Stop Pushing People to LET GO or "Go to your edge"

I say this with so much love and I know how well intentioned the cue is.  Stop telling your class to let go.  Stop encouraging people to find or push their edge.   I want to offer an alternative lens to these cues because I do understand the intention behind them.   

People are coming in stressed, guarded, we know they need to "relax" to let go so they can recover.  We want people to play with their edge as a way to remember the inherent resilience and strength they have.  

However there is a bigger picture that we should consider.  

Let go. Release. Surrender. Breathe it out-open your mouth and let go.  

I was in class today and heard the instruction over and over.  And over and over it reminded my how not good enough I was.  Because I can't let go.  Letting go today is too overwhelming - too much pain, too much emotion.  I'm at my edge trying to function and just get through class without coming apart.  

Obviously as someone who trains and educates yoga teachers, it gave me an opportunity to reflect not on the emotion but on the application of it. 

Whether or not you acknowledge it -you work with nervous systems and if you are going to speak to someone's edge or letting go, you should have a deeper understanding of what this means. 

We have inherited a let go culture in yoga. It runs through our cueing, our sequencing philosophy, our language around the practice. The mat is a place to release what you are carrying. To soften. To surrender. To access something underneath the tension that is more true than the tension itself.  That stillness, surrender, letting go is the ideal and the only way to go. 

That framework is beautiful. And it rests on an assumption that is not always accurate.

What the nervous system actually does

The tension your practitioners are holding is not incidental. For many of them it is functional. It is the nervous system doing its job under conditions of chronic stress, accumulated grief, sustained overwhelm, or something they walked in with that morning that you will never know about.

The deep stabilizing muscles of the spine, the multifidus and the intrinsic spinal system, operate below the level of conscious control. They do not respond to cues. They do not respond to intention or effort or breath work directed at relaxation. They respond to the nervous system's assessment of safety. And that assessment happens below conscious awareness through a process Stephen Porges calls neuroception. The body scanning the environment for cues of threat or safety without asking the thinking brain for input.

You cannot instruct someone's nervous system into feeling safe. Safety is not a cognitive decision. It is a physiological state the body arrives at when it has accumulated enough evidence that the environment is not threatening. That process takes time. It takes relationship. It takes consistency of experience. It does not happen because a teacher said let go on an exhale.

When someone cannot release in your class it is not a failure of practice. It is the nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do under conditions of real or perceived threat. It is protecting them. And that protection is not the enemy of the practice. It is the starting point.

The people you do not know you are teaching

Consider who might be in your room on any given day.

The high performer who has been running on cortisol and compensatory habits for so long that their nervous system has shifted into dorsal vagal shutdown. Not fight. Not flight. Freeze. Functional disappearing. They look fine. They are hitting their deadlines. They showed up to class. And underneath that they are so far past capacity that the best they can do is get through this hour without falling apart.

The person carrying grief so heavy that the nervous system has chosen numbness over being consumed by it.  Maybe it's betrayal trauma, a move they didn't want, maybe it's a breakup, loss, etc.  They are not disconnected from their feelings because they are repressed or avoidant. They are disconnected because full contact with what they are feeling would be more than the system can manage right now. The numbness is mercy.  The NOT letting go is survival.

The practitioner with a trauma history for whom the instruction to close your eyes, soften your belly, and surrender control is not an invitation to ease. It is a threat. The body remembers things the thinking mind has processed and filed away. Neuroception does not care about your cognitive reframe.

You could have any or all of these people in your room right now. You probably do.

And we meet them there and tell them to go to their edge.

What we are actually asking

Let go assumes two things. That there is something ready to be released and that the person has the regulatory capacity to release it safely. Both of those assumptions can be wrong.

For someone whose protective bracing is the last line of defense their nervous system has constructed, the instruction to let go is not landing as an invitation. It may be landing as one more demand in a day full of demands. One more thing they cannot do right. One more way the practice is not working for them the way it is supposed to.

I cannot let go does not mean I do not want to. It means this is the best I can do right now. Getting through this moment is enough.

The let go cue also carries an implicit judgment that most of us never intend. If you cannot release, something is wrong with you. You are holding on too tight. You are not doing it right. The practice is not working because you are not working hard enough at being soft.

That is a painful thing to feel in a room that is supposed to be safe.

What to say instead

This is not an argument against inviting ease in your classes. It is an argument for language that creates an opening without demanding anyone walk through it.

Instead of let go, try something more invitational. 

Instead of release, maybe reinforcing that just making it to their mat is a win.

Instead of surrender, maybe affirming that whatever their choice is-little breath, larger breath is the right choice. 

 The difference is permission without prescription. You are not telling someone what their body should do. You are creating space for whatever their body can do right now. That is a fundamentally different teaching orientation and it changes the experience for every person in your room, not just the ones who are struggling.

The bigger picture

As a yoga teacher you are working with nervous systems.. Whether you intend to or not. Every sequencing decision is a load decision on the nervous system. Every cue is a nervous system input. The physical and the neurological are not separate systems you address in sequence. They are the same system operating simultaneously.

Unintelligent physical loading, asking structures to work outside their job description repeatedly across sixty minutes, combined with simultaneous nervous system cues that push someone toward emotional release and vulnerability, creates cumulative load on every level at once. Physical, neurological, emotional. For someone already at capacity that is not a healing experience. That is more demand dressed up as restoration.

The practice is sophisticated enough to meet people exactly where they are. It always has been. We just have to be educated enough to do the same.

That starts with understanding what we are actually asking before we ask it.

If this resonates, the first APEX Community workshop is May 19 at 4pm EST. The Flexibility Myth: What Exercise Science Actually Says About Range of Motion and Why It Changes Everything You Teach. $67 for the public. Free for community members.  If you want to explore more topics like this, we do this in the APEX community.

Link in bio.