What Istanbul Taught Me About Letting Go : A Personal Reflection on Travel, Spiritual History, and the Summer That Changes You
I want to tell you about a trip.
Not because travel is the point, but because sometimes a place does something to you that no amount of clinical training or self-reflection quite prepares you for. Istanbul did that to me.
I went as a traveler. I came back changed. And I have been sitting with what it opened ever since, both as a person and as a therapist, turning it over the way you turn over a stone to see what lives underneath.
This newsletter is a little different from the others in this series. It is more personal. It is part reflection and part invitation, because what I experienced in Istanbul connects directly to something I want to offer you as we move into summer: the possibility that this season could be the one that finally lets you put something down.
Standing Inside History
There is a particular quality of silence inside sacred spaces that have held centuries of suffering, prayer, and hope. I felt it the moment I walked through the doors of the Blue Mosque. It is not the silence of emptiness. It is the silence of everything that has already been said in that space, every prayer and every grief and every petition that has risen from that floor and into those domes.
You cannot stand in a place like that and feel fully separate from it. The weight of time becomes physical. You feel it in your chest.
THE BLUE MOSQUE, SULTAN AHMED CAMII
Built in the early 1600s, the Blue Mosque takes its name from the hand-painted Iznik tiles that line its interior walls. Over 20,000 tiles, each one placed by a human hand, each one carrying a tradition of craft that survived conquests, fires, and the collapse of empires. Standing beneath those domes, I thought about how much human labor is embedded in beauty. How much of what we inherit was built by people who would never see it finished.
As a therapist, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what people carry from the past into the present. About how the grief and the adaptations and the silences of previous generations become the furniture of the rooms we grow up in. Seeing that idea made literal, in stone and tile and centuries of continuous use, was something I did not expect.
History is not abstract when you are standing in it. It is weight and texture and the faint smell of incense. It is bodies that walked through the same doors under entirely different circumstances and still found themselves bowing their heads.
"We do not heal in a vacuum. We heal in the presence of everything that came before us. And sometimes, standing inside what survived helps us understand what in us might survive too."
Hagia Sophia: What Endures When Everything Changes
If the Blue Mosque gave me a sense of accumulated devotion, Hagia Sophia gave me something harder to name.
It has been a cathedral, a mosque, a museum, and a mosque again. It has been claimed and reclaimed, converted and reconverted, for nearly fifteen hundred years. The mosaics of Byzantine saints and the Arabic calligraphy of Islamic scripture exist on the same walls, not in opposition but in layered cohabitation, each layer telling the story of what survived a transition that the people living through it could not have predicted.
HAGIA SOPHIA, ISTANBUL
Originally built as a Christian cathedral in 537 AD under Emperor Justinian, Hagia Sophia became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, a museum in 1934, and returned to mosque status in 2020. Its walls hold the visual evidence of every transformation. The mosaics that were plastered over for centuries are now partially revealed. The Arabic medallions installed by the Ottomans hang alongside them. It is, literally, a building that carries its entire history in its walls.
I stood in the middle of it and thought about transitions. About the people who experienced those shifts not as historical facts but as the actual collapse and rebuilding of their understood world. About how every life contains at least one Hagia Sophia moment: a point where everything you thought was permanent becomes something else, and you have to decide what to do with the version of yourself that existed before.
In my clinical work, this is the conversation I have most often with clients navigating life transitions. Divorce. Grief. Immigration. The end of a career or a faith or a way of understanding yourself. The question is never only: how do I survive this? It is also: what do I keep? What do I allow to be covered over? And what might reveal itself when the plaster eventually cracks?
"Every significant transition asks you to decide what to keep and what to let go. The wisdom is not in choosing one or the other. It is in knowing the difference."
Topkapi Palace: The Weight of What Was Kept
Topkapi Palace is an education in accumulation. Over four centuries of Ottoman rule, the sultans collected: art, weapons, sacred relics, manuscripts, garments, jewels, and the personal effects of everyone who passed through. The palace holds the staff of Moses, the footprint of the Prophet Muhammad, the sword of David. Whether or not you hold the same beliefs as those who collected them, the intention behind the collection is unmistakable.
