The other night was the full moon. A typical practice on full moon nights is letting go of something. I wasn’t quite sure what to let go of. I often feel like my body is holding onto so much, but it’s not clear what. So a little reflection on what to let go of got me thinking about the process of letting go itself.

The importance and significance of it. And strangely, in letting go of the need to let go, it dawned on me that integration, the process towards what Carl Jung called individuation or developing one’s self, is only possible with separation. If there is no separation, no letting go of something that we once felt the need to have, or at least the desire to have it, then there can be no integration of that item under the hood of one’s personality. The state of our being remains subject to its influences.

Letting go doesn’t necessarily need to be a physical act, it can be a psychic or mental one, in which an idea or belief is no longer identified with, or attached to. It then falls away from the self and becomes something ‘other’. It’s fascinating how the process of letting go seems to be the essential step to becoming more whole. In the hole that results from the separation, something else must take its place. Perhaps it’s a greater understanding or a creative spirit that now has space to come into existence as a result of this wider perspective. And from this place, a deeper, more intimate relationship with the essence of the thing, the object, or the being can be established.

The dance between the sun and the moon reflect this process beautifully. It is when the sun is completely opposite the moon, most separated from its partner, that the moon shines its brightest. The sun sees the moon for what it truly is, and under this light of this awareness, the moon begins it’s journey back around to be close, or together with the sun again.

And just like that, my body started to loosen its grip on itself.