What Can I Let Go Of?

Balancing the Inner and Outer Landscapes

Eve Bernfeld
Nov 6 · 4 min read
Photo by Brian Guerrero

The other, ehem, year, my husband was cleaning off the desk in our home office and decided I needed an inbox. Or maybe he decided he needed an inbox for me to pile up all the stuff that was mine. So he built one for me. That’s just the sort of person he is. We’ve both been piling my stuff on there for the last two years, but I’ve never actually cleaned it out. I’m impressed it’s only about 10 inches tall. What will I find when I excavate it? Because it will be something like archeology, I think. I see a peek of a poster from a class I taught a couple of winters back. I see a summer camp schedule from last year. I see a snowflake my daughter cut out last winter. I see materials from a course I took last spring…

If there is value to the inner life to be gained from clearing the outer landscape (and I think there is), I’m failing miserably in my house. Glancing around as I type, I can see baby carriers (my kids are five), VHS tapes (we don’t have a VCR, or a TV, for that matter). Outgrown kids’ shoes that have been taken out of circulation, but haven’t made it into a giveaway bag. Full disclosure — I’m typing near the floor-to-ceiling shelves where we cram all those things. Not every room is this bad… I think?

I realize, as I give this confession, that a little work could go a long way to improving the situation. I have neither time, nor energy, nor inclination to take a week (or a month?) out of my life to purge my house from top to bottom. The massive transformation is appealing (thanks, home makeover shows), but unreasonable for this wife, mother of three and business owner. But it would be pretty easy, this very day, to recycle the summer camp schedule, put the shoes in the giveaway bag and post the baby carriers on the resale facebook group. To let go of a few things I don’t need.

But that requires something else first. A moment to pause and see what’s around me, and resist the temptation to shut down. “I can’t deal with this, it’s too overwhelming.”

Actually I have a lot more practice in balancing the inner landscape. It’s far from perfect, but it’s what I work on every single day. And the process is the same. Pause. Notice what’s going on. Are my thoughts spinning? Are my shoulders tight? Am I holding my breath? Can I let go of these things I don’t need?

This process is not a radical makeover. In fact the very nature of a “radical makeover” is that it’s all about the PRODUCT. But life is a process. To live it as well as I can, I need to wave goodbye to the fantasy of a perfect house, or the fantasy of being a perfectly patient mother. And instead embrace a process of pausing, parsing and dropping what I don’t need right now. Over and over and over again.

It’s tempting to shut it down before I’ve even started. Realistically, getting rid of three things a day is never going to get me anywhere, considering the sheer mass of stuff that walks through the door of a family of five. Pausing and letting myself breathe for a moment seems like throwing a flower at a dragon. However this misses the point of the exercise. If I pause and bring into focus my inner or my outer landscape, who knows what might happen next? The very act of stepping off the express train of my life for a moment means that I am stepping into the unknown. To continue with my travel metaphor, I’m stepping off the map.

Interrupting automaticity can be deeply unsettling. I may not like the mess, but at least it’s my mess. I may lament the knots in my shoulders, but at least they are familiar. Until these patterns become too boring or too painful to tolerate.

This came to pass about a dozen years ago with my shoulders. I started studying the Alexander Technique and began a process of interrupting the pattern of tightening my shoulders. Pause, breathe, let the shoulders go. Over and over and over again. And over time, I found fewer and fewer days when I wished for a massage. I found myself having headaches fewer and fewer days of the month, until they went away almost completely.

So in the end, I suppose the change was radical. But it happened in such tiny steps that each step felt like almost nothing.

Pause.

Breathe.

Lighten up.

Or as Lao Tzu put it, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I’m sure I’m not alone in my wish to see the end of the journey from that first step. Could someone take me up in a helicopter first? Or maybe give me a money-back-guarantee?

And that, of course, is not how life works. All I can do is take the step.

Pause.

And see what happens next.

Body Wisdom

Where mind and body are one. A publication about health, well-being, personal development, optimal functioning and performance.

Eve Bernfeld

Written by

Eve is a certified Alexander Technique teacher, a licensed Drama Educator, a singer, baker, hiker, reader, writer, mother of three. More at www.inbalanceat.com.

Body Wisdom

Where mind and body are one. A publication about health, well-being, personal development, optimal functioning and performance.

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