Breathe, Release, and Let Go

The Life-Changing Skill You Must Master

I want to dive deep into a topic I’ve covered many of times throughout my career, yet it remains the most transformational skill you can develop: the ability to breathe, release, and let go in a relaxed body.

The Origins of Letting Go

My journey with letting go began in December 1988 during my early sobriety. I discovered this skill through the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. That book, now worn with a broken spine and falling pages, taught me something profound: there’s a mechanism to letting go. It’s not abstract. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s a specific skill that requires discipline, understanding, and practice.

Letting go is anchored in creating a separation between the feelings and the events that shaped them. When I feel angry, overwhelmed, or any emotion, I’m able to accept the emotion, observe the situation, breathe, release, and let go. I can create that separation. This is what most people struggle with. They ask, “How do I let go?” and then keep recreating the same situation over and over.

Understanding the Mechanism of Letting Go

Think of letting go like the inner mechanics of a lock. There’s a tumbler, a place where the key goes in, and when you turn it correctly, the lock releases. You hear that click, that alignment. Letting go is that same alignment. As you master this skill, you begin to regulate your emotions differently.

What you’re mastering are your anxiety, fear, and doubt. These emotions are driven by anger, hate, resentment, guilt, shame, abandonment, rejection, overwhelmed feelings, grief, apathy, and pride. These are the main emotions that will take you into anxiety, fear, and specifically doubt. When you understand the cause that creates the effect of why you do what you do, you can start to regulate yourself and create the separation.

The Fight or Flight Response

The body goes into fight or flight in an automatic reaction. Most of society lives in a very short breath cycle because of fight or flight. They hold their breath. People begin holding their breath as children through different levels of trauma: sexual, physical, emotional, and critical or generational trauma.

Any combination of these traumas will keep your body in levels of fight or flight. You’ll meet people who live in adrenaline and cortisol. They wait for the shoe to drop. They’re constantly in conflict. This is why it’s so important to be able to breathe, release, and let go.

Practicing the Skill Daily

Breathe, release, and let go in a relaxed body. This becomes an affirmation you can use seven days a week, and I say it every single day. The more you say it, you’re affirming to yourself: “I’m breathing. I’m releasing. And I’m letting go.”

The breath is a long breath cycle. You bring the breath up from the abdomen, which puts you in your core. You bring it up, you release it, and you follow with the word “release.” You’re retraining your body to let go. The body that holds on to fight or flight will recreate the same situation to fulfill the same set of feelings until there’s an interruption pattern created.

Creating Emotional Resilience

If you’re in a hostile environment, whether in a relationship or a job, and you’re working on an exit strategy but can’t quit today or leave tomorrow, it’s important that while this is going on, you’re able to neutralize that negativity. You neutralize the ego of other people. That’s a state called non-attachment.

To be non-attached is definitely a breathe, release, and let go skill set so that you can stay in your relaxed body. The relaxed body allows you to be present. It allows you to still be productive. If you don’t know how to regulate yourself, you’ll encounter adversity and then go into anger mode or shutdown mode. Either one is ineffective.

When you face adversity, it’s important that you have emotional resilience. That’s the breathe, release, and let go component where you’re no longer the mind-body connection to the lower self that would get overwhelmed.

Breaking the Pattern of Emotional Addiction

If you keep recreating the same situation, you’ll continue to attract the same situation to your circle of influence over and over. That’s what fulfills the neurochemical craving of being emotionally addicted to a set of feelings.

Anxiety, fear, and doubt is a byproduct of unresolved issues. It’s a byproduct of the events that shaped your feelings as you grew up. Fight or flight is the autonomic reaction to stimulus. Your body goes from zero to 100 without you knowing it, and all of a sudden you’re being critical, negative, judgmental, and you don’t even know you’re doing it.

Changing Who and What You Attract

People ask me daily: How do I change who and what I attract? The first step is understanding it’s a skill. Then it’s important that you’re rigorously honest about your childhood. By the time you’re 18, your personality is a byproduct of your personal reality. The home you grew up in, the school system you went to, the taunting and hazing you experienced—all of this is a component.

When you’re skilled at breathing, releasing, and letting go, you’re creating the separation. And the separation is what allows you to change the wiring. You’re wiring from love. You’re wiring in joy, peace, belief, trust, truth, understanding, and inner knowing.

The Transformation Begins Now

As you let go of the anxiety you hold on to, this is how you change who and what you attract. You’re no longer being the experience and experiencing the experience. You can observe it. As you’re the observer, not the participant, you’re creating the separation. This changes the neurological network of neurons that wire and fire.

Instead of being zero to 100 and angry, all of a sudden you’re now in peace and you’re able to let go. You’re able to not let it affect you the way you used to. You don’t have to be right and get in the ring with people. You’re able to realize that the pleasure isn’t worth the pain. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Breathe, release, and let go in a relaxed body. This is your pathway to freedom, emotional resilience, and attracting the life you truly desire. Master this skill, and you master your life.