🕊️ Let it go

Have you ever felt the weight of the world on your shoulders, only to realise it was baggage of your own making? 

In todays episode I'll lead you through an eyes-open visualisation exercise, that uncovers the hidden strength in releasing what no longer serves your growth—recognising that the resilience forged from past struggles can now be set aside to make way for clarity, self-worth, and inner peace. Whether it's embracing your inherent value or learning to see success as a vibrant part of your present, this conversation is designed to nourish your journey toward self-love and worthiness. 

By the end of our time together, you may just find yourself a step closer to understanding that the ultimate destination of our travels lies within us—all it takes is the courage to let go.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Importance of Letting Go
• 13:48 Letting Go and Embracing Self-Worth
• 28:01 Letting Go and Finding Inner Peace

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the Hot Genius podcast. As always, I'm your host, christina Modafari, so are we excited to get into this episode? Because it's going to be a light take on a heavy subject. So, just like the title episode suggests, this is going to be all about letting go, and I'm going to tell you a story, as well as giving you some very effective tips in how you can do this in your own life and what to expect from it. And so, just let it go.

Speaker 1: 0:32

You know, I hear that and you probably hear that, and you're like cool, just let it go. And we say it. We say it very often, don't we? We say it with our friends, we say it all the time, and we almost say it to a point where it's sort of lost its meaning. Right, am I right? Am I right?

Speaker 1: 0:49

And so what's really important about, I guess, the concept of letting go is hearing it beneath the surface of what it really sounds like, as we know that when something becomes cliche, overused and all these things, naturally the brain becomes overly familiar with it, that it actually stops paying attention to what exactly certain words mean, and this conversation that we're going to have today is going to truly give you a different level of understanding of the concept of letting go. It's not going to be something that you're just going to say and not do. It's going to be something that, when you hear it from here on out it's one of these things you just can't unsee you will truly hear it. You know what I mean Like hear it from within, you'll hear it in your bones and you'll live through it, and so the importance, obviously, of letting go is that, well, if we are holding on to things that aren't serving us metaphorically and or literally, then naturally, the present moment and the walk towards our future is going to feel heavier than it really needs to be, and I'm going to use an analogy to describe this. So let's say, right now, I want you to really utilize your imagination as much as you can and imagine that you're walking on this gorgeous road. Okay, I want you to dress it up, make it your thing, make it your flavor. Like you want to add some pink flowers, you want to add a jumping castle, like you want to add three smoothie bars with each a different color, you do you right, but I really just want you to see a nice road and you're walking on this road. As you are walking on this road, I also want you to see, in the far distance, right, that you're walking towards this thing that you know you desire. You might not necessarily know what it looks like to the detail, but you definitely know for sure that it's exactly where you want to go. Okay, and as you are walking, you're really determined and you'll add a breath a little bit.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Right, and you're also wearing a very, very heavy backpack. This backpack is about to tear, but you're walking anyway. You've also got some extra weights around your ankle and then you've also got a belt that has an extra 20 kilos on it, and I want you to see yourself walking, and walking, and walking. I want you to notice how much you're sweating. I want you to notice how dehydrated you are and the temptation you want to simply go into your backpack so that you can hydrate yourself. But the thought of actually moving right now, when you're so you know you just wanna get to your destination, it just seems like maybe you'll just leave the water for later, because it's just too much of a mission to just stop for a moment. Grab the bag, pull out the water bottle, drink. This is the whole thing. Right, we don't wanna do that, we don't have time for that. I want you to really see this.

Speaker 1: 4:00

And then you're walking, you're walking, you're walking, and then you see someone, right, and this person comes up to you and they're like hey, you know how you doing. You're like yeah, yeah, I'm good, like I'm trying to get to this place, I know where I'm going, but like I'm just really exhausted. I just wish I was there already. And then the person goes to you look, maybe just let go, maybe just let go of some of the weights that you're carrying. Like I don't know why you're wearing like that belt with like an extra 10, 20 kilos on it. You don't need it. And then you're like oh, yeah, yeah, I'll let it go, I'll let it go.

