Category: EVENTS

The Joy of Letting Go

Letting go is not getting rid of anything. It is not pushing anything away. It is simply releasing our stranglehold on the things to which we cling. We cling to things in a sort of existential panic to prove we’re here. I obsess, therefore I am.

Our near constant gripping and appropriation causes pain, not only for ourselves, be also the objects of our gripping. We keep the things we love strangled and imprisoned within our projections. We don’t see these captures; we see our idea of them. So even when we get what we think we want, it’s not what we have.

We cling to things we want, of course. But we also cling to things we disdain. This is as if we’ve come to want not wanting some things. It doesