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Guided Meditation: Letting Go

Hello everyone, and welcome. Welcome to our meditation session together. The idea that we're doing it together, so many of us from around the world, for me is quite meaningful. It's always been meaningful for me to practice in community, meditate in community. I've done a lot of it, and I probably wouldn't have practiced as much as I have if I hadn't had a community around me sharing the meditation. I probably wouldn't have learned as much. And I've learned a tremendous amount sitting together with other people in meditation. So we have this way here now, through the medium of our electronic communications, to have a chance to meditate together. Thank you.

Sometimes when there is a particular Buddhist practice that's given, it's offered not as a universal practice—"do this all the time"—or if it is offered that way, then we do it for a while and we forget, and then it's just always there, and we might do it and we might not. But the alternative way is to have a practice that we do for a very specific time, and maybe even a short time. This is what we're doing now. What I'd like to suggest is that for these next 29 minutes or so of meditating together, the primary practice be letting go.

Let go, and let go into your breathing. Keep the thread of coming back to your breathing over and over again. It's a way of highlighting what you can let go of. Anything that takes you away from the breathing: gently, lovingly, kindly, maybe even slowly, let go. Release it. Thoughts: let them float away like thought bubbles. We're not letting go of things per se; what it is is letting go of our preoccupation with them, our concern with them. So it is not a judgment or a statement about the value, or the lack of value, of anything. It's just the value of not holding on, the value of having a heart and a mind that's not concerned, preoccupied, or involved with anything at all, except gently concerned with the breathing. Letting go into the breathing.

Being with the breath, and any kind of extra effort, straining, pushing, judging, and commentating about how it's going: let go. Let go of your concern with it. Let go of your interest in that kind of thinking. Let go of giving it authority or value. Just let go and be with the breathing. Be with the breathing.

Assume a meditation posture that maybe provides you with a certain kind of strength, a little bit of dignity, a little bit of presence here and now. If you're sitting in a chair or sitting on a cushion, perhaps you can straighten out the back of your neck a little bit so there's a gap between the last vertebra of the spine and the skull. As you lift up and open that part, at the same time, maybe open your chest a little bit. Not puffing it out, but just letting the shoulders maybe roll back a little bit.

Feel where the weight of your body settles on your chair or your cushion. Wherever you are, what do you feel? The groundedness there. Taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. On the exhale, releasing yourself into that support while staying upright.

Then letting your breathing return to normal. It's a lot easier to let go if the body is relaxed. So in whatever way that's possible, but not more than that, relax the body on the exhale. Relax the muscles of the face. Maybe when you feel the muscles of the face, you can get a sense of how much they work: speaking, smiling, communicating, responding to the world. In meditation, let your face relax, taking a break from all that.

Relaxing or softening around the shoulders. We carry the burdens of the world, the things we're preoccupied with; the preoccupation is maybe held or expressed in the shoulders. For these minutes now, putting everything down, letting the shoulders relax.

And the belly. Maybe anxiety or fear is chronically held in the belly. And if there's fear or anxiety, it's hard to let go of our mental preoccupations even for a short while. Softening, relaxing the belly. Feeling the weight of the belly as you do so.

Finally, you can also relax the thinking mind. The energy, the pressure, the tightness associated with thinking. Maybe in the head, maybe somewhere else. As you exhale, maybe a little longer exhale than usual, relax the thinking muscle, the thinking mind.

Then breathing normally. Noticing how the body experiences breathing. You're not so much in the control tower as you are in the experience the body has of breathing, the sensing, the feeling in the body. Either feeling more fully, or a little bit like placing a flag in the sand, saying, "Here, this is the place where the attention will now reside, come back to."

Any other concern or preoccupation of the mind, as soon as you notice it, let go. Especially let go on the exhale. Release your preoccupation. Let go of your concern, your involvement. Whether the thoughts you're caught in go away or not, that's secondary to releasing your interest in them, your involvement with them. So that your deliberate or conscious interest returns to breathing over and over again. Let go of everything else but resting gently with the breathing.

