exercise · all tools
Letting Go
Marked optional in the handbook, and the deepest thing in it. The framing is explicit: many participants have experienced significant pain and sometimes trauma, and carrying it forward lets the original event keep causing harm. Participants stand in pairs holding hands with eyes closed, are guided through a tunnel that represents their life, and are invited to release a specific past hurt — each on their own journey, but held by the person beside them.
Prerequisites
- Marked optional by its authors — the curriculum works without it, and it should be dropped rather than forced
- Physical contact for the whole exercise: hands held with a partner, eyes closed. Consent to that is part of consenting to the exercise
- The handbook itself names trauma as what may surface; a facilitator who cannot stay with that should not run it
- No aftercare is specified in the text — a facilitator has to supply one
- Not for a group that cannot leave, and not for anyone in acute crisis
Practical
- Time
- 45 min + 30 landing
- Group
- 4–24 · pairs, small-group
- Settings
- in-person
- Materials
- None; room enough to stand in paired rows
- Mechanisms
- emotional-processing, ritual-container, somatic-awareness
- Change scope
- state · one-off
Instructions
- Where
- cleancooking.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/342-1.pdf
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — reachable
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Genevieve Smith & Anita Shankar — Empowered Entrepreneur Training (SEE Change)
In this directory via SEE Change Initiative (Empowered Entrepreneur/Employee Training)
Related: The Letting Go Moment (pairs-with)
The third depth-4 record in the directory, and the only one outside Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects. Unlike those, its source supplies no aftercare guidance — which is itself worth knowing before running it.
status: checked · added 2026-08-29