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Guided Meditation: The Joy of Letting Go

So, hello everyone. Thank you for being here. Today the theme is release in relationship to emotions.

Now, this process of being with emotions, to do so in a healthy, mindful way, increases our capacity to feel wholesome emotions, and one of those is joy, delight, or a kind of happiness. It's useful when engaged in mindfulness to remember to allow for joy. It's maybe easy to overlook, easy to think other things are more important, but some degree of joy supports the process of waking up here in the present moment. We might think about that: to release, letting go, really works, is significant, or appropriate when there is something in the family of joy. In the process of letting go, of releasing, it feels good. It feels right.

So, in these five underlying themes or threads for each of these weeks—relaxation, recognition, respect, restoration, and release—each of those steps has a little bit of release in it. Each of the first four, in having a little bit of release, might make it possible to look for a peaceful joy, a peaceful delight, or well-being, an appreciation that maybe is not evaluative. It just kind of feels like it's part of it.

With relaxation, it's one thing to relax and appreciate and feel the good of it, but maybe it's possible to also appreciate a little joy or delight: "Oh, this is good. This is a good fortune, to be able to let go, to release all that."

Recognition is also a kind of release, because when we learn the simplicity of recognition—really simply just knowing something in and of itself—then for that moment, at least, we've stepped away from being entangled with it, judging it, or identifying with it. It's just recognizing, "Oh, that's that." So if there is pain someplace in the body—and it's difficult to be with pain; I don't want to belittle or minimize the difficulty—but in the moment of recognition, there is a kind of freedom. There's a kind of letting go. It may be just a fleeting moment of recognition, but to learn to recognize the letting go, the release that happens in that recognition, there's that potential in recognition.

To respect what's happening is also a letting go of our disrespect, our entanglement, our caughtness. There, too, there's a kind of releasing of something that made the relationship maybe more complicated than it needed to be. I think of deep respect for reality, to ourselves, to others. There's a release that is joyful there. Rather than being subservient, to offer respect to someone is actually a freeing of ourselves.

Restoration: to feel, to allow for the movement of energy in the body, the healing, the processing, the unfolding of our life, to trust it and open to it, and feel the goodness of how that unfolds, is also a kind of release, getting out of the way. All this sets the stage for appreciating the joy, the value, the wonderfulness of really being free, which is release.

I'm going to guide you in this today. A little bit more of an exercise, perhaps, in two rounds of release. Going through these five processes with the idea that each time there's a kind of release. Once just to settle in, and once in relationship to emotions. I apologize to those of you who want more silence for this, and hopefully you'll get it another time meditating on your own.

Assume your meditation posture and lower your gaze. Lowering your gaze, can you relax your eyes? With your eyes relaxed, if it feels appropriate, close your eyes. With your eyes closed, can you relax your gaze some more, letting your eyes rest in the eye sockets? With your eyes closed, maybe you can attune to your body a little bit more, make small adjustments in your posture.

Then, as you take two, three, or four deep inhales, let the exhale be a release of letting go. A long, sustained, gentle letting go as you exhale.

Let your breathing return to normal. Go through the body to relax it some more as you breathe normally. As you relax, if it's possible to relax these parts of the body, see if you can have some enjoyment of that, or some joy, or appreciation, or delight. It could be very, very faint, but see if you can recognize the goodness of letting go, of relaxing.

Softening, relaxing the muscles of your face. Softening, relaxing the shoulders as you exhale. Relaxing the chest. And as you exhale, relaxing the belly. As you exhale, a global relaxation throughout the body.

Then to recognize, in a simple and relaxed, uncomplicated way, how you are in the simplest way. In such a way that there's a little bit of letting go in that recognition. Letting go of our judgments and entanglements. Letting go of being for and against.

Recognition: that's a kind of opening to experience that has some modicum of joy, a good feeling to let go of the entanglement and just recognize, just let things be as they are, and recognize them.

