When Letting Go Feels Impossible: Lessons on Surrender From a 95 Year Old Woman
Reading time: about 12 minutes.
Picture a diving board, high above still water. Your toes curl over the edge, your heart pounds in your ears, every cell in your body is voting to climb back down the ladder.
Then, somehow, you lean forward.
For one suspended second there’s nothing holding you at all. It’s the most terrifying part of the dive, and also the only part that’s truly free.
Most of us live our entire lives at the edge of that board. We grip the outcome, the relationship, the bank balance, the people we love, the version of ourselves we’ve worked so long to hold together.
Your jaw stays tight long after the argument ends. Tomorrow gets rehearsed in your head before today is even finished. Everyone keeps telling you to just let go, while nobody explains how.
This article is my answer. It’s pulled from a childhood on the dive team, from quiet palliative rooms where silence says more than words, plus thousands of readings where the truth landed harder, and kinder, than certainty ever could.
Over the next twelve minutes you’ll learn what surrender actually is (and isn’t), why control keeps failing you, what a 95 year old woman taught me about fear, plus two practices that teach your nervous system that release is safe.
Short on time? Every section ends with quick takeaways you can skim. Stay for the final section if you can, though. That’s where everything comes together.
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Jump to what you need:
What does it mean to surrender spiritually?
Surrender isn’t chaos, it’s trust
All my life, people have told me how much freedom I give them. Friends, clients, even strangers at weddings who suddenly find themselves dancing like nobody’s watching.
It isn’t something I do on purpose. Part of it is simply not worrying much about what other people think of me. The rest is how deeply I love surrendering to a moment.
That’s probably why I joined the dive team as a kid.
Standing high above the water, heart pounding, I’d choose to fall. Not flail, or tumble, choose, with just enough discipline in my body to twist into the plunge gracefully.
Nobody on that board ever told me it was a spiritual lesson. It took me years to understand that’s exactly what it was.
Surrender isn’t chaos. It’s trust, balanced between discipline and release.
Most people hear the word surrender and picture a white flag. Defeat, collapse, lying down in the road. That misunderstanding is the very reason letting go feels impossible, since nobody wants to lose.
What surrender is not
It isn’t giving up. You still make the plan, show up, do the work, while simply letting go of a guaranteed result.
It isn’t not caring. People who surrender often love more freely, since love no longer has to come with terms.
It isn’t passivity. A diver who surrenders still has a perfectly tucked body. Surrender lives in the trust, not the laziness.
It isn’t a single moment. You’ll let go, grab hold again, then let go once more. That’s not failure. It’s practice.
I didn’t realize how deeply that board had shaped me until years later, sitting beside a woman in her final days.
If you’ve ever wondered what actually happens after we die, beyond the fear and the stories, you’ll find twelve striking insights in What Happens After We Die: Lessons From Spirit.
Why are people afraid to let go at the end of life?
What a 95 year old woman taught me about resistance
Palliative rooms have their own kind of weather. Time moves differently there, slower, thicker, measured in breaths rather than hours.
Her name was Margaret. She was 95, receiving palliative care, her body slowing, her breathing growing softer by the day.
What struck me most wasn’t her frailty. It was her resistance.
She was terrified of letting go.
You’d think nearly a century of living would make the final step feel natural. In my experience it often works the other way. The longer we’ve held on to life, the more practiced our grip becomes.
Bereavement training teaches you to stay quiet in moments like these. You don’t rush to comfort or fill the silence with platitudes. Instead you listen, nod, let the pause stretch as long as it needs to.
When the time feels right, you ask about love. About who they used to be, about what they’ve survived.
That space lets people mourn the ones they’ve lost, along with something nobody talks about: the person they themselves once were. A young mother, a dancer, the one who drove herself everywhere. Grief at the end of life is often grief for a whole lineage of former selves.
As Margaret spoke about her family, names rose in my awareness. Her parents, her brother, all in spirit.
Later, telling stories from her childhood, she spoke those exact names out loud.
Their presence was undeniable to me. Still, I didn’t tell her.
She hadn’t asked for a psychic reading, and palliative care is never the place to prove anything. My role was to witness her, not to be right.
Sometimes the most loving thing you can do with what you know is to hold it, then simply stay.
I knew with certainty the people she loved were near, waiting the way family waits at an arrivals gate. One day she’ll see that for herself.
That moment reminded me of something I’ve always believed: this life is already the afterlife. We’re souls having a human experience, and death isn’t an ending. It’s waking up from the dream.
Some linger for a while, watching life carry on. Others return home quickly. Consciousness doesn’t stop either way, and when you hold that close, fear loosens enough for surrender to become possible.
Here’s the part I want you to sit with. Margaret’s fear at the end wasn’t new. It was the same fear she’d carried quietly for 95 years, finally standing at its full height.
How you hold on now is rehearsal for how you’ll hold on then. The good news is that rehearsal works in both directions.
If you’re sitting with someone you love at the end of their life, the National Institute on Aging offers gentle, practical guidance on bringing them comfort.
Quick takeaways
Resistance at life’s end usually comes from fear, not from the body.
People at the end often grieve their former selves as deeply as the loved ones they’ve lost.
The way you let go now shapes the way you’ll let go later.
What’s the difference between control and discipline?
One clenches tighter, the other steadies you
One of the biggest struggles I’ve witnessed, in clients, in palliative care, in ordinary conversations over coffee, is the human need for control.
Control is rooted in ego. It clings, resists, demands guarantees where none exist. For all that effort, it rarely gives us peace.
Most people don’t realize how tightly they’re gripping until someone names it. See how many of these feel familiar.
Signs you’re holding on too tightly
You rehearse conversations that haven’t happened yet, sometimes for hours.
Uncertainty feels physically unbearable, so you’d rather hear bad news than no news.
Your shoulders live somewhere near your ears.
Rest feels unsafe, since stopping means something might slip.
You quietly manage other people’s choices, then feel exhausted that nobody manages yours.
If you saw yourself in that list, there’s nothing wrong with you. Control is usually a survival strategy that worked once, long ago, then never got the memo that the danger passed.
Discipline is something else entirely. Rather than clenching, it steadies.
Think of discipline as habit, structure, a rhythm to lean on when life feels chaotic. Paradoxically, it creates the very freedom control keeps promising without ever delivering.
Take money. When people feel anxious about finances, their first impulse is to control: hoard, restrict, panic, avoid the bank app altogether.
The answer is discipline instead. Write down what’s coming in against what’s going out. Keep your receipts. Pay attention.
Tracking with discipline trades fear for awareness. Awareness is freeing, since it shows you exactly where your choices really live.
Your health works the same way. Control says punish yourself, cut everything out, push until something gives.
Discipline is quieter, kinder, more consistent. It asks you to notice what genuinely fuels you, plus the moments when emotions drive your appetite more than hunger does.
Control grasps. Discipline grounds. When you’re grounded, surrender stops feeling like defeat.
Remember the diver. The tucked knees, the pointed toes, the practiced shape: that’s discipline. The fall itself, the part nobody can control, that’s surrender. You need both to land gracefully.
When your mind wrestles with fear, intuition offers clarity. Here’s how to tell them apart in Intuition vs Anxiety: How to Know What to Trust.
Quick takeaways
Control is fearful, resistant, draining.
Discipline is structured, measurable, grounding.
What’s yours to hold gets discipline, so surrender can handle the rest.
If you can feel yourself gripping something right now, a reading can help you see what’s safe to release. Book your 30 minute session with me here.
Why does the ego fight letting go?
Its grip tightens at the end, though the truth dissolves it
Margaret reminded me that the ego never goes quietly.
Ego isn’t the villain, though. It drives us to survive, to eat, to achieve, to build futures worth striving toward. It’s what keeps us alive in the world of form.
As much as it fuels us, it also clings. It whispers that separateness is real, that you must protect yourself at all costs, that if you stop holding everything up, everything falls.
That grip tightens in moments of loss, of uncertainty, most of all at the threshold of death.
At its root, ego is fear. Fear, by its nature, is the opposite of love.
Love doesn’t cling. It surrenders, through the great remembering that we aren’t fragments scrambling for survival. We’re one vast consciousness expressed through billions of temporary faces, all returning to the same home.
This is what so few people realize at the very end: you aren’t dying, you’re rejoining. The illusion of separateness dissolves, leaving what was always there beneath the noise.
Not the fragile, conditional love we barter with day to day. The infinite kind, with no opposite, no ending, no loss.
For anyone afraid of death, this is medicine. Death isn’t the erasing of who you are. It’s the release of the mask you wore, a costume in a play that was never meant to run forever.
What steps forward when the mask comes off isn’t absence. It’s wholeness.
You don’t have to wait for your final breath to taste this. Every time you loosen your grip on how something must turn out, you get a small preview of that wholeness.
Quick takeaways
Ego fuels survival, then grips tightest when facing death.
Fear is the root of ego. Love is its opposite, expressed as surrender.
Death is a rejoining, a return to oneness you can glimpse long before the end.
What is sleep yoga, and how does it teach surrender?
Bedtime as a nightly rehearsal for letting go
Here’s something most people never consider. You already surrender completely, every single night.
Each time you fall asleep, you release your grip on the room, the day, your name, your worries, even your sense of being a separate person. You trust, without thinking about it, that you’ll wake up again.
The Tibetan teachers noticed this centuries ago. Their practice, known as sleep yoga, is beautifully explained in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It turns that nightly surrender into a conscious rehearsal.
Sleep yoga, counting down to release
- As you close your eyes, notice how your mind clings to the day: unfinished conversations, worries about tomorrow, memories on a loop.
- Instead of pushing those thoughts away, watch them drift. Become the quiet observer as each one rises, then dissolves on its own.
