The Lightness of the Burden
The Alchemy of Release
There are moments in therapeutic work—quiet, almost stealthy—when something shifts inside a person, and the entire psychic posture reorients itself toward ease. Nothing external changes, yet everything becomes more breathable. The air lightens, the shoulders soften, the psyche remembers its own proportions. Complexity doesn’t vanish; it clarifies. What once required immense effort begins to move with the naturalness of something set back into its proper scale.
Zhuangzi captured this beautifully in the Zhuangzi (3rd century BCE), describing the fish that swims freely in clear water precisely because it does not attempt to dominate the sea. The fish does not impose. It participates. Jesus, across another geography and century, echoed the psychological truth in the Gospel of Matthew (1st century CE): “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Burdens become heavy when we carry what does not belong to us. Ease arises not from avoidance but from alignment—carrying only what is ours, releasing what is not.
Depth therapists encounter this misalignment daily. People carry obligations, psychic residues (the lingering effects of past experiences or traumas), ancestral expectations, and internalized demands that were never theirs. The psyche strains, compensates, twists itself into impossible angles. And then—sometimes—something lets go.
Returning the Burden
A patient I’ll call Daniel once brought a dream that arrived like a feather falling into the room. “I’m walking along a beach,” he said, “carrying a heavy pack. I don’t know what’s inside, but I feel responsible for it. I’m exhausted. At some point, a tidepool glows bright blue—almost bioluminescent—and a voice says, Set it down.”
He had resisted the dream all week. “It felt wrong to put it down,” he admitted. “Like I’d be abandoning something or someone.”
This is the moral confusion that haunts so many trauma survivors: the belief that letting go equals betrayal. When he finally described the moment of setting the pack beside the glowing water, his breathing changed. Shoulders lowered. His voice steadied.
“It wasn’t mine,” he whispered. “I knew it when it touched the ground.” The relief was palpable, a weight lifted from his shoulders, leaving him feeling liberated and free.
In the room, the shift was palpable. Eigen writes in The Psychoanalytic Mystic that sometimes the psyche teaches by “letting us breathe in a different rhythm.” Daniel’s new breath belonged to him. The burden did not.
The dream did what dreams often do. It distilled complexity into a single gesture. It reminded him of the living truth that not all weight is meant to be carried.
A Metaphysical Mirror
Dreams, myths, and metaphysical stories often illuminate the same psychological terrain. In my novel The Unholy, Claire, a young woman tormented by a burden she believes is hers alone to bear—the spiritual violence of a corrupt ecclesiastical father. Her psychic life is wrapped around a responsibility that never belonged to her: the responsibility to protect, absorb, and redeem another’s darkness.
There is a moment late in the story when Claire steps into the forest of Aztlan Mountain and hears her mother’s voice—soft but steady—telling her to release what was never hers. Much like Daniel at the tidepool, Claire lays down a weight that has been crushing her for years. And the forest, responsive and alive, shifts around her. The atmosphere changes. Even the wind seems to breathe differently.
That moment mirrors what happens clinically: the uncanny sensation that reality itself rebalances when a person drops an alien burden they’ve carried too long. Fiction simply dramatizes what therapy often witnesses in quieter ways.
Alignment Instead of Striving
When people discover that the burden they’ve been dragging is not theirs, they often protest at first. They’ve built an identity around endurance, caretaking, vigilance, or guilt. To relinquish the burden feels like losing a part of themselves.
But easing the load is not abandonment—it is transformation. It is the psyche rediscovering its original shape. Bion spoke of “becoming lighter by suffering truth.” Sometimes the truth is simple: This isn’t mine.
And when that truth is metabolized—not just intellectually but somatically—something softens. The psyche stops wrestling the sea and finally swims with it.
The Lightness That Follows
There is a felt sense in the room when a patient’s burden becomes light. Their face becomes more spacious. Their voice loses its tightness. They begin to inhabit their lives rather than merely survive them.
The change is subtle but unmistakable:
They stop carrying what was never theirs.
They begin carrying what is.
And even that, paradoxically, feels lighter.
Both Zhuangzi and Jesus knew this: the lightness of being is not a faraway abstraction. It is a mystic psychological reality. It is what happens when a person remembers the difference between responsibility and residue.
Tending the soul—at its most intimate—returns us to the clarity of lightness, where we carry only what is ours and gently lay the rest down.
Lightness Within
Close your eyes and breathe into the space that feels most burdened.
Let the breath move gently, as if it knows the way before you do.
Notice what is truly yours—and what has only been passing through.
Set down whatever does not belong to your life or your becoming.
Feel the quiet rise within, the place where lightness gathers.
Now open your eyes.
The lightness remains.
Live Deeply…Read Deeply!