Speaker 1: 4:33

Anyway, you keep walking and you leave the belt on and you keep going and you're walking, you're walking, you're walking and before you know it, you have another person come up and now you're telling them you know, I just, I really just I do everything I can. You know, I work really, really hard. I try so every single day, like sometimes I don't even drink my water. You know, like I don't even take breaks. I just, I just walk and I walk and I'm sweating. You know it must mean the pay off is gonna be real good, you know, and but the thing is I just I just feel like something's off. Stay with me. I feel like something's off.

Speaker 1: 5:12

And you know, no matter how hard I try, no matter what new strategy I apply, like I don't know, I just kind of feel like something's missing into this whole picture, like I just want to get to this gorgeous place that I'm getting to, and then the person turns around they say, like hun, just let go of the belt. Like it's got 10 kilos on it. It literally serves no purpose. You're not even gaining muscles and you're. And then you're like, oh no, like I'm somebody who lets go very often. Actually I know a lot about letting go. You know, like 20 kilometers ago I removed like one kilogram of a weight from my bag. Like I'm really good at letting go. I let go all the time. I have nothing, I'm not holding on to anything. What are you talking about?

Speaker 1: 5:54

And you're walking, you're walking, you ignore that advice and then eventually you stop because you actually have no choice. You are so fucking exhausted and you now can't argue with the fact that you know that something's not right. And you're in this situation and you're feeling really hopeless because you could have sworn that you were already at the destination. You could have sworn. You're looking around, you take a step back. You reached for your backpack, you try to find your water bottle, you grab your water bottle and, as you're turning the lid, you look around you and you're trying to see. Have you missed it? Did you miss the stop? Did you fall asleep on the way here? Like what's going on? Where is it? You know how you feel fucking lost. You all of a sudden don't even remember the point of you going to that destination. You don't even remember what it feels like per se, and you're just feeling really shit.

Speaker 1: 6:55

And then it dawns on you. Oh, you look down at your waist and you see this belt with a weight of 20 kilograms and as much as you now really register that it's probably a good idea to just remove it from your waist, drop it and live behind. You're sort of attached to it, right, like you don't really know who you are without it, and then you're like fuck it, who cares? You had enough. Now I'm gonna pause this, this really intense analogy that's turned into a visualization so that we can understand what's going on here and I don't think I need to explain very much. I feel like it sort of did the work for me. You know what I mean, because that's the way people live their life right, they're trying to get to this destination and over, like on their journey of getting to these places.

Speaker 1: 7:58

The weight serves them to some degree for a moment, just like a real life weight when you're exercising can serve you. It's helping you build enough resistance so that you can build some muscle, so you can burn more energy or the things Cool. It's great for 30 minutes, just like feeling pain for 30 minutes or three minutes or whatever it is is necessary Feeling regret for three minutes, so you know never to do that thing again. You know that certain emotions and certain levels of pain is very necessary. The same way it is necessary for us to build physical muscle when we're literally exercising.

Speaker 1: 8:36

But the difference between exercising in a gym versus exercising in life, as an analogy, is that, well, you can't literally see the weight. You can't see it. It's all invisible. So when something is invisible, it's harder to quantify. When something's harder to quantify, it's hard to realize its existence. It's just the way the brain works. And so, in that analogy, where I paused you on that visualization of an analogy is it's where most people stay.

Speaker 1: 9:10

This is the time when people say that they're stuck, that they're lost, and this is usually when people get depressed, and it's because they know what they need to do, but something just doesn't let them. And what that is is exactly like what that visualization should suggest. It it's that, as much as you know, you just need to simply remove the waist, the weight around your waist, that belt. You know you just need to remove the ankle weights. You know you just need to empty the things out in the backpack, which you don't even use anything in it besides the water bottle, if you even bother to drink the water. Right, you know what you need to do. You even know it's important that you don't do it.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Why, why, in this situation, do you think you don't do it? I'll tell you it's because, while you spent years walking aimlessly, exhausted and struggling and the thought of realizing that it was all for nothing, that all you got to do is literally just take a moment and pause, empty the backpack, remove the waist, remove the belt from the waist, remove the ankle weights just send a little bit to anti-climatic. That payoff that you're after that your ego convinced you of meaning struggle equals bigger payoff. That the higher you struggle, the higher its worthiness and value. You don't want to face that that this whole time. The struggle it wasn't necessary. You, rather most people when I say you, I mean you plural and I mean humans in general. Our natural default setting is we much rather create problems so that we can overcome them, so we can fill value of our rewards. Really hear that and because of that, people don't let go. This episode is not for me to tell you to let go, because everyone will tell you that you already know that you need to let go.