These were things people needed to be near. Objects that carried meaning too large to discard, even across generations, even across dynasties.
TOPKAPI PALACE, ISTANBUL
The primary residence of Ottoman sultans from the 1460s to the 1850s, Topkapi held not only the imperial household but the empire's most sacred objects. The Chamber of Sacred Relics houses objects from the three Abrahamic faiths. The treasury holds centuries of accumulated wealth. Walking through it is less like visiting a museum and more like reading a civilization's relationship to meaning, to what it chose to preserve and why.
I walked through it thinking about the things we carry. Not objects, but beliefs. Narratives. The stories we were handed about who we are and what we are worth and what the world owes us or does not. The things we have kept not because they serve us but because they were given to us with such weight and intention that discarding them felt like a kind of sacrilege.
Some of what we carry is genuinely sacred. It holds the memory of people we loved. It connects us to something larger than ourselves. It deserves to be honored.
And some of what we carry is old. It made sense in the context in which it was collected. It does not belong in the present. But we have been holding it for so long that we have stopped noticing the weight.
Topkapi taught me the difference between preserving what is sacred and refusing to examine what is simply old.
"Not everything we inherited deserves to be kept. But nothing we inherited should be discarded without first being understood."
Cappadocia: What Happens When You Face the Fear
I have to be honest about Cappadocia.
I wanted to go up in a hot air balloon. My husband and my son did not. The fear of heights is real, and I understood it, and I also knew something that years of clinical work has taught me: the thing you are most afraid of often holds the thing you most need.
So we talked about it. Not to convince anyone, but to sit with the fear honestly. What is the worst that happens? What is the cost of not going? What would it mean to try? It was not a debate. It was a conversation the way real conversations are, tentative and uncertain and moving in the direction of something neither of us could fully see yet.
We went up.
The sun was just rising over the fairy chimneys, those extraordinary volcanic formations that look like nothing else on earth. The light came in warm and slow. And my husband and my son, who had been afraid the night before, stood in the basket of that balloon in the early morning air and were completely still. Not frightened still. Moved still.
That stillness is something I carry with me. Not because the fear was conquered, but because it was accompanied. Because we faced something uncertain together and found something beautiful on the other side of it. That is, in so many ways, what the therapeutic journey looks like too.
CAPPADOCIA, CENTRAL TURKEY
Cappadocia is known for its extraordinary landscape of soft volcanic rock eroded into towers and valleys over millions of years. The region has been inhabited since the Bronze Age and contains an underground city capable of housing thousands. Hot air balloon rides at sunrise are now among the most iconic travel experiences in the world, lifting passengers above a landscape that feels genuinely otherworldly in the early morning light.
"Fear does not have to be conquered to be survived. Sometimes you simply have to let someone stand beside you while you face it. That is enough."
Ephesus: A Gift for Someone Who Loves Books
I love books. This is not a small fact about me. Books have been companions, teachers, and lifelines. They have held me in difficult seasons and opened doors I did not know existed. So when I stood in the ruins of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus, one of the largest libraries of the ancient world, I felt something I did not fully expect.
Gratitude. A deep, almost physical gratitude for the people who built it.
THE LIBRARY OF CELSUS, EPHESUS
Built around 117 AD, the Library of Celsus in the ancient city of Ephesus in western Turkey was the third largest library in the ancient world, holding an estimated 12,000 scrolls. It was built as a mausoleum for the Roman Senator Celsus and later expanded into one of the most significant centers of learning in the ancient world. Though the interior was destroyed by fire in the 3rd century AD, the facade still stands, with its ornate columns and carved niches for statues representing Wisdom, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Excellence.
The facade of the library carries four carved figures in its niches: Wisdom, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Excellence. Someone stood in that square nearly two thousand years ago and decided that those four ideas deserved to be held in stone, at the entrance to a place where learning lived. They were saying: this is what we value. This is what we want people to see when they approach understanding.
I stood there for a long time. Long enough that my family wandered ahead and I did not notice. Because I was thinking about all the books that burned when the library was destroyed in the third century. About how much wisdom was lost, simply because the conditions for preserving it were not yet in place. About how much grief lives in the spaces where knowledge once was.
