Can Healing Retreats Help You “Let Go”?

If you’ve lost someone you love, you’ll understand that the idea of letting go doesn’t land easily.

It can feel like a betrayal. Like loosening your grip means losing them all over again.

You might think, “If I let go, I’ll forget them.” Or, “If I move on, it means they didn’t matter.”

But the truth is, letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. It means making space. It means letting your grief change form so it stops weighing you down and starts moving you forward.

This is where healing retreats come in.

When we’re surrounded by noise, obligations, and the fast pace of everyday life, we rarely give ourselves the time or space to feel what’s really happening inside. To slow down. To breathe. To unravel.

Healing retreats offer something most environments can’t: sacred space to do the real work. To let your grief breathe. To soften your grip. To let something new enter.

And in that space, something extraordinary happens. We begin to release. Not because we have to, but because we’re finally ready.

Why It’s So Hard to Let Go and Why That’s Normal

Grief is love without a place to land. And when we’ve lost someone, especially through something as traumatic as suicide, it’s not just sadness we’re left holding.

It’s confusion. Rage. Shame. Terror. The desire to control what happens next. The fear that we’ll lose someone else. The guilt that we didn’t do enough.

These emotions settle in our nervous system like stones.

Letting go isn’t just about an emotional decision. It’s about safety. Our bodies don’t let go until they feel safe enough to do so. And when we haven’t processed what happened when we’re holding on for dear life because we feel like we’re the only one left it makes sense that our system refuses to release.

But when we start to create safety in the body when we’re held in a space that allows for feeling, unwinding, and regulation, something changes.

The grip loosens. The breath returns. The energy starts to flow again.

Healing Retreats as a Portal to Transformation

At JAX, we’ve seen this over and over.

People arrive holding everything so tightly. Their pain. Their fear. Their grief. It’s etched into their posture. Their breathing. Their voice.

But through the course of a few days within a supportive, trauma-informed container, they start to feel something shift.

We don’t push or force. We don’t tell you to move on.

Instead, we guide you through the sacred process of releasing what your body has been carrying for too long. Not with talk alone but with real somatic practices designed to meet the layers where the pain lives.

We work with:

Kundalini energy activation, which moves life force through your system and clears the energetic blockages that grief creates
Somatic bodywork and movement to help unwind stored trauma and tension
Breathwork, which softens the nervous system and opens the heart
Sound healing and meditation to drop into the parasympathetic state, where deep repair becomes possible
Ceremony to mark what has been and open what is to come

This is not about bypassing pain. It’s about holding it, honouring it, and then letting it transform you.

What Letting Go Actually Looks Like at a Retreat

It’s not one big moment. It’s not a dramatic release that changes everything in a flash.

It’s subtle shifts. A deeper breath. A tremor. A softening. A moment where your heart cracks open and something starts to pour out.

It’s laughing and crying in the same breath.

It’s feeling them close to you, but not from the weight of pain, rather from the purity of spirit.

Letting go isn’t about becoming okay with what happened. It’s about making peace with the fact that it did and choosing to live fully and freely anyway.

And often, it’s in the letting go that we gain something greater.

We start to embody more light. We begin to feel them in ways we never could before subtle, peaceful, present. We open to frequencies we couldn’t access when we were stuck in dense emotion.

We remember who we are beneath the grief.

And that changes everything.

Letting Them Cross Into the Light

Something I have learned through my own experience, and it’s something we speak about deeply during our grief healing retreats, is that it is not just about us letting go for our own sake. Sometimes, we also need to let them go for their sake.

Energetically, when we continue to hold on tightly to someone who has passed, we can unknowingly keep tugging at them, pulling them back into the density of this world. Out of our own fear, longing, or resistance, we might be holding onto their energy so tightly that we delay their crossing into the light.

But true love is not about keeping someone earthbound. It’s about giving them the freedom to move on to journey to wherever they are now meant to go. That’s part of what integration is. Not only allowing ourselves to live again, but also allowing them to rest.

In Bali, I’ve done letting go ceremonies with high priests, and in those moments, I felt something shift. A peace I hadn’t yet known. A knowing that I had honoured Jack by giving him full permission to cross over with love and grace. It wasn’t a final goodbye, it was more like, "You go ahead, I’ll meet you there later."

For a long time after he died, I couldn’t even go to the toilet without asking him to keep me safe. I’d get in the car and feel like I had to ask him to protect me. I clung so tightly because the world felt terrifying without him.

But eventually, I was taught to shift that. To pray to the Universe instead. To trust that he was now being held too. That I didn’t need to keep him tethered to my survival. I could let him go without losing our bond.

And that’s when the relationship changed from desperate to divine.

When we let them go with love and reverence, we often find they come back in purer ways. Not as a weight we carry but as a light that guides.

Are You Ready to Let Go and Rise?

Letting go is one of the most sacred and misunderstood parts of grief. It does not mean forgetting. It does not mean abandoning. It means evolving.

When we let grief move through us, when we stop clinging and start trusting, we don’t lose our loved ones; we meet them on a different plane.

And we meet ourselves there, too.

If you are holding something heavy, if you are longing for a space to soften, if you are ready to release what no longer serves and welcome in what your soul has been waiting for JAX may be that space.

Join JAX Healing Retreats and Classes

✨ Apply for one of our deeply held, trauma-informed healing retreats in Bali
✨ Join our Virtual Healing to begin your emotional growth journey — no passport required
✨ Come to a JAX Day Retreat for a powerful immersion into trauma-informed healing
✨ Join us for a two-hour in-person JAX class and experience the method firsthand