Let go. Let go of the layers that get revealed as you let go. Release. Release your concern, your involvement. It's not that you're so much letting go of what you're thinking about, just letting go of holding on, being involved. And let go into your breathing. Let go into knowing breathing.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting. Sometimes the practice of letting go in meditation, where there's no need to be thinking about certain things or being concerned with things in the moment—no inherent need—we start seeing how much our desires and our thoughts keep us from the task at hand. Sometimes when we're with other people, caring for others, caring for ourselves, we get hijacked, pulled away by our thoughts, our judgments, our commentary. Learning to let go can be learning to really be present for others, present for ourselves in a deep, friendly way, caring way, kind way.

May it be that what we learn about letting go supports us in caring for self and others, for a focus on supporting the welfare and happiness of all beings. May wise letting go give us the ability to wish and support happiness, safety, peace, and freedom for everyone. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (63) Second Noble Truth

So the practice of letting go is a powerful teacher. Learn to let go and you can be available more fully for our life, for compassion, for wisdom to arise. Practicing letting go starts revealing all the ways in which we hold on, all the ways in which we cling, grasp, hold on. It's hard to see that in daily life often, but in meditation, we can see the subtlety of it, the consistency of it, how easy it is for the mind to wander off into some kind of concern. It might seem innocent enough, some of our preoccupations, but it still involves some part of us that is interested in our thoughts, our fantasies, our imaginations, the past, the future. That interest involves some kind of desire, some kind of wish. That can be mild and innocent enough, but it could also be strong and intense. If there's anger about something, sitting in meditation and the mind just can't drop thinking about what happened and what someone said, the intensity of holding on and being concerned about it is so strong.

One of the things we learn is the consistency: how subtly and how thoroughly we're always holding on to something. In daily life, we don't see it so clearly, the minutia, that ongoingness of it. In some ways, we are being led around, we're being hijacked, we're being directed by our desires. There's a lack of freedom. We're not directing the show; our desires are. So in meditation, we can learn how this works and learn to let go of it. We can start to cultivate softening the muscle of holding on and clinging, the intensity, the energy behind it. We can soften some of the mental orientations that lead us to cling and to hold on to things: the inclination to give authority to our thoughts, the inclination to see everything through the filter of "me, myself, and mine," the orientation to have opinions that we feel we need to have. We have to have all kinds of things, we can see. And so, in meditation, it's a laboratory to discover what it's like to let go of it all. Let go, let go, let go.

In mindfulness practice, as we go through this, there's been no real discussion about letting go so far. The only thing is at the very beginning it talks about relaxing the body, but otherwise that's the closest it gets to actually instructing us to let go. The phenomenal power of the Satipaṭṭhāna^[1] is that we are not the agent for change. We are not the ones who are doing the change; we're the ones who are knowing, showing up for experience, knowing it well, and then the letting go happens in a deeper way. That's how the sutta^[2] is. But it can be very wise to let go if you know how. It could also be unwise; there is unwise letting go, letting go of the wrong things.

But what we're focusing on in Buddhism is not the things we let go of—we might let go of some things—but rather we're focusing on the letting go of the clinging to things, the holding on to things. In this regard, it's helpful to make the distinction between holding on and holding. I can hold on to this striker, and I can also hold it like this with my hand flat, so we can hold things in the softness of our hands. Now we're holding it lightly. If it's something that needs to go or is naturally going away, then it goes; we're not holding on to it. If it's something that temporarily needs us to use it for a tool or something, then we can grasp it and do something, and then we return to holding it lightly. So we don't necessarily have to lose things in letting go. We lose the grasping, the holding itself, the holding on, though we still might hold.

Why this is important in looking at the Four Noble Truths^[3] is that probably the most popular and common modern interpretation of the Four Noble Truths is that the Second Noble Truth teaches that craving is the cause of suffering. That craving, grasping, is somehow responsible for how we suffer. In this interpretation, if the grasping goes away, then that suffering goes away. It's possible to argue this and say, for example, not all suffering comes from grasping and clinging. Some suffering, some pain, sadness, grief is just a natural part of life. A dear loved one dies; the fact that we feel grief and sadness doesn't have to entail any grasping or clinging. It's just a natural state of losing something that's important to us. But there can, in the grief, also be clinging and attachment. The issue in practice is how to hold something like grief without holding on to it. When you hold it, then grief kind of knows what to do. If we hold on to it, we limit its working, its unfolding.

