Letting go of place - a starting point

© Jenn Shallvey

At times in our lives we choose to or need to let go of a place. We can use the words space and place interchangeably. I tend to go back and forth between the two words place and space, because sometimes it is not just about letting go of a physical location, but also something within that location. An analogy that might work is a room in a house, as opposed to the house. You may wish to, or need to, or desire to let go of both a room in a house and then the entire house. Or maybe the journey that you are on is one where all you can handle at the moment is a space within a place because the place is too big to let go.

I know we are off right away in this post with examples because I want to set the scene here. Another example then might be moving out of your family home. Your family still lives in the home but you do not. Perhaps you return for the next visit and your family has changed the room. The walls are repainted. Your bed no longer has your childhood bedspread. Your desk has now been converted into a craft table. Or maybe one of your siblings, who waited for the better room, moved in and took over. You knew consciously in your mind when you moved out of that house, that place, that you would perhaps possibly even more likely lose the space. No one was actually going to hold it for you. You no longer were there physically. This is a distinction that is is worth keeping in mind and reflecting on for you before we really get into the idea of place. For letting go of place and space is tied very much into where you are at in your life and journey.

To start we might even dive into this from a different angle than you probably would expect. The logical end says, you go through a decision tree and you follow the deducted outcome. But here we are going to work differently. We are going to work energetically and notice what happens energetically with you. 

For reference you may or may not be familiar with the word energetically or energetic. Maybe you do yoga, meditation or visit practitioners that work with this area. Irrespective of your pre-existing knowledge of this idea let’s just approach our letting go of place with a general statement. Some say that non-physical aspects of ourselves are tied closely to anchoring ourselves energetically into our world around us. Nothing can be more anchoring and important to us as our home, wherever we call home, what we call home. Home can vary between people. What is home to one person who might be quite nomadic might be not even a home to somebody who has a family residence that has been passed down from generation to generation. You see already the idea of what you may or may not be attached to in terms of place will vary greatly by your definition of home. Even so, whatever you call home is a place for you.

Our life depends quite significantly on being able to anchor ourselves in a place, whether it is temporary or permanent. It could be a hotel room, temporary accommodation, a tent in the forest. It could be a makeshift accommodation that protects us from the elements. There is a place for us, a little spot on this big gigantic planet that we can settle in and call home. Given the perspective that there is a range of type of place that we might say we dwell in or live within or upon or amongst the letting go of that will vary as much.

Then there is another aspect - the degree to which we share place with others. We might say that we can have a tiny little domicile in a house that is our room and we can become quite protective of that and even say, that is our space. No one else can enter it or go in without our permission, we can control it. But the more we branch out from that space, that is what we call ours, the more it becomes a shared space. A place of a house will more often be one shared with more than one person or at least at some point in the person's life will have been shared with more than one person. For example, I can think of elderly people that may have had their family move away and a spouse pass on or move out. They may be by themselves. But that house that they live in may still be a place that was shared. Then even if we hold a space like this that we call our own, there are visitors to the space. So we can not really say that it is only to ourselves, right?

If we go outside of our living place, into our community we enter a bigger shared place. This is part of a definition of community. We have common roads, footpaths, parks, shops, cafes, services and facilities in an area. They are all shared places. We can go beyond that community into a regional aspect and define a region, an unofficial border. We could then move into another level, which might be a state or a territory that has official legal separation. We might then move into a country level. We might move into alliances of countries that are together. That is a place. We might go to continents because you can be on one continent. That is one place that is different from another continent, which is another place. At some point, the place is the earth, the planet, the globe. We are in this place on this place of this place. For the purposes of this discussion, we are going to stop at the planet level, but you could go universe. We live in places more likely to be shared than not shared. Our idea of letting go of a place is not so much about others, but much more about ourselves and how we choose to be within a place.

The interesting thing is that the idea, even of letting go of a place comes up because we are so me-centric in where we are, we have personal boundaries. We look for a way to surround ourself with our physical things in a space or a place that is ours. There is something about our human nature that says, let me be safe. Let me be held physically somewhere where I can rest. This is not too different from an animal who might make a nest or find a territory but with the difference being that we actually consciously know our reasons or choice for why a place is ours.

I therefore invite you to consider place with the context of knowing that we are in a shared place, much more than we are in one that is not. Consider how attachment to our own place can get in the way of us living in a shared place. We might have, for example a house or an apartment or a room in a place that we call ours. There is an unofficial, or maybe an official boundary between us and somebody else. The demarcation of that line could be as simple as a map on an architectural or council diagram, or it could be a fence with a big sign that effectively says this is not your side. It could have been a wall built up between us and our neighbour. There could be demarcations of that nature. We are closed off from the other side of that fence in our own place. The other place is not ours. Should we choose to venture into that place we would have to get permission or we would be trespassing. We hold on quite tightly sometimes to our place. Firstly we are by nature inclined to want to attach to a place and call it our home. We are also often literally and metaphorically fenced into places that become the only place we feel safe or can be. 

