had unwittingly opened and decided to confront this letting go business.  

That’s when the third guru appeared. The wonderful and talented hypnotherapist Guy Scantlebury. He is a friend of mine, but I didn’t believe in that hocus-pocus Blast! regressive therapy stuff he talks about, until sorted me out.

 A sunny Saturday afternoon, sitting in his living room after he’d kindly finished filming a self-tape audition of me smashing up a computer. I brushed the hair out of my eyes, put down the hammer and looked up to see a beatific smile on his face. It’s his permanent expression, to be fair (he’s one of those humans who always sees the positive and then shares it out without worrying about the cost to himself).  

“What is it?” I asked.

“You do funny-angry, really well, Jess, but it might do damage, in the end. You should try to let stuff go a little more.”

An hour’s debate later, we agreed to differ on the power of holding onto stuff; I called it fuel; he called it exhausting. Standing at the front door, I told him in passing, “There’s just this one memory that occasionally pops into my mind, when I really wish it wouldn’t. It involves a party, numerous junkie actors and lots of blood. No biggie.”

Like the head of the ‘Let-go’ police, he looked somewhat stern and suggested I make an appointment to have a hypnotherapy session with him, sooner rather than later.

Sitting in his office, pretending to be the model student, I was secretly thinking, oh, let’s just go grab a drink and watch a Scandinavian thriller, until he explained, “When we experience things in a heightened state and our body goes into ‘Fight or Flight’, we don’t process things in the normal way, the memory gets stuck, and we can’t “let go”. We have beliefs about that event, and together they can cause a lot of suffering over time. We need to process it, but thinking and talking about it just seems to make it worse. What Blast, or EMDR does, is it allows the subconscious mind to do that processing while you are re-experiencing aspects of the event – what you were feeling, and where the sensation is, in your body. What image or film would represent the event, when you think about it now?”

“Texas chainsaw Massacre.”

“Ok good, good, stick with that!”

I too was unsure if that was a sensible idea, but lots of,  “follow this light with your eyes,” and his mellifluous voice describing entering walled garden later and, incredibly, I found myself at said party, circa 2002; a place where I had felt hopeless and out of my depth. My plan was to go over to the person who had invited me into this Bedlam and tell him what I thought of him, but instead, I saw myself embracing him in a maternal hug. In my arms he became smaller and younger and as vulnerable as I know him to be. This distorted, ogre of a man, who I had given the power of making me feel sick about myself for years, became what he actually is, a snot-nosed little boy, also out of his depth, and I felt what I should have felt all along: pity. 

“So, on a scale of 1-10 how strong is that memory now, with 1 being the weakest and 10 being the strongest?”

“Zero.”

And so, it would appear that a certain amount of letting go is essential for survival, and a large amount is good for our sanity. Yesterday, I went around the house removing anything that was connected to a negative memory: bad art, those shoes I wore on my 40th birthday, a latex nurse’s outfit (don’t ask). And while I’ll never go in for the Marie Kondo style of life cleansing, it felt good.

As for memories, I’ll hoard a few special ones until old age makes them pack their bags and leave for sunnier climes. But perhaps I won’t stick them on the fridge anymore.

If you are having trouble with letting go of the past and the dramatically changing present, speak to a brutally honest teenager or hypnotherapist. Just don’t ask your dog’s advice; he will likely lick your face and fight you for his frisbee.

Oh, and the younger me, the one we left hanging off the cliff face…with the help of a fearless Aussie camera man called Charlie, I did let go, and learnt a few things about what I was capable of.

We all do, eventually.