Speaker 1: 11:25

Whatever that is for you, whatever the belt of weights around your waist means to you, what does that symbolize to you? Is that your relationship? Is that all of your Instagram posts that you spent eight years putting together, that you realize is just completely out of alignment to you? That was completely sabotaged to perpetuate a story of your lack of worthiness? What does the ankle weight suggest? What does that symbolize for you? Is that the beliefs you have around your history meaning that you're not worthy of love or you're not worthy of good things. What does all this shit in your backpack symbolize to you? What is it? Is it that you spend your whole life attracting things that you know you deserve more of, but yet you stayed anyway? Is it all the things you did that you regret, that you don't want to admit that you regret because you're afraid of feeling the pain that comes with admitting that? Whatever it symbolizes to you, you already know what it is. You've got it on your mind right now and I'm sure it was on your mind as I was walking you through that visualization that we call an analogy, and so, again, I'm not going to be one of those millions of people who tell you to let it go. Just in, just that. Goodbye, hi.

Speaker 1: 12:47

The podcast is Let it Go bye now. If it was that simple and direct, you would have done it by now and you wouldn't have clicked on this episode, right? You're looking for something that's actually going to get you to do the thing that you already know you need to do, and that's where I come in. I'm here to tell you that you're right. You're right about the fact that, in a way, you probably have been doing it the hard way and that the truth is it really is anti-climatic. Getting to the destination you want to get to it doesn't actually have to cause you struggle. Don't confuse struggling for being disciplined, for being brave, because they aren't the same thing. Because now I'm going to get you back on that visualization with all the things that I just shared with you and I invite you to take a deeper look at what comes out for you. You ready, so you're not going to be that person like everyone else majority of the population who stay stuck right. So let's get back into it.

Speaker 1: 13:48

All, right, so you were back into your visualization. You're on that road. You're just looking down, looking around, you're trying to see where the fuck is this place, like, did you fall asleep again? You're still wondering, right, that's where we're up to. And then you walk backwards a little bit. Right, you walk backwards, you're just sort of dragging your bag and as you're dragging your bag, your arm starts to hurt. You look down at the bag and you realize you know what I'm fucking done with you. You grab the bag, you find a bin nearest to you and you just dump it. You look at it and you go.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Thank you so much for all that you've taught me. You've made me such a bad bitch. You've made me a badass. You've made me stronger Cause you know what, as much as I've been struggling, I've learned so much about what I'm capable of, like carrying shit, like you were heavy and like I carried you anyway and I'm breathing and I'm surviving. And then you walk away and you're like, oh, not, while I'm at it, I'm on a roll. I'm also getting rid of that belt full of 20 kilos. You unbuckle yourself really excited, take it off in like whoa, that's freaky. As much as that feels good, it feels very odd because you're not used to having 30 kilos less weight on your body. And then you look down your ankle belt and you realize that's the last thing that's left on you, that you don't really need anymore. And we're deep breath in, deep breath out. You reach down and you grab the belt on your ankle and you undo it and you throw it in the bin With so much satisfaction. You now have a bit more strength and you feel instantly better because you didn't realize that that weight was really draining your life. You grab your water you have another watering drinking session and you look up and you're like, oh my God, now that I'm hydrated and not exhausted from carrying extra weight on my body for literally no reason.

Speaker 1: 15:43

I actually had arrived to my destination a very long time ago, but I refused to accept that it could have been that easy While I was too busy trying to try and struggle. You were walking. You were just walking nowhere, nowhere, you were just walking everywhere. But the thing you're trying to get to and you know what the thing you're trying to get to really is it's not literally a place. You see, I want you now imagine that this destination that we spoke about at the beginning of this visualization. It symbolizes your self-love and worthiness, the sense of home, the sense of enoughness, and I want you to see that this isn't just a building. I want you to see vibrant, vibrant colors. Make it your own thing. And I want you to see this building with vibrant colors. Maybe it's pink for you, maybe it's purple or blue. Make it yours. You can add donuts on it if you want. Make it yours. I want you to see that.

