We often think of health in terms of acquisition. We want to get healthy, fill a prescription, buy ourselves a few more years of life. The language of health care consumerism comes to mind. But maybe health is less about adding, and more about uncovering what is already there.

I re-connected with a childhood friend, on his birthday, who told me of a recent retreat with his church around the idea of “letting go.” This was a powerful experience, he explained, of returning to the heart of what matters most in his relationships with others, his work, and his self; shedding what’s not essential so that new growth can emerge from here. The practice of pruning wine vines became a useful metaphor. And I’ve found myself thinking since that this practice is akin to the collective healing needed for healthy community.

We know that psychosocial experience plays a fundamental role in health. Letting go of self-defeating ideas or trauma, forgiving self and others, is very often the essential first step in deep, sustained health change. In a larger spiritual context, we can see Health as a revealing of Self. And the nature of this revealing is ongoing and collective (i.e., we come to find that the “self” is not separate; it is one manifestation of the whole).

Talking with my friend reminded me of this Biblical reference, found here in the context of Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U” (change process), which draws on ideas that are also foundational to our Communities of Health work.

Individuals or groups on the U journey come to a threshold that requires a “letting go” of everything that is not essential. In many ways, this threshold is like the gate in ancient Jerusalem called “The Needle,” which was so narrow that when a fully loaded camel reached it, the camel driver had to take off all the bundles so the camel could pass through—giving rise to the New Testament saying that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

 

At the same time that we drop the non-essential aspects of the self (“letting go”), we also open ourselves to new aspects of our highest possible future self (“letting come”). The essence of presencing is the experience of the coming in of the new and the transformation of the old. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Often they then begin to function as an intentional vehicle for the future that they feel wants to emerge.

Letting go comes when we remember our way back to what’s essential. We do this with and for each other in our gatherings. Separation dissolves, and we begin to see as a collective what it is we most want, and we choose to create this together. The only world we accept is one in which every individual is honored and provided for, and together we remember what it is to belong.

For me, last night, letting go came running in the rain-soaked woods; in the path dark-root and emerald, in mistakes made and made visible; in white birch lighting the way, in hope in remembering, and in return; and in the eyes of my wife and children welcoming me back home, where I belong.