Letting Go: The Deep Practice of Yoga

Over the last ten years, this understanding has quietly deepened in me; that yoga, at one level, is a practice for health, and at another, a training in the art of letting go.Lately, I sense this lesson becoming more relevant for many of us, not as an idea of loss, but as an opening into something wider, quieter, more alive.

I’ve been exploring what the spiritual traditions say about release, and how they connect it with death, not as an ending but as a continuation of awareness.

In yoga, we practise letting go again and again; letting go of tension, of thoughts, of outcomes. Each exhalation is a small death, a chance to rehearse surrender, and, paradoxically, to embrace life more fully.

To die well, the teachings suggest, is to stay awake and relaxed, to witness without resistance. That is what we are practising every time we release into a posture, every time we pause with the breath, allow the body to settle, and accept whatever sensations arise through the process of observation without judgement.

Whilst yoga increases vitality, it also deepens our preparedness to experience each moment, including the final one of this life, with openness and trust.

This readiness is not only for the last breath. The old teaching says, die before you die.To die in each moment is to let the old version of ourselves fall away; to release the clinging to identity and story. When we live without context, without the need to be anyone or prove anything, we touch a kind of death that is pure life.

In those moments, there is no separation, no striving, no becoming; only being.And so, yoga becomes a lived invitation: to let go, to meet the present as it is, and to allow each breath to return us to simplicity.

So today, with every breath that arises, observe; and with every exhalation, let go of anything that stands between you and the direct experience of life as it is.