Speaker 1: 16:54

It's so long that it's actually no matter whether you walk a bit further down, you walk backwards. That building is there, no matter what it's. This building is infinite, whether it's always right next to, side by side, walking. Then you start walking and you're walking, you're walking forwards, you're walking backwards. You're like well, there's only one difference with this big ass building which I call my destination. Then the only difference is is that the more further back you get, the less colorful and the less creative and the less interesting the building is. But the building is still awesome and functional. But as you walk further up, the building gets higher, taller, more vibrant. You know. It gets simpler, it gets more functional.

Speaker 1: 17:46

That is you and your growth and your evolution. That, although it can be a bit of a head fuck to realize that you have always arrived, you are always arriving, but you'll also never stop evolving. This analogy, this visualization, is the best way to understand it. That's you, but you will never see it, you will never experience it, you won't even enjoy it until you let it go. Do you see what I mean now? That when you were able to let go, you now don't have shit holding you down affecting your literal judgment and your eyesight and your perspective. You were too busy looking ahead of you, not realizing the reason why. You couldn't see the picture of the building where you're going to, but you could feel it, it's because it was right next to you the whole time. It always has been and always will be. And this building doesn't just represent your inner self-worth and your inner self-love and your enoughness. It also represents your success.

Speaker 1: 18:58

But what I'm trying to say here is that your success looks different yesterday, as it will in 10 years from now. It gets to be like that. It gets to be that simple. Your success does not have to equate to fame and millions of dollars and thousands of clients Like it doesn't have to equate to that today or yesterday. Your success from yesterday could literally just be that you have you learned something new about yourself and you clocked a habit that you struggled with. It could be that you tried something new. It could be that you remembered to love yourself.

Speaker 1: 19:44

It doesn't even matter what that success is. What matters is that you need to be aware of the fact that you have always arrived. You were always arriving, but at the exact same time. If you're always, you always have arrived. That does not mean that arrival that can't evolve, because it can. It's inevitable for that to happen.

Speaker 1: 20:08

But the only way to truly feel that level of satisfaction and wholeness is to let go, and that's the tough part. But now that you know that letting go is only something that's hard is because we're sort of addicted to the struggle, and that's not anyone's fault per se, it's literally just humans, human conditioning, it's our default setting, our brain. If you look at psychology, our brain just happens to value things that we believe we earned. But unfortunately, the dark side of this is that we do it to the degree in which we never believe that we deserve to deserve the thing. We're in a constant search of earning. We're in the constant pursuit of earning. It keeps us what people call hungry. But this isn't an intrinsic motivation. Well, people think it is sometimes, but it's not. It's a constant sense of dissatisfaction and incompleteness disguised as ambition. What about ambition being enough? Because you just want it? Why can't that be enough? Why can't we just be grateful for what we have, which we are, but also want more? Why can't we have both? We can. It's called duality, but again, once again, we cannot see it, we cannot experience it, no matter what, even if it's right next to us, even if it's always available to us, if we are holding onto shit that doesn't serve us.

Speaker 1: 21:46

And I'm going to end this episode by sharing a story with you. So on my personal Instagram, right? Well, I don't want to call it personal because it is very revolved around my work, but anyway, for my Instagram at Christina Modafari that's the handle. I have had that since high school. I've had that since Instagram has existed and I, for the last no bullshit, like legitimately, like what eight years have felt this resistance towards my Instagram, like I was cut at it like piece, like I can't. You wouldn't actually believe me, to be honest, if you had any idea how much this fucking bothered me. And what this is is that I struggled to let go of my fricking old content. I might not be a hoarder like with my physical possessions, but let me tell you, I am a fucking content hoarder, like my own content hoarder, like you have no idea.