And then I thought about the building that survived. About how someone looked at the ruins and said: we can restore the facade. We can hold the memory of what this was. We cannot get back what was lost, but we can bear witness to the fact that it existed.
That is grief work. In stone.
You cannot always recover what was lost. But you can honor that it existed. You can say: it mattered. It deserved to be preserved. And what remains of it is still worth standing in front of, quietly, for as long as you need.
"Not everything that is lost can be recovered. But everything that mattered deserves to be honored. That is what grief actually asks of us."
The Summer That Changes You
I came back from Istanbul in the middle of what I have been calling, in my own practice and my own life, a season of release.
Summer has a particular quality for that work. The pace shifts. The schedule opens, even slightly. Children are home, or out of the house for the first time. Vacations create space between the usual routine and yourself, and in that space, things that were submerged have room to surface.
Some of the most significant therapeutic work I have witnessed happened in the summer, not because something catastrophic occurred, but because the slight loosening of structure gave a client enough room to finally ask a question they had been holding for years.
What summer transitions ask of us
Every summer carries within it the residue of all the previous summers. The one where the diagnosis came. The one where the relationship ended. The one where you arrived somewhere new and did not know yet whether you would survive it. Summer is not neutral. For people who are grieving or healing, it often activates memory before it activates rest.
But summer also carries something else. It carries the particular generosity of longer days and slower mornings, of heat that asks you to move differently. It offers, if you are willing to take it, a kind of permission that the packed urgency of other seasons does not.
Permission to be somewhere other than where you have always been.
What letting go actually requires
Letting go is not a decision you make once. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires conditions.
You cannot let go of something you have not fully seen. This is why so much of the work of therapy involves not releasing the past but looking at it more honestly than you have been able to before. Istanbul taught me this in a new way: the mosaics in Hagia Sophia that were plastered over for centuries did not disappear. They waited. And when the conditions finally allowed them to be seen again, they were still there, still intact, still carrying meaning.
What you have been covering over is still there too. It has not gone anywhere. And this summer, if you are willing, might be the season you finally let it come into the light.
The habits and beliefs that are ready to be put down
Some of what you are carrying is not sacred. It is simply old.
The belief that rest is something you have to earn. The habit of managing everyone else's emotions before you attend to your own. The story about yourself that you inherited from a parent who was also carrying something they had never examined. The idea that needing help means you have failed.
These are not truths. They are adaptations. And like the layers in Hagia Sophia, they made sense in the context in which they were formed. You are allowed, this summer, to look at them clearly and ask: does this belong in my present life? Or have I simply been carrying it because no one ever told me I was allowed to put it down?
A question to sit with:
What is one belief or habit you have been carrying for so long that you have stopped questioning it? What would it feel like to examine it honestly this summer?
A Path Forward
I did not go to Istanbul looking for a shift. I went as a traveler, curious and tired and ready for beauty.
What I found was something I have been trying to articulate for months: the way that encountering history, real history, the kind that has absorbed centuries of suffering and prayer and survival, can quietly reorder your sense of what matters and what does not. What deserves to be preserved and what is simply taking up space.
The summer ahead is yours. It does not have to be a season of pushing through. It can be a season of looking clearly at what you have been carrying, honoring what is genuinely sacred, and allowing yourself, perhaps for the first time, to put down what is simply old.
That work does not happen alone. It happens in relationship, in conversation, in the kind of space where someone sits with you and says: I see what you are carrying. Let us look at it together.
That is what I am here for. And if you are ready to begin, I would be honored to walk alongside you this summer.
About the Author
Ashma Hakani, LCSW-S is a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of Renewed Hope Therapy, PLLC. She specializes in grief, trauma, anxiety, and relationship issues, providing compassionate, culturally competent, and trauma-informed care. With over 18 years of experience, she utilizes evidence-based approaches to support her clients in building resilience and coping skills.
Ashma also offers clinical supervision and mental health education to individuals and communities. Her work is rooted in the belief that healing is a journey, and she is dedicated to walking alongside her clients every step of the way.
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