Letting Go
The next Three Sundays Series begins July 12th
The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go.
Letting Go: Finding the Secret, Hidden Beauty in Every Ending
The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.
The poet Rilke said, “Be ahead of all parting” as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.
The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.
The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.
Letting go clears the way to seeing more clearly what was there all along.
Join me for Three Sundays in July, to look at all the visible and invisible endings that mark a human life and that, when approached with the right insight, the right perspective and often surprisingly small but courageous acts of letting go, provide us with the new beginning we need.
Live virtual sessions for Letting Go will take place on July 12th, 19th and 26th. Session recordings and resources will be made available for all registered attendees until December 1st, 2026.
Paid Substack subscribers receive $35 off the cost of registration. If you are a paid Substack subscriber, and have not received a discount code in email for the July 2026 Series, contact support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.
Note: If you have not registered for a Three Sundays Series on davidwhyte.com website, you will need to create a username and password in order to register and access the series resource materials.
With anticipation,
and all of us at Many Rivers
Letting go to find a new way forward is an important part of our human growth. What is missing though is the recognition that when an illness or injury brings an ending to a fuller, engaged life, it’s hard not to want one’s old life back, when moving on becomes a daily struggle. These kind of endings and beginnings are not welcome ones.
How does one let go of the disappointment that true dialogue is completely absent in yet another relationship? No matter how many relationships there are, no matter how subtle the initiative to repair conflict through dialogue may be, it is almost always met with defensiveness. How does one let go when one can clearly perceive the innate ambiguity of human language and the limits of perception itself? And how does one let go when the other person cannot perceive the relationship as an emerging third entity rather than as personal property? Is the only solution to treat infatuation as a non-negotiable phenomenon that must be transcended in order to foster genuine intimacy?