So it could be argued that it's possible to question this whole thing about suffering coming from craving. That's why I like to turn this interpretation around and say that if you crave, you will suffer. So it's not saying that all suffering comes from craving, but rather craving is a cause for suffering. Part of the reason that I feel confident in saying this is that craving itself is a form of suffering. It's a form of stress on our system. Even regardless of what we crave, the act of craving is suffering. But the act of craving also creates habits in the mind. It creates karmic momentum^[4] in the mind that will come back and sometimes make things more difficult in the future.

So learning to recognize what's called craving or clinging is important, and I like to think of it as being compelling desire. Desire which we seem to not have much choice about because it's so compelling, it's so forceful, it's so insistent. Put it down, it immediately comes back. Sometimes you try to let it go over and over, and you can't let go of it. Sometimes it has complete control over us, the intensity of the addiction or desire that we might have.

Some people find it phenomenally useful, this simple idea that craving gives rise to suffering, and if you let go of the craving, that particular suffering goes away. Suffering that's there that's not because of craving, that's a whole other topic. But this is one of the great teachings of modern Buddhism, I think: this focus on craving and clinging and letting go that allows us to really release a lot of the tension, the stress, the suffering that we carry with us in our lives.

So to see the Second Noble Truth, to understand it... So the first one is the truth of suffering. The second one is the truth that craving is the cause of suffering. Some people in the modern world also like to say that in this regard, suffering is optional and pain is not. Emotional pain comes with life, but the suffering in this, in the Buddhist language, suffering is the pain that arises because of the clinging. So there's pain that has no clinging; it wouldn't be called dukkha^[5], we wouldn't use the Buddhistic word "suffering" for it.

Learning to let go... there are two ways: there's dropping something, and there's letting go of the holding onto it. One way some people love to do this letting go practice is not to let go per se, but rather to let be. This is closer to what we're doing in Satipaṭṭhāna: it is a practice of letting everything be and then just seeing it for what it is, knowing it. If we think of the knowing of mindfulness as a letting be practice, I think it adds a richness and a depth to mindfulness that is very, very significant.

So letting things be. Letting go of the holding on to wanting, expecting, measuring ourselves (how are we doing?), wanting it to be different, wanting it to go away. There are all these compulsive thoughts and ideas that can weigh us down when we do mindfulness practice, and the idea is to come to a very free or easy or satisfying place of mindfulness where we let everything just be, and in the beingness, we know it. We let it be and we know what we're allowing to be. So whether it's experiences of the body, feeling tones, mind states, the hindrances^[6], the seven factors of awakening^[7]... a lot of it is just letting it be and knowing it well.

What we discover over time is that the act of this clear, full knowing, while we let things be, has an impact. It sets in motion something. It begins to unfold and to move and change. I don't know if this is a good analogy, but if you take a bottle of carbonated water and maybe shake it first, and then remove the lid, just removing it, letting go of how the lid holds on and clings to the top of the bottle, releases the pressure of the carbonation, the gas. So sometimes just letting go releases something free, sometimes it allows something healthy to flow and move. Our psychophysical beings are processes; they're not things. The holding on interferes with the processes, the dynamic nature of this life that we are. Letting be doesn't really let things stay the same. Letting things be allows a dynamic process to unfold which is not under your direction. There is a kind of letting go of direction, because giving direction is another thing to hold on to.

So you might want to look at what behavior you have today that's compulsive. What thoughts, what words you speak, what activities you do that you find yourself doing without deliberation, without care and attention, like something inside of you is taking the ball and running with it, where you're not free. And what do you need to let go of, or what do you need to not hold on to, so you come back to a place of freedom of choice, of agency, knowing what you're doing without compulsion getting in the way? Stop through the day, take a good look at this, and you'll learn a lot.

So thank you all, and tomorrow I'll offer a different interpretation for the Second Noble Truth that relates to the Third Noble Truth^[8]. Thank you.