More than ever, many of us may be feeling this self enclosure right now across the world. Suddenly place is out of our control. The places that are in our control are becoming more and more precious. The domicile of our life has been restricted, cut back, moved into smaller and smaller space to where the only area within which we have influence is perhaps even a room in a place. When we step into a shared space, now that place is no longer what it used to be to many of us. The boundaries and the way that these are managed are changing. We have greater need to be able to adjust, to go with this change, to be able to handle it within ourselves. As we have less and less control, we need to find a way to be within that and still maintain a sense of self, a sense of connection, a sense of domicile.

I invite you to consider your situation right now. See yourself as an individual in your space and go back and look at that for you. Where are you right now? Where are you sitting reading this post? Or if doing this exercise after reading, where are you walking, driving, going? As you reflect notice the space or place that you are in - the room, house, building, street, demarcations around you, signs, trees and landmarks. This is where you are right now.

Technically this place is all that matters right now. Right? Yet you know you have a place somewhere else that you can actually go to. Pretend for a moment that you are walking and you have a place to go to. You have a home to go to. [Some people are not that lucky. We are not going to talk about that in this post but it is acknowledged.] What is it about that place that draws you back to it? How do you feel when you go back to it? What are you happy to see or feel? What are you dreading? What is it about that place that you know is right for you? As you feel into this, you can also get a sense of your degree of attachment to it. Now you get a sense of place for you.

Is there anything that does not feel right to you? Is there anything that feels uncomfortable for you about the place you currently are in? That is something to pay attention to. What is it about that place that does not feel right for you? That is a question to answer and then sit with. Because often the place we are in serves a purpose, it holds us for a reason, for a time in our life that when it is no longer serving that purpose, we may feel detached from it. What is it about that place that you hold on to that means a lot for you that if you were to leave it would really affect you? Why are you holding onto? These are questions about where you are at now.

Then there are places that we have had in the past that still may be coming up as memories or attachments. I feel like we can do the same exercise of connecting to that place and seeing how it feels for us. What does it do with us? What is our relationship with that place? When we connect to the past of that place, why is it still something that we hold on to? Is it because it is just a memory or is it because we longingly want to go back to that place? There is a constructive way of looking back at places where we have been. Then there are also ways where we can go back and it can become debilitating or not constructive to us in fact deconstructive in our self. If that is the case, then you are carrying that energy forward with you as well. You are carrying the negativity, hurt or unresolved aspect of that experience.

The idea of place varies from person to person and is shaped by our life story and personal experience. Delving into the connection can be a process that is done with support that holds you. Another way is to approach with the idea of what place means for you and what you are still connected to from your past.

A simple exercise might be, first of all, what comes up when I ask you to think of a place in the past, what is the first thing that comes up. Then you can ask yourself intuitively, why did that place come up first? What is it about that place that I'm connected to?  Why do I actually want to stay connected to it? Is there work for me to do with that place?

You can connect to that place and find answers through your own inquiry, what it means to you and why it is important. Now it may be that you simply have a good memory. For example maybe when you were a child, you took holidays at certain location and this place has good memories for you. Maybe that comes up to remind you that life can have good things in it. Maybe you had a not so good experience in your past and a place reminds you of this. There are a lot of associations that exist. What is key about places from the past is that you are not there now. Remember at the start of this post we explored your present situation. That is the anchor of where you are now, not the past. 

Thought not the focus of this post there is also the place of the future. This is purely imagination, visioning. There can still be attachment to this as well that gets in the way of you enjoying and living in the future. For example you may tell yourself ‘when I move to this new place my life will be better’. Or maybe you have a goal you are focusing on that involves a future place that drives you to the point of forgetting about where you are now.  

The last place is one that goes with you through choice and creation – a place of our imagination.  This connection is one we create. It can be real or not real. Because it is entirely within the realm of our own personal creativity we can be anywhere.  In meditation I was taught many years ago that one practice is to create and have a ‘location’ for you to go to anchor you in your meditation.  Over the years I have developed a connection to my ‘internal safe place’ as a way to be and connect.  For me it is a physical place I love where I feel wonderful and fabulous when I am there or even thinking about it. Imagine this place as an internal getaway or place to visit, an internal domicile.  

In your meditation you can anchor yourself in such a place as well. You can imagine that place in all its detail. You may have been there or go there or not. For example, in my meditations, when I want to start in a place that anchors me, I go to a particular spot on the ocean. It is just below the edge of a cliff on a rocky beach with not a soul visible, just the water, waves crashing and the endless sky and ocean on the horizon. I see myself surrounded by the broken, earthy edges of the cliff, the sand and the rocks. I can sit on the sand or I can sit on the edges of rocks. I can put my feet in the water and feel the different textures of the rocks and plant life beneath the surface. This is a magical place for me. I do not need to be there physically to connect. 

As you can see place can take many forms. Letting go of place is first about understanding and connecting to the ones that matter in our own lives.  From this starting point we can then discern what is no longer serving us in being fully ourselves. The next step then is to work through the process of letting go. More of that to come.