However you are right now, can you respect it? Letting go of anything that gets in the way of respect. Letting go of anything that doesn't honor whatever experience you have at this moment of being alive. Any judgments or stories you have about who you are and what's happening that doesn't respect the aliveness of the moment.

Then to allow restoration. To trust that there's something here within you that, if allowed to process, will heal and repair, cultivate, develop, and unfold in a healthy way. To let go of being the engineer of our experience. Let go of more judgments of it or resistance to it. Feel the goodness, the joy of allowing our system to find its way.

Then we come to release. With every exhale, let go. Let go of thoughts. Let go of preoccupations. Let go of preferences. In the letting go, can you recognize some degree of joy or goodness in doing so?

Ever so gently, see if you can make a very small smile with your lips. A smile of joy. See if turning up the corners of your mouth produces any pleasant feelings for you, however subtle. If there is any pleasant feeling or any joy, relax into that. Keep the half-smile, but relax into the pleasure of it, the joy of it. Recognize the joy, the pleasure in the smile, or in just being alive, breathing.

In recognizing it, stay simple with it. Letting go of complications, doubts, and protests. Respecting your embodied capacity to feel joy, well-being, happiness. Breathe with it.

Allow for restoration, healing. Allow for whatever wants to happen as this simple joy, calm, quiet joy, or well-being is given space to be here.

Then release any grasping or holding. Release any resistance or any stressful feelings related to how you are. Maybe feel the quiet joy of release.

In the middle of it all, centering yourself on the breathing. The more you give yourself over to breathing, the more all five of these processes, the five Rs^[1], have a chance to grow and unfold. Trusting yourself with the breathing. Letting there be a joy in breathing in and breathing out.

[Silence]

As we come to the end of the sitting, there's a letting go, a releasing that allows us to turn our hearts out to the world. Not as a duty or an obligation, but knowing that the alternative is to stay closed or stay limited. To allow our freedom, our liberation, or release to have a chance to become full, we also want to allow our capacity to feel, to know, to empathize, to be open to the world around us, to the people we know, our neighbors, our friends, strangers, people in our community.

What is it to let go so that our capacity to empathize, to feel, to know, to connect, can grow? So they can be a channel for our goodwill, our care for the world. To turn our attention to offering care to the world at the end of a sitting is a way of supporting, protecting even, our freedom.

May it be that through our care, we promote the happiness of others. May it be through our care that we support the safety of others. May it be through our presence that we offer a peacefulness to others. And may it be through our own freedom that we help spread a spiritual freedom in this world. May all beings everywhere be happy.

Dharmette: Emotions (5 of 5) Release is Peace

So here, on the fifth talk on mindfulness of emotions, we've talked about release, release in relationship to emotions. I think I said this at the beginning as well, that some emotions are a product of, or arise together with, stress, with tension. And some emotions flow with the lack of tension, the lack of stress. Generally, the unwholesome emotions—the ones that are afflictive, that are painful to have, or which motivate harmful activity in the world—come with stress. So as we release the stress, release the tension, the tightness, those afflictive, unwholesome emotions tend to have less energy, less juice, less nourishment to keep going.

The sense of well-being that we can have when there's no stress, no tension, tends to support, to make room for, wholesome movements. So the absence of stress tends not to result in more afflictive emotions, but rather the beneficial emotions, the supportive and nourishing emotions: love, joy, delight, happiness, care, compassion, contentment, gladness, tranquility, and calm—a whole slew of things like this.

So this release, to really learn how to release and let go, doesn't leave us emotionally neutral, like a blank. It might be initially that way for a little while as a transition. If we're really used to swirling in fear and anxiety, swirling in anger and resentments, swirling in desires and ambition, we're comfortable—some people are comfortable with that. So when they let go of that, the energy, the motivation, the charge that they've been living their life on is lacking, and nothing has replaced it yet, and it can feel blank for a while. It's kind of like giving up coffee and spending three days adjusting to that until a natural vitality comes back. It's the same thing as we switch from spending a lot of time with afflictive, difficult emotions—it may be a lifetime, there's a transition. But as that transition unfolds, the lack of tension and stress makes room for these beneficial emotions.

