Steep Your Soul

Relaxed Woman: On Letting Go Ep 65

• Annabelle Matson

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Do you ever feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders?

Many women today feel tired, burnt out, and overwhelmed by all the responsibilities in their lives.

But what if there was another way?


In this episode of Relaxed Woman, I’m exploring the power of surrender — what it really means to let go, release control, and find peace.  

We’ll talk about:

  • How surrender not only lightens the load but often opens the door to clarity, rest, and even miraculous provision.


  • Personal stories from my business and family life — including my Dad’s healing journey after being given just six months to live


  • A simple prayer you can use when you find yourself picking control back up again


If you’re tired of carrying it all in your own strength, this episode will remind you that you don’t have to hold it together alone.


✨ Resources mentioned:

Private Coaching - book in for an Initial Breakthrough Session or work with me in a 3 or 6 month program

Reclaim Your Calm $20 workshop

Visit my website

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Submit a question for an upcoming episode.

Welcome to Relaxed Women. This is a nourishing series on the podcast to help you slow down, soften your grip, and live from a deeper place of peace and trust. These episodes are here to remind you that you don't have to hold it all together, that you can breathe, release the weight you've been carrying, and find a different way of living. So if you're tired from carrying it all, you're in the right place. Let's take a deep breath together and let's begin. I meet so many women who are tired, who are feeling burnout. They're trying to do life on their own. Um, they're striving to solve their own problems to make their own way, to figure out where they should be. And we can feel so exhausted trying to change, trying to do better, to do all of these things in our own strength. And I find with a lot of these women underneath that there's actually a deep desire to be held, to be able to let go, to feel like something or someone is taking care of them. And for me it was a massive exhale when I realized maybe we are not meant to carry it all. Maybe we were actually never designed to do life on our own. And what shifted everything for me was discovering that God wasn't asking me to hold everything together. He actually wanted to carry the heavy parts of my life for me to provide, for me, to guide me, to bring me wisdom and direction, and suddenly it wasn't all on me. I. So I remember a period in my business years ago where it felt like everything was falling apart, and that sounds dramatic, but the things that had always worked, stopped working and everything started to feel very hard. I did all of the things that I knew how to do for weeks, and none of those things created the results that I needed. Looking back, it was such a deep lesson in surrender. I'd come to the end of myself. I couldn't strategize my way out of it anymore. The only thing left was to let go and to trust that God would support me and show me your way through. Part of my mind sort of started to get really loud. It was sort of screaming at me. This is so lazy. Like you can't do less. You should be doing more. There's so much on the line here. But the harder I pushed, the more brick walls I hit, when I stepped back and I got quiet, I felt this deeper knowing that I was meant to let this go, and not as a last resort, but this is actually how I was designed to live, to not be in the driving seat of my life, trying to make every outcome happen myself. And funnily enough, when I finally let go. The right opportunities began to open again, and not because I pushed harder, but because I stopped trying to control it, and I stopped seeing myself as the source of success. So I think a lot of the frustration and the exhaustion. And the stress that we feel is because we are acting against our natural design. Our natural design is not to be self-reliant and independent, and to be making things happen all on our own. Our natural design is actually to be dependent, to dependent upon God for the things that we need. So there is no peace when we see ourselves as the beginning and the end of what we need in our lives when we place ourselves at the center and see ourselves as the source and the only source. It's such a recipe for burnout and exhaustion. So there is peace, there is clarity, there's healing and provision available for each of us. And it doesn't depend on how hard we strive or whether we can prove we're worthy of it. But what it does require is humility, and it's admitting that we can't do it all on our own, and that we actually don't have all of the answers that we're seeking. So really what we are talking about here is surrender. Surrender means giving up control. And I'll be honest, control is the thing I wrestle with the most in my life. So as I share this, please know I'm not above any of this, and it still continues to be something I'm leaning into all of the time. My life has been marked by ongoing lessons and having to let go and having to surrender and letting go of control can feel unsafe because. We use control like an armor. If I can control this, if I can stay one step ahead, we think if we can just think more, plan more, push and force things to happen then we will be, be safe. And for a moment it does feel. Like we're a little bit safer, but that safety is only ever temporary. When we live from control, there's never truly rest. There's always something else to manage, another problem, to fix another way that we feel we've gotta prove ourselves. So control might feel comforting in the moment, but it actually keeps us trapped. It keeps us stuck in cycles of fear and doubt and scarcity and frustration. The real breakthroughs in my life have come when I've been willing to admit I don't have all of the answers and to ask to