Hexagram 12: Pi; Standstill / Stagnation: A time to do nothing.
~ i Ching
Every transformation begins in the in-between; that odd moment when an old way has begun to disintegrate but the new way hasn’t arrived yet. Life asks us to stay and wait. Not to fix it or force it, but to meet it. This is where I’ve seen the difference between two disciplines that look alike but aren’t: letting go and letting be.
I learn this most clearly with horses. Each ride begins with a release: I soften my hands, drop the pressure I didn’t know I was holding. That’s the letting go, something that unclenches. Then the harder part. I wait. Pausing, I don’t fill the silence with another cue. The horse has to find the correction on their own. If I step in without the pause, I’ve taken that from them. That’s the letting be: not releasing what is in me but refusing to interfere with what’s already developing.
The two get confused because they can look the same from the outside. A pause is a pause. But one is about me: the gripping, the pressure, and expectation I didn’t realize I was carrying. The other is about what’s already unfolding. Choosing not to manage, interfere, or correct it. Neither is complacent; when understood as a discipline, it is a moment-to-moment practice of awareness.
Letting go clears space, and letting be protects it.
The temptation always is to skip the in-between. To let go and then immediately fill the space with a new plan, before we’ve let anything actually be. But that’s where the correction happens with the horse and in me. Not in the letting go and not in what comes after, but in the waiting between them: stay there long enough, and you stop needing to force the next step. It arrives on its own. That’s where the magic happens.
Isa (ᛁ) is the Norse Rune
that represents stillness, a frozen pause, and a time when doing nothing or holding back is the wisest choice.
