You've said the words. Maybe more than once.
I've let it go. I'm over it. I've moved on.
And you mean them — at the level of the mind, you genuinely mean them. You've journaled. You've talked it through with someone you trust. You've made the decision, consciously and deliberately, to release whatever it is you've been carrying.
And yet.
Something in your chest still tightens when their name comes up. Your jaw clenches in a specific way when the old situation surfaces. The body keeps a record that the mind has already tried to close.
So how do you actually know when you've let go — versus when you've simply decided to?
The Volcanic Rock
Here's an analogy I use, and I want you to really let it land.
Imagine you're holding something in your hand. Gripping it. Now imagine that thing starts to heat up — not all at once, but gradually. Getting warmer. Warmer. And at a certain point, when it becomes too painful to hold, the hand releases.
Notice: it's not really a decision. The hand doesn't debate it. It doesn't take a vote or consult a journal. The body just releases, because holding has become more painful than letting go.
This is exactly how it works internally. For most people, the release finally comes when the pain of holding on outweighs the discomfort of letting go. And that moment comes — it always eventually comes — but only if you wait for the burn to get bad enough.
Here's what I want you to understand: you don't have to wait.
Letting Go Is a Body Thing
You cannot think your way into letting go.
This is the part that most people miss, and it's worth saying plainly: the mind's decision to let go is the beginning, not the end. It's necessary. It's real. But it's not sufficient.
The body is a separate system, running by its own logic. And the body holds on — to people, to stories, to old versions of reality — not because it's irrational, but because it learned, somewhere along the way, that holding on kept you safe.
Letting go, for the nervous system, is a threat. It means releasing something that has been providing a form of structure or certainty, even when that certainty is painful. At least I know what this feels like. At least I know how to survive this.
The body doesn't release because you've decided it should. The body releases when it feels safe to release.
When it trusts — at a cellular, pre-verbal, thoroughly non-intellectual level — that it can survive without the thing it's been gripping.
Creating the Safety to Release
So the work isn't to force the release. It's to create the conditions that make release possible.
And those conditions come from inside, not from the situation resolving itself in the way you hoped.
This is the work of presence. Of breath. Of movement that allows what's stored in the body to be felt and discharged rather than perpetually suppressed. Of witnessing — that same witnessing we talk about in the context of the inner critic — where you can observe what you're carrying without being collapsed inside it.
The researcher Bessel van der Kolk has written extensively about how trauma and unprocessed experience live not in the narrative of the mind but in the body's physiology — in muscle tension, in breath patterns, in the activation of the stress response. "The body keeps the score," as he puts it.
Letting go happens in the body first. The mind's understanding often comes after, as a confirmation, not a cause.
How You Actually Know
So how do you know you've genuinely let go?
Not because you decided to. Not because enough time has passed. Not because you've stopped consciously thinking about it.
You know because the grip is gone. And the grip — you'll feel it — has a very specific physical quality. The tension in your shoulders when the topic comes up. The constriction in your chest. The way your breathing shallows. The tightening around your throat or your stomach.
When those are gone — not suppressed, not managed, but genuinely absent — when the name comes up and your body stays soft, when the old wound surfaces and there's no charge left in it, just a kind of neutral recognition: yes, that happened — that's how you know.
Not as a decision. As a natural consequence of no longer needing to hold on.
The grip loosens when the body finally trusts it's safe without it.
That's the whole practice. Give yourself enough safety, enough presence, enough gentleness from the inside, that the thing you've been gripping stops feeling necessary to hold.
Then watch what releases.
Dylan Ayaloo is a transformation coach and the founder of elev8, helping people do the inner work that changes everything on the outside.