The Grace in Falling

In Autumn 2020, I wrote a post responding to that meme that floods my feed every Fall—the one about how the autumn leaves show us how beautiful it can be to let go.

I wrote then: Ugh…if I see this one more time, I think I'll scream. Of course, letting go can be beautiful. It can also be really painful and not very pretty at all.

It’s that time of year again, and I find myself revisiting that idea. Over these past few years, I’ve learned a few things about what it really means to let go.   

Contemplating the cycles of nature has helped me understand - deep in my bones - that dissolution is essential for something new to emerge.

The fallen tree in the forest seems tragic, until you witness the new life flourishing in the soil beneath its upturned roots. The more-than-human world reminds us, again and again, how necessary it is to release the old to make space for the new.

My daily meditation practice has taught me a lot about letting go. Watching the cycles of my breath—each exhalation a tiny act of surrender—has helped me sit with the busyness of my mind and the discomfort of difficult feelings as they arise.

Some mornings, anxiety rises within minutes. As my mind spins stories about all the things I should be doing instead of sitting here, I let the thoughts and feelings arise and subside. Eventually—reliably—this gives way to a quiet calm, not because the distracting thoughts or feelings disappear, but because I settle into the spacious awareness that holds them.

This is kind the effort that practice invites—not the forcing kind, but the kind that releases the grip. On the meditation cushion, the effort is in not trying to fix the anxiety or follow the stories. It's the effort of staying present with what is, even when what is feels uncomfortable.

In my asana practice, I've also made peace with saying goodbye to poses that no longer serve my 56-year-old body. There was grief in letting go of arm balances and deep backbends that were a fun part of my practice for decades. At first, it felt like failure. But beneath the grief, there was also relief.

Instead of pushing into ever-deeper poses, it’s liberating to honor what my body needs and to welcome in simpler, subtler practices that feel more appropriate at this stage of my life.

This subtle effort—where how we are is as important as what we do—serves us well when life beckons us to let go.

It's the opposite of the kind of effort we're taught to make everywhere else, where effort means pushing through, overriding our body's signals, and prioritizing achievement and productivity at any cost. That kind of effort that leaves us exhausted, disconnected, and perpetually striving.

Yoga asks something entirely different of us: it’s the effort of attunement rather than achievement. It’s listening first - sensing when to act and when to soften, when to persist and when to release. It's learning to harmonize our individual will with the natural flow of life as it unfolds.

While our experience of letting go might not always mirror the seamless beauty of the falling autumn leaves, I've come to see that our messy, imperfect letting go carries its own kind of grace.

And if we keep evolving and practicing this subtler, gentler kind of effort, we may discover that grace has been there all along - even in the falling.