On Letting Go: When Holding on Becomes the Disturbance
There is an interesting contradiction within modern health culture in that we are constantly encouraged to add - add the supplement, add the superfood, add the morning routine, add the meditation, add another practitioner, another test, another protocol, another piece of information. Even healing itself can become something else we accumulate.
Biological systems survive by letting go of what they no longer need, just as much as they survive by taking things in.
Breathing: We take in oxygen and exhale used air.
Skin: We constantly shed old, dead cells.
Waste: We clear out used hormones (chemical messengers that tell our organs how to work) after their job is done.
Immune system: Our body fights off sickness and then shuts the defence response off when the danger passes.
Brain: Active neuropathways grow stronger, while unused connections quietly fade away.
Nature is full of letting go but it seems perhaps human beings have become less good at it. We hold onto identities, relationships, expectations, grievances, routines and even versions of ourselves that may once have served us extremely well. Sometimes we hold onto illness identities too, and this is not to suggest that illness is psychological or that somebody can simply decide to stop being unwell. That kind of thinking can be both simplistic and cruel.
But there is a more interesting question: What happens when the circumstances that created a particular adaptation have changed, but the adaptation remains?
A nervous system that learned vigilance may continue scanning for danger long after the original danger has passed, a person who survived through relentless independence may find receiving help almost intolerable or someone whose identity has become organised around achievement may experience rest not as restoration, but as failure.
From a homeopathic perspective, we spend considerable time exploring patterns: what a person repeatedly does, feels, fears, avoids and compensates for. Nutrition can reveal similar patterns for example, food itself can become comfort, control, nourishment, reward, identity or security.
The perfect blood results, perfect food, perfect sleep, perfect supplements, perfect regulation, perfect health can seem like health optimisation but can become another form of holding on.
At what point does the pursuit of health itself become another demand the organism must carry?
Perhaps letting go is not passive at all and perhaps it is one of the most sophisticated expressions of adaptability. A healthy efficiently functioning ecosystem does not preserve every element indefinitely. Forests shed leaves, rivers change course and species migrate and old structures decay and their materials become available for something new.
There is of course wisdom in conservation, but there is also wisdom in release and maybe one of the questions worth asking in health is not always:
What does this person need? Sometimes it might be: What are they carrying that they no longer need to carry?
This is part of why my work rarely begins with the question, “What else can we add?” Sometimes there are nutritional deficiencies to address, physiological systems that need support or homeopathic treatment to consider, but sometimes the more revealing question is: what no longer serves this person or his family? That might be a nutritional strategy, an unsustainable routine, a long-established pattern of response or simply the relentless pressure to keep “working” on their health.
Through functional nutritional therapy, homeopathy and lifestyle mentoring, I look at these different layers together. Not to impose another perfect regime, but to understand what the individual system is asking for now and although sometimes restoring health is about providing what is missing, sometimes it is about reducing the load and, occasionally, progress begins when we finally give ourselves permission to stop doing something. At the core of building my patients strategies the overarching goal is always to build whole system vitality, resilience and adaptability.
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Best Wishes