be shown The way our culture sometimes treats this posture as weakness, but it's actually not surrendering and asking to be shown is how we make space for things to shift in ways we could never have orchestrated on our own. And surrender is not a one time thing. At least it isn't for me. It's something I have to return to again and again. I might surrender something and then I notice myself picking it back up again. So suddenly I'm stressed about that thing again, or I'm trying to figure it all out on my own again, and I notice myself doing that. And it's like, oh, okay, here I go again. I'm trying to do this on my own. I'm trying to do this in my own strength. And that's when I stop and I'll pray something really simple like, God, I lay this at your feet. Again, show me, lead me, guide me. Please give me your peace around this and help me to surrender this to you. And here's the thing, sometimes even we even start striving to surrender. It can feel. Frustrating that we're not surrendering. So then we put more pressure on ourselves and it feels like it's something we have to try harder to make happen on our own. But surrender isn't about mustering up more willpower. We actually can't untangle all of that on our own. It's about opening our hands and our heart and letting God help us do what we can't do by ourselves, so we don't actually have to surrender on our own. So you might be familiar with the podcasts the episodes that have sort of come before this with, um, my client and friend Eve Northcutt, who has been on this huge health journey. And we recorded her, um, journey on, on the podcast here. But on those episodes, I also shared a health journey that our family has been walking with our dad. So he was diagnosed with cancer. He was given six months to live. Uh, he was told that there was no treatment available and was told to go home and get hi his affairs in order and to come back when his pain was too much and they would provide pain relief. And so when he was given this diagnosis, my first reaction was to go straight into control mode. So what are all the things I can do about this? It felt so outta control every way we looked at the situation, it seemed so hopeless, and it felt like doors were closing everywhere, that there was no hope. There were, were no doors open for us to walk through, and so. We had to get on our knees literally and figuratively. And it was in that place of surrender that we experienced something incredible. We experienced divine provision. We said, God, you've gotta show us what to do. This looks hopeless, but we know that you can make a way. And little by little we started to see things shift. So treatments that had been totally off the table. Suddenly ca become available. People started to appear out of nowhere, who would share their radical healing, jo healing journeys with dad. We would stumble across YouTube videos or articles or healing modalities that we hadn't heard of before and bit by bit hope started to grow and so did our faith, and this was not something that we could have manufactured in our own strength. In the natural world, he was given absolutely no hope. There was no hope for him to live beyond six months. But as we surrendered and as our hope started to grow and our faith as well, we couldn't have done that ourselves. That was, it was a supernatural thing. Um, and it all really came through surrender. So five years later, dad is still here. After being given just six months to live and because of that, he's been able to, uh, walk me down the aisle at my wedding. He's been able to meet my first child and share so many moments with our family that we were told would never happen. When we lay down our control, we open the door for God to move in ways we couldn't imagine or orchestrate. And I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it in Eve's story too, when all she had left was to surrender. She experienced the miraculous. So I wanna ask you, where are you holding on tight? Chances are it's the areas where you are feeling the least amount of peace. And how could you show a willingness to be led? To be shown the way, you don't have to do this on your own. And it's not about striving to surrender. It's about letting go. And I've found that God always meets me in that place and he helps me to do what I can't do on my own. So maybe you already have a faith maybe. You're still figuring it out, but if you're exhausted from carrying the burdens of life all on your own, I would really encourage you to open up to something bigger. And this won't be for everyone, but if it, if something in this episode has stirred something in you and you're curious about where to start, I've created a free guide called Getting Started with Faith. And over the past year, so many people have reached out to me who are exploring faith, often stepping away from what they were taught at school or through their parents into a personal relationship with God. And this guide is just a gentle way to begin that journey for yourself. So you'll find the link in the show notes of this episode. So thank you for being here for this episode of Relaxed Women. There are more episodes already waiting for you in this series, and we are touching on a lot of different topics and there are more to come. So if this sounds like something you need, hit, follow or subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss what's ahead. And if a friend comes to mind who would love this too, please share any episode with them. And if today's episode has spoken to you, you'll. Also love the Reclaim Your Calm Workshop. It's just$20 and gives you simple ways to calm your mind, feel more grounded, and bring more peace into your everyday life. You'll find the link for that workshop in the show notes below, and if you're curious about going deeper, you can also learn about working with me in a one-on-one coaching program below as well. I'm looking forward to being with you again soon, and I'll see you in another episode.