Settle in, let your eyes soften, and notice what your face is doing. That is where the 20-minute guided meditation published by the London Buddhist Centre begins, and it is a fitting place to start a practice about letting go. Led by Sthiramanas, the session asks listeners to find the small, unnoticed clenches they carry around all day: a set jaw, a tight throat, shoulders hiked toward the ears, a belly braced against nothing in particular. It then uses the breath, and especially the outbreath, as the working tool for releasing them. Along the way it makes a larger claim, that the habitual holding on to a sense of who we think we are sits at the root of suffering, and that meditation gives us a way to loosen that grip a little at a time.
Most people who sit down to meditate expect to do something: count, visualise, repeat a phrase, concentrate on an object. This session asks for close to the opposite. Sthiramanas opens by naming the aim plainly: "one of the most satisfying experiences of meditation is just some time and space just to really let go." The guidance that follows is less about effort than about attention. You scan the body, notice where something is being held, and then allow it to soften without forcing the change.
That distinction matters, and the teacher returns to it again and again. Around the first minute of the body scan, the instruction is to notice any holding "not manipulating it, not trying to push it away," and to bring awareness into it so that the holding can let go "of its own accord." A reader who has ever tried to relax on command will recognise the trap. Tension that is ordered to disappear often just becomes tension with a new job. The practice here is to become curious about the clench and then wait, and to trust that the body can release what it no longer needs to hold.
The journey moves downward in a deliberate sequence, and each stop has its own texture. It begins with the face, "your forehead, your jaw," then the throat, which the teacher asks you to allow "to relax and open up." From there the attention drops to the shoulders, where the instruction is almost poetic: "just letting your shoulder blades just melt down your back." The belly comes next, with a memorable image for a common habit. Notice any gripping there, and allow it "to unclench like a fist." Then the scan moves into the large muscles of the thighs and buttocks, where bracing often hides out of sight.
What makes the sequence work is its rhythm. Each area gets a brief pause, a noticing, and a release, and then the attention moves on. Nothing is held for long enough to become a project. The effect, for a listener who stays with it, is a gradual sense of the body becoming heavier and more supported, as though the chair or cushion is doing more of the work.
The central technique of this meditation is simple to state and surprisingly deep in practice: follow the whole of the outbreath. The teacher describes it as "one good way of really letting go in meditation." The instruction is to watch the exhale from "right at the start of the outreath all the way to the end as it turns back towards an inbreath," and to let the release travel with it.
There is a physical logic to this. The outbreath is the natural moment of settling, when the body lets air leave and the muscles of the chest and abdomen tend to ease. By pairing awareness with that movement, the practice borrows a rhythm the body already knows. The guidance asks you to notice "any tension that arises anywhere in the body" and let it go with the exhale, and then to pause on "the relief of really letting go." Many people find that relief is the most tangible part of the session: a small, specific loosening they can locate and return to.
A letting-go practice would be hollow if it only welcomed the pleasant sensations. This one is more honest. The teacher names the unpleasant sensations directly, "any uneasy, unpleasant" feeling tones, and asks listeners to relax into them, "letting go of any tendency to push it away, to try and change it." The phrase "letting things be" carries the whole stance. Discomfort is not treated as an enemy to be solved, only as an experience to be met with less resistance.
The same generosity applies to pleasure, which can be the subtler trap. The instruction is to "see if you can let go of them as well," allowing pleasant sensations to be there without reaching for more. Anyone who has chased a good feeling in meditation, trying to hold a calm state in place, will know how quickly that chase turns into another form of gripping. Here, both the pleasant and the painful are invited to arrive and pass in the same open way.
The meditation's most pointed moment comes when the attention turns to the mind. As you watch the outbreath, the guidance suggests, you may notice "any thoughts, any narratives, concerns, or ideas about yourself" rolling through. The response is almost casual: "You can just drop them. Just let them go with the outreath." Then comes a line that gives the whole session its philosophical edge: "Don't need to be anyone right now."
This connects back to the opening claim about "that tightness and that holding on to who we think we are." The teacher is not asking listeners to dismiss their concerns or pretend they have no self-image. The suggestion is simply that many of our anxieties are built from stories we keep telling about ourselves, and that a few breaths of releasing those stories can show how much of our tension is maintenance work. The session also acknowledges, gently, that some things will resist: the practice includes "any ways in which you're not letting go, which you don't want to let go or won't." Naming that resistance without judgment is part of the practice too.
The closing minutes ask for the least of all. "As you breathe out, just trust that you can let go completely," the teacher says, and then the instruction becomes almost spare: "not trying to do anything at all. Just sitting there." After so much noticing and releasing, the final stillness is where many meditators feel the practice settle into their bodies rather than remaining an idea. It is a useful reminder that letting go is not an achievement to be completed. It is a posture to return to.
If this session has opened a question for you, the most useful next step is to try it outside the cushion. Pick one moment in your day, perhaps a difficult phone call or the first minute after you sit down at a desk, and check for holding in the face, jaw, throat, and belly. Follow one full outbreath and let whatever you find soften with it, without demanding that it do so.
To go deeper, listen to the complete guided session from the London Buddhist Centre on YouTube, published in June 2020, and return to it several times. Repetition matters here, because the body learns letting go gradually. Many people discover that the same meditation feels different on a tired evening, a restless morning, or a day when they are holding more than usual. That variation is part of what the session teaches: the holding is always there to notice, and the outbreath is always available to release it.
