How to Let Go When Talking Isn’t Working

We live in a culture that wants everything explained — why we feel what we feel, how to fix it, how to make it stop. But the body doesn’t speak in logic; it speaks in sensation, pressure, vibration, and release. And sometimes, the only way through an emotion isn’t to analyse it — it’s to move it.

There are times when talking about what we feel just isn’t enough. The mind can loop, analyse, dissect — but the body still hums with the charge of it.

Anxiety. Anger. Grief. Shame. The weight that sits beneath words.

I came across an exercise recently that does something different. It gives the energy somewhere to go. It externalises what’s stuck inside — not by suppressing it, but by giving it form.

The Practice

Close your eyes.

Take a slow breath in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Then bring your hands up in front of you — palms facing each other, about hip-width apart.

Now imagine gathering whatever you’ve been holding — the tension in your chest, the knot in your stomach, the emotion you can’t quite name. Imagine it as an energy that you can move — and begin to collect it between your hands.

As you breathe, see it forming — a ball of energy, maybe dark or bright, dense or light, however it wants to appear. Feel it growing stronger, the current of it vibrating between your palms. This is everything you’ve been carrying, held outside the body for a moment — contained, witnessed, no longer hidden in your tissues.

When you feel it reach its peak, take one last deep breath — and throw it back into the universe. Not in anger, not in resistance — but in release.

It’s no longer yours to hold.

Why It Works

When you physically externalise emotion, your nervous system gets the message that it’s safe to let go. You're shifting energy out of thought and into motion — giving it a defined place to exist, rather than letting it swirl endlessly inside you. You're saying, this no longer belongs in my body.

Because sometimes the most healing thing you can do isn’t to analyse what you’re feeling — it’s to give it somewhere else to go.

A space outside yourself where it can move, transform, or simply dissolve.