Letting Go

A New Earth

Eckhart Tolle · 2005

Tolle’s examination of the ego — the stories and identities we cling to because they feel like us — is essentially a book about letting go of what we think we are. For anyone who cannot release a situation, a relationship, or a version of themselves, Tolle’s gentle, persistent question — is it possible that you are not what you think you are? — opens the door.

Letting Go

Dr. David R. Hawkins · 2012

Hawkins, a psychiatrist who spent decades mapping human consciousness, argues that most of the things we hold onto — resentments, fears, desires, identities — are generating more suffering than they are worth, and offers a simple, practisable technique for releasing them. It is not a gentle book, but it is a direct one, and for readers who have read about letting go without finding a mechanism that actually works, Hawkins provides one.

The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff · 1982

Hoff uses Winnie-the-Pooh to explain the central Taoist insight that things go better when you stop trying to force them — that effortless action, or wu wei, is what allows natural outcomes to unfold. It is a gentle, funny, surprisingly deep book about the art of not gripping so hard, in a format that makes the philosophy genuinely accessible.

Forgive for Good

Dr. Fred Luskin · 2002

Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, makes the evidence-based case that forgiveness — the specific act of releasing grievance, not of excusing harm — benefits the person who does it far more than anyone else. For readers whose letting go involves someone who wronged them, Luskin offers the clearest, most practical guide available.

Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto · 1988

After the death of her last relative, Mikage finds herself sleeping in the kitchen of strangers, and the novel traces the slow, ordinary, slightly eccentric way she lets her grief dissolve and rebuilds her life around small comforts and new attachments. Yoshimoto writes the process of letting go as gentle and concrete rather than dramatic — a change in texture rather than a single decision.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 2019

Written as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother, the novel is an act of letting go — of the version of the past that never happened, of the relationship that could not be fully spoken, of the pain of being an immigrant child whose mother cannot read his goodbye. Vuong’s prose is extraordinarily beautiful, and his tenderness is of the kind that can only exist alongside loss.