Speaker 1: 22:48

And in the last few years I have been trying so hard to let it go, and the way that I did it was I would just remove a little bit. You know, let's say I have a thousand posts, I get rid of maybe 30. Or then I'll get rid of 500 and I'll leave the 500. And I'll always be that person who just wanted to make myself believe that I was letting go when I wasn't really. I was manipulating myself into believing that so that I could please the ego. I was what you could say in that analogy. You know that example of the visualization where I'd be walking and then you know that person would say, hey, just let go of the frickin 20 kilos in the waist, you don't even need it. And I'd be like, oh yeah, I did. I did like 20 kilometers ago.

Speaker 1: 23:30

That was me, right, and and it's hard, because I struggled to let go of my old content because, straight up, like I worked so hard for so many years building it but honestly, it was like I was building it in a way, it's sabotage. I just my ego was just creating problems for me to overcome because I was actually really afraid of my success. Right, it was easy for me to get low engagement or, you know, have not be seen and and not have many, you know, audience members in my Instagram community at the time. You know it was easier to, I guess, have people not interact when I knew that it wasn't really me being like my true self to some degree, I knew it was just the shit version of my content. I don't mean shit isn't. I didn't put effort into it but shit isn't. It wasn't. It was me holding back, it was me going literally out of my way to sabotage it.

Speaker 1: 24:27

And again, a fear of success. Because if I were, I was afraid that if I put, if I did my best and I did my, created my authentic content, that if I was knocked to get engagement and get rejected from my authentic self, then I was afraid of feeling the level of disappointment that would mean, because it's easy to be rejected when you're not really being fully yourself. It's different level of bravery to be rejected for being yourself. And not long ago I decided to face that and I let go of, finally, all of that content, all of those hours and years and whatever, of creating and writing and posting. Oh, I let it go. And I was like, yes, christina, although for several years I've been trying to let go, I've been specifically trying for the last two years and I finally did it. And I'm so proud of myself because get this, the second that I did.

Speaker 1: 25:26

I didn't have any more skills. I had the exact same skills I had 24 hours prior to that. Have the same amount of knowledge. Right, I was the same person, same super contribution. That commercial just had to be set. Anyway, everything was the same. The only difference was the let go, energetically and literally, of everything I ever created prior to that moment and get this the next set of the next real content that I just that I had posted from this energy of letting go.

Speaker 1: 25:58

So if this was the analogy in real life, it was me doing the whole emptying everything from my backpack, removing the weight around my waist and that belt, removing the ankle weights. That was that equivalent. Get this the most engagement and the most fun creating Instagram content ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. I'm the same person. Just so we're clear, let me say this again Same person, same skills, same knowledge, same everything, and I wanted to share this really powerful story as a lesson for us both that it's not enough for us to just know something right, I'm the queen of decluttering and yet because of that, I refuse to understand that I had a deeper level of embodiment that I needed to do and that I got lazy because I'm like I know what letting go is.

Speaker 1: 26:58

When we can truly let go of our ego, then we can finally let go of the things that we realize that are no longer serving us and just remember that we are not necessarily destined for struggle and that it is just our mind playing tricks on us when we believe that we must suffer in order to value something, or that we need to suffer to earn something, and that, yes, there's some truth to that and there's a place for earning something. This is not to say that I don't believe that we need to earn things. Oh my God, absolutely Do I believe that we need to earn things. I do believe in doing the work, the hard work that we need to do in order to become the people that we want to be, absolutely. But doing hard work and being disciplined and being brave and growing growing pains okay, that that's the big difference between growing pains and pure suffering.

Speaker 1: 28:01

And I think that when we can truly acknowledge that they are different and we can learn that difference, letting go becomes simple. We start to realize that we really don't have to be people who struggle, struggle in a way that gets us nowhere, and instead we finally get to be people who just face discomfort and get good at that, but that does not mean suffering. So, whatever it is that you've been listening to in your mind or thinking about as you've been listening to this podcast episode. Maybe this is your sign to finally let that thing go. And, just like in that guided visualization, it's not really about anything other than removing all that wasted space so that we can see what we already have, because from that space now we can create more of that same thing, but in a good way. Okay, sending you so much love until the next one. Bye.