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Mindful Letting Go (2 of 5) Wise Letting Go

So for this second talk on mindful letting go, I want to emphasize the importance of wisdom—that we let go with wisdom, with a deeper understanding. Sometimes people hear teachings on letting go, and they hold it up idealistically. They hold it up as something that we're supposed to really do with everything: let go of everything, be renunciates to something. There can be lots of foolish letting go. There can be letting go of the wrong things. There can be letting go of things which are perfectly fine to have, but there's an attitude that maybe they're wrong or bad, or just an idea that letting go is better.

There are two general areas of wisdom in terms of letting go. One is to generally understand something about what we are letting go of—the nature of what we're letting go of. The second is what we are letting go into, what we're allowing by letting go. So one is to understand the dangers of clinging and holding on, and the other is to understand the benefits of letting go, what's good about it.

The dangers of clinging are twofold. Sometimes we cling to things which themselves are harmful. For example, if there's a strong addiction to almost anything—certain things, say it's alcohol. Acting on that addiction becomes extremely hard and extremely damaging, not only to the person who's an alcoholic but also to their family, to people around them, and so forth. I meet lots of people coming to meditation retreats who talk about their personal inner challenges and sufferings. One of the common themes is that it's very hard to grow up in a family where one of the family members is an alcoholic. The behavior that comes out of alcoholism damages itself and damages others. It's the clinging to that alcohol which on the surface is really the difficulty. Sometimes the wisest thing to do is to really let go of the alcohol, let go of the object of the addiction, remove ourselves from it, remove it from us. So sometimes there is danger in something we're clinging to and holding onto, and we see wisely, "Oh, this is damaging, this is painful." That's the kind of wisdom we have; we really understand why it's not healthy for us.

The other kind of understanding about the harm and the danger of clinging is to understand that the act of clinging itself is a kind of suffering. It might be less of a suffering sometimes than the consequences of addiction, but there is clearly a loss of freedom, a pain, a contraction, an anxiety, some kind of inner pain that comes from clinging. Here, it's not necessarily letting go of things, but rather letting go of the clinging. Someone could cling to something which is quite beneficial in and of itself, which is quite good. Someone could cling to having a good, nutritious diet. But the clinging to it—the craving, the grasping, the necessity, the holding on for dear life, which I've seen in some people. I've seen people who are really consumed with almost an addiction to having healthy food, and it has not served them well. What's needed is not letting go of the healthy food; what's needed is to let go of that drivenness, the compulsivity for it. That's what we let go of. Some Buddhist teachers will say that letting go is not letting go of things, but letting go of our clinging to things.

In that way, what I'm very fond of pointing out is that there are two ways of letting go of the striker. One would be to just let it drop, and then it might fall—like it just did now on my ankle, and it hurt a little bit. So you could cause damage letting go in the wrong way. But the other way of letting go is I can let go of the grasping to the striker, and it ends up like this: I still have the striker, but I'm holding it gently, openly. I'm not clinging to it. Really understanding the pain and the tightness of the clinging to the striker, it limits the sensitivity and availability of the soft, sensitive part of the hand to feel what's going on in the world, to connect to it, and do other things with it. When I'm grasping, I'm limited when the hand is holding this way. If I let go of the clinging, I'm not as limited; there's more I can do, including putting something down and picking it up when it's needed.

The wisdom of understanding the danger of some of the things that we cling to is one form of wisdom. The other form of wisdom is to understand the danger of clinging itself, how it limits us and causes pain. Those two forms of wisdom can give ample reasons for us to let go, and we understand really well, "Oh yes, I need to let go, I have to let go, it's important to let go." But still, even with that kind of wisdom, some people find it hard to let go. There's fear to let go; their compulsion is quite strong.

So the other side of wisdom is to understand the benefits of letting go, that we can also let go into something. When the hand opens to a greater sensitivity, I'm available to feel and be in contact with the world in a much richer and deeper way than if my hand is always clenched. We let go into a sensitivity, into availability, into a kind of presence that's not possible if we're contracted in clinging.

We can also understand that, especially as it comes with more and more Buddhist practice or any kind of spiritual practice, the contemplative life, there's a difference between living on the surface of life and living really connected more deeply into the wellsprings of life. I like to call it the inner life. Some people might call it the soul here in the modern West; Buddhists might call it the heart. Really being connected to the heart. If I spend my days pursuing pleasure, getting massages, tasty food, and different kinds of sensual pleasures, it might feel really good, but that's more on the surface. To really feel something deeply—deep contentment, peacefulness, warmth, and a three-dimensional, fully embodied sense of the full inner life—we have to open up to what's deeper inside of us, the quality of our inner life. Only we can be the caretakers of that inner life, and we have to discover it and learn what it is, which is a lot of what the contemplative life is about.

I'm using the word contemplative today to imply something that's maybe much bigger than simply a mindful life. A mindful life, for some people, is still a life on the surface—just being mindful of eating a raisin or something. Contemplative life is mindfulness which really wakes up the inner sensibility that touches into the quality of the inner life.

To realize that when we let go, we can also let go into a deeper connection to the present moment. We can let go into peace, into feelings of contentment, joy, happiness, well-being, goodwill, a sense of rightness. We can let go into a feeling of, "Oh, this is true." It's possible to let go and then feel our sadness and our grief. It can feel like, as painful as it is, it feels right. There's a rightness to feel this grief. Of course I feel grief given what's happened. I can let go into the rightness of grief, or these different strong emotions we have that might not seem to be contemplative in nature, but they're true. To let go into the trueness of it—this kind of letting go into what's actually here—and then we find our way, and life is a whole different thing.

We can let go into having greater clarity. We can let go into having more awareness because clinging interferes with it. We can let go into seeing more clearly what's actually happening—taking time to look and see. We can let go into a sense of inner vitality and engagement. We can let go into joy, delight, and happiness. We can let go into calm and peacefulness. We can let go into concentration. Classically in Theravada Buddhism—I don't know if classically, but it's a long popular idea, maybe—the primary means for developing Samadhi^[1] is just letting go. Letting go deeply. Letting go into a natural subtleness, openness, and focus. And then there's letting go into equanimity, into a serenity of peace, a non-reactivity.

These are called the Seven Factors of Awakening^[2]. They can be available in small ways and in big ways, and this is part of the richness of our inner life. As we practice, slowly we begin to get inklings of these Seven Factors of Awakening. We get inklings of the Brahmaviharas^[3] of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. We get inklings of wisdom and understanding. We can understand how dangerous it is to be apart from that, to not be wise and not be connected to mindfulness, and we can understand the benefits of being connected.

We let go not to diminish ourselves, but to enhance ourselves, to benefit ourselves, to avoid dangers. I really like to think that this letting go is a way to enhance the goodness, the strength, the beauty of our inner life. Developing wisdom around letting go—mindful letting go—can be synonymous with wise letting go. If someone asks you to let go, or you consider letting go of something, ask yourself, "Is it wise? What is wise?" Let's become wise first about it before we let go.

So thank you, and I look forward to tomorrow.