Letting Go of Resentments Through Somatic Release

I’m pretty sure 90% of most good advice could be summed up by one or both of these two songs: “Thank U” by Alanis Morissette and “Let It Go” from Frozen. Turns out, both songs are just somatic release wearing a really good hook.

Earlier this week, I was cooking brussel sprouts for dinner and my husband played something on the guitar that reminded me of Alanis Morissette. So i jumped up and started playing her Spotify profile through the speaker.

I may or may not have (but definitely did) spent countless hours of my teens belting out Alanis in the shower.

As “Thank U” started coming through the Bluetooth speaker, we kept looking at each other like How ‘BOUT that? Alanis KNEW! She knew the Thing(s)!

It was not only nostalgia, but an inner smile at baby me — who didn’t know she knew Alanis knew — but needed to sing along anyway until life’s mystical laws started to make sense decades later.

What Somatic Release Looks Like In a Session

A few weeks ago, I was working with a client in a somatic-based session, and their whole body was just clenched — creating so much unnecessary pressure, effort + injury. The song “Let it Go” popped into my head and wouldn’t go away for weeks. That clenching is the body asking for somatic emotional release — not more analysis, not another round of “why.”

Letting Go of Resentments (Without Needing to Know Why)

The beautiful thing about LETTING IT GO is that we don’t always have to know WHY it was there or why it stuck around so long or what it means. Sometimes we discover those things, which is great. But other times, obsessing over the why is a distraction that keeps us from doing what we actually need to do, which is… LET.IT.GO. This is somatic healing in its simplest form. Releasing before understanding, letting the body lead the mind for once.

So for this offering, I wove the lyrics from these two songs — “Thank U” by Alanis Morissette and “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen — and sat with what they were actually trying to tell me. Here’s what I noticed.

“Thank U” isn’t really about being thankful for good things. It’s a song built almost entirely out of thanking the stuff that wrecked her — the disillusionment, the terror, the whole undoing. That’s the part that gets me every time. Forgiveness not as a favor you do for someone else, but as something you do because you’re done carrying it. Grieving it one piece at a time instead of demanding the whole thing make sense today.

And there’s a reason distance does that to fear. The things that used to run the whole show can’t reach you anymore once there’s enough space between you and the story.

“Let It Go” gets treated like a kids’-movie anthem, but strip away the ice palace, and it’s circling the same thing from the other direction: what happens the second you stop performing the version of yourself everyone agreed to. The perfect girl, the good one, the one who doesn’t break the rules. She’s the one who has to leave first, before anything else can.

That’s the part that showed up in the room with my client a few weeks ago. Not the metaphor — the actual physical clench of a body that’s been performing “fine” for so long it forgot it had another option. Letting go is emotional and physical. The body has to be the one to release it, because the mind will talk you into holding on forever if you let it.

Let It Go, Sing It Out

However you get there — through somatic release, through song, through sheer stubborn grace — let it go. 

may you give thanks. 

may you let it go.

sing out loud.

amen.

courage,

grace

Is This Resonating?

If some part of this found you while you were reading — the clenching, the grieving in pieces, the surprising relief of finally putting something down — you’re probably standing at the edge of your own version of this.

Letting go rarely happens because you’ve finally figured something out. More often, it happens because you’re done asking why and ready to ask what’s next. That’s a quieter kind of work. Less digging through the wound, more listening for what wants to happen now that your hands are empty.

If that’s where you are, between what you’ve already released and whatever’s waiting on the other side of it, 3 Keys to the Soul was created for exactly this in-between. There’s no perfect timing required. This is just a free resource to have close by, whenever you’re ready for it.

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