When Love Lets Go - Part 2

The Body’s Wisdom

The body always knows when our boundaries are being betrayed.

It might show up as a knot in the stomach, a tightening in the chest, a restless need to “do something.”

The nervous system experiences enmeshment as danger, even when the mind calls it love.

Boundaries are not barriers, they are balance. They are what allow us to stay connected to ourselves while remaining open to others.

When we return to our own centre, the body softens. The breath deepens. There’s a quiet sense of expansion, as if the edges of perception widen again. From that grounded place, we can sense the other without losing ourselves.

I often use the image of dance when working with clients. Two people moving together can only create something beautiful when each is anchored in their own body. If one loses their balance, the other must compensate: pushing, pulling, bracing. The dance becomes awkward, heavy, sometimes even dangerous.

But when both are centred - grounded in their own axis - something magical happens. They can move with fluidity, creativity, and deep connection.

This is what healthy love feels like. 

Not fusion, but flow. 

Not control, but coherence.

Boundaries make intimacy possible because they give love a structure in which to breathe.

The Courage to Let Go

Letting go is one of the most misunderstood acts of love. We equate it with indifference, when in truth, it’s an act of radical trust.

To let go is to recognise that we cannot live anyone else’s life for them, that each soul has its own path, lessons, and timing. It’s to release the illusion that we can protect someone from their own experience.

For those of us conditioned to care through control, letting go can feel unbearable at first. It means meeting our own helplessness - the tender truth that we cannot save the people we love.

A few months ago, my son stopped wanting hugs, making a show of being repulsed by any physical affection from me. After trying to understand why, I found myself attempting to convince him otherwise. When that failed, I noticed the impulse rising in me to reject him in return. To withdraw. To protect myself by pulling away as well.

It took everything I had to stay with my own pain instead - to recognise that these feelings of rejection weren’t all about him. I meditated. I journaled. I talked with a trusted friend. I chose to answer the invitation to tend to my own wounds rather than making him responsible for healing them.

And then I offered him my presence. Just that.

When I spent time with him, I took extra care to feel my spine, my feet on the ground. In the face of even the most cruel behaviours, I focused on the overwhelming love I have for him. I held steady. I offered him a hug over and over again - as if for the first time - accepting his “no” and returning to tend to my own inner work.

Until one day, he came over and gave me a hug of his own accord.

I cried with relief. I held him tight and told him how I’d missed him, how much I love him.

This is what letting go looks like - not abandoning someone, but releasing our grip on how they should be. Staying grounded in our own body while holding space for them to find their way back. Trusting that presence, not pressure, creates the opening for real connection.

“Stand together yet not too near together: 

For the pillars of the temple stand apart, 

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Untangling these crossed wires asks for deep inner work - the kind that expands our capacity to feel the full range of human emotion.

Because to love with clarity, we must be willing to meet both the ache and the ecstasy of being alive. 

To open to joy without denying sorrow. 

To allow life to move through us in its wholeness, not only in its comfort.

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. 

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

When we stop trying to manage others’ pain, we rediscover our own vitality. The energy that was once tangled in anxiety and over-responsibility returns as presence, creativity, and clarity.

We begin to see that love doesn’t need to fix anything. It only needs to be.

Coming Home to Ourselves

Healing porous boundaries isn’t about becoming detached, it’s about becoming whole.

It begins with the simplest awareness: Where am I abandoning myself right now? Whose emotions am I carrying that are not mine to hold?

 From there, the work is practice: learning to stay inside our own body, even when someone else is in distress. 

To breathe. 

To ground. 

To listen without absorbing. 

To trust that their pain belongs to them, and that our presence - not our intervention - is the greatest gift we can offer.

These days, there is someone in my life who has been helping me rewrite my relational blueprint. Someone who asks me every day how I am and really listens, who doesn’t let me get away with the disconnecting, superficial “I’m fine.” They will listen as I talk about whatever is alive in me in that moment, all the emotions that are present, and simply hold that space. More than once, I’ve tried to edit something with high emotional charge, to minimise it, to move on, and they’ve only said: “What else is there? What more?”

And then, after listening: “What do you need right now?”

One of the most powerful questions I can think of in relationship with anyone. Not “Here’s what you should do.” Not “Let me fix this for you.” Just: What do you need?

I cannot begin to describe what it is like to finally experience this kind of presence.

Over time, this practice rewires the nervous system. We learn that connection does not require self-sacrifice, that compassion does not demand collapse.

We learn to love through presence rather than anxiety.

And we learn true intimacy, rooted in the moment and exquisitely attuned to what is being expressed in connection.

Love, Reclaimed

When love lets go, it doesn’t lose its warmth, it gains its wisdom.

 It becomes less about managing and more about meeting. 

Less about rescuing and more about respecting.

It’s a love that honours each person’s sovereignty. 

A love that knows: I can walk beside you, but I cannot walk for you.

This is the love that arises from presence, the kind that is both fierce and free. 

It doesn’t cling, it doesn’t control. It trusts. It breathes. It allows.

Because true compassion never requires us to abandon ourselves. 

It asks us to stay - in our bodies, in our truth, in our balance - so that love can move through us without distortion.

Love that lets go doesn’t stop caring. 

It simply stops confusing devotion with control.

It is the kind of love that doesn’t rescue but remembers - remembers that the deepest connection begins and ends in self-connection.

And when we love from that place, our relationships cease to be performances of safety. They become creative dances, alive, equal, and exquisitely free.