- Let go of chasing sleep or forcing clarity. This isn’t about control. It’s about surrendering to the mystery of where consciousness goes at night.
- As dreams begin, then give way to deep, dreamless sleep, try to hold the faintest thread of awareness. Not sharp concentration, just a soft noticing, as if you’re floating.
- Treat each night as a small death, each morning as a small rebirth. Many practitioners describe that stillness as womb like, a place of safety, almost like the heartbeat of the universe cradling you home.
You won’t stay aware through the night at first. Almost nobody does. That’s fine, since the practice works on you whether or not you remember it.
Practiced nightly, sleep yoga teaches your nervous system that release is safe. Surrender stops being an abstract idea, settling quietly into your body instead.
A psychic reading reflects your blind spots back to you, so you can move through life with clarity. Sleep yoga reflects something deeper still: you are awareness itself, not the fear that clings to form.
For the moments when grief feels endless, here’s a gentle reminder: Grief Isn’t Linear, and It Rarely Looks How We Expect It To.
Which tarot cards represent surrender?
Three cards that prove surrender is renewal, not weakness
Tarot is one of the most powerful tools for self reflection, especially when it comes to learning surrender.
A reading doesn’t predict your every move. It mirrors the energies, patterns, plus lessons you might be avoiding. Three cards in particular tell the whole story of letting go, almost like chapters.
The Hanged Man, card twelve, is the pause. Not punishment, perspective. The figure in the card hangs upside down by choice, calm, a soft glow around their head. This card teaches the wisdom of suspending control, choosing patience over panic. It often appears when you’re being asked to stop forcing an outcome so clarity can arrive on its own.
Death, card thirteen, is the release. One of the most misunderstood cards in the tarot deck, rarely about physical death. It symbolizes transformation, the passage from one state to the next. Notice the sun rising in the background. Resisting change only prolongs the discomfort, while letting what’s finished fall away opens the road ahead.
The Star, card seventeen, is the renewal. Gentle, luminous, deeply spiritual. The figure kneels by the water, pouring freely, holding nothing back. This card promises that renewal follows release. After you let go, hope begins to rise on its own, proof that surrender restores you rather than stripping you.
Read them in order and you’ll see the arc of every real surrender: first you stop, then something ends, then light comes back.
Whether through a professional reading or your own daily pull, tarot holds a mirror to your soul. The cards don’t dictate your future. They help you meet it with love instead of fear.
If letting go still feels impossible, here’s how a reading can hold up that mirror: What Makes the Best Tarot Readings So Transformative.
How do you finally let go?
Remembering you’re already home
Margaret didn’t need me to tell her what I sensed. She needed space to tell her own story.
Maybe that’s true for all of us. Nobody can hand you freedom. It’s something you surrender into yourself, one small release at a time.
Sleep yoga is your nightly practice. Here’s a daytime one, for the moments when you catch yourself gripping in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
The open hand, a one minute release
- Notice where you’re clenching: jaw, shoulders, fists, belly. Don’t fix it yet, just name it.
- Make a tight fist with both hands, as tight as you can, for five slow seconds. Let your body feel what control actually costs.
- Slowly open your hands, palms facing up, resting on your knees or a cushion in front of you.
- Breathe out longer than you breathe in, three times. A longer exhale tells your nervous system it’s safe to soften.
- Name the one thing you’ve been gripping, then say quietly that you don’t have to hold this right now. Not forever. Just right now. That’s where every real surrender begins.
Control belongs to the ego, discipline to the body, while surrender belongs to the soul.
Before you go, sit with these questions for a moment. You don’t need to answer them today.
What am I gripping that was never mine to carry?
Which fear have I been calling responsibility?
If I trusted the fall, where would I let myself land?
Whether through sleep yoga, the open hand, listening to the wisdom of the dying, or simply dancing at a wedding like nobody’s watching, you begin to understand something quietly enormous.
You aren’t separate, you aren’t ending. Love is what you’re made of, already on its way home.
Somewhere above still water, a kid is leaning forward off the board right now, terrified, choosing to fall anyway. That kid is still in you.
Next, I’m writing about the one thing people try to control most, even after they’ve learned to let go of everything else: how other people see them. If that’s your last grip, it’s coming soon.
Where can I read more about letting go?
If this resonated, here are a few more pieces worth your time:
- Facing shadow: Real growth
- After death: Lessons from spirit
- Quiet knowing: Trust yourself
- Grief’s shape: Not linear
- Restless minds: Why you can’t rest
- True separation: The illusion
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About the Author
Chris Bennett is the founder of The Tarot Medium, one of the world’s most highly rated, trusted psychic mediums and tarot readers. He received his first tarot deck at fifteen and now reads full time for clients around the world. Known for accurate, honest readings free of fear or theatrics, his work spans evidential mediumship, intuitive tarot, psychic life path readings, plus grief support rooted in real psychological depth. Alongside hospice volunteering, he offers secure online readings to clients across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond. To book, visit thetarotmedium.com.