I find it kind of humorous or delightful that as these beneficial emotions arise, any movement to cling to them, to resist them, or to want to hold onto them is stress, and moves us in the opposite direction from what they're all about. It's kind of like rubbing a cat against the way the hair lays down, and all the hair gets bunched up and rises up rather than lying flat down, or going against the grain of the wood to cling to these good emotions. There's a tendency to want to hold onto them or do something with them, but at the same time, you can't do it. It doesn't make sense to do it. It's not appropriate to do it. I find it kind of humorous to be in that middle spot there, and then just delight in that: "Oh, I can't do anything with it. I can't hold onto it. I have to let go. I can't make it mine. I can't be in charge of it in a certain way or claim it." There's freedom in relationship to them.

Some people don't understand, or haven't been told or learned, that as we practice, this matures. As letting go deepens, the connection to our inner life deepens, to life deepens, there's also joy and well-being and happiness. It doesn't have to be dramatic; sometimes it has a quiet feeling to it. But to avail ourselves of that, to make room for that—release is not only about what we let go of, it's also what we make room for. In that making room for, there's a lot of peace. I think the two words, two concepts of the Buddha most commonly used to describe how someone is when there's been a deep letting go, a deep release, is peace and happiness. Peaceful happiness. Happy peace. Peace and happiness. I don't think we can go too wrong with those in the forefront, especially when those are the very conditions that allow for our deepest or fullest forms of care for the world to operate as well, because there's nothing that interferes with it, there are no blocks to it. So, to let go deeply.

In relationship to emotions, to let go of the stories we have about it, to let go of the preferences we have about our emotional life, to be able to tease apart all the different component parts of what's happening when we have emotions and find the place of holding. Sometimes the clinging and the holding is not in the emotion itself, but in the way in which we relate to the emotion: the knowing, the directedness of attention, the attitude we have about it, the ways we're thinking about it. So sometimes we have to kind of turn away from the emotion per se and look more at the attitude, more at the directedness of mind, or the engagement of the mind in the emotion to find a place where something can let go and relax.

To let go, to relax, to release, and to appreciate every moment of release becomes a positive reinforcement for release. We start recognizing that release, letting go, is a healthy thing, a good thing. To learn to let go enough so we learn the skill of letting go, we learn when it's appropriate to let go, we learn how to let go appropriately. One of the things I had to learn was if I let go, but I was emotionally neutral, it would come back and bite me. I hadn't really let go. To really have let go in a healthy way, there had to be some modicum, some degree of joy or lightness that came in the wake of it. So to release, let go.

You might try it. You might try when you have emotions of all kinds, especially when you're in the grip of them, when they are strong. Maybe you have to pull yourself away from the situation you're in, go for a walk or sit down or something, and just let go in a deep way. Maybe go through these five Rs. Some people really like going through a systematic process that keeps them engaged and focused. To relax, recognize, respect, restore, and then release. All those are a form of letting go, or involve some degree of letting go, of release.

So thank you for this. In my experience, my practice life, one of the byproducts of release—letting go, releasing the stress—is a profound gratitude. It's a tremendous feeling of gratitude. It's been one of the great gifts of this practice. It's a gratitude which often, sometimes I feel grateful for particular things: the practice, the Buddha, the community I'm practicing with, many things. But the kind of gratitude that I find the most meaningful or satisfying or profound or joyful is the gratitude that is just grateful for no reason. Just grateful. Just a feeling of gratitude, gratefulness.

So, emotions. We've done a week on emotions, and I hope that this has given you a new perspective on how to live with emotions, practice with emotions, appreciate emotions, and that it supports you and brings you a greater sense of well-being and maybe even some gratitude for this life of ours.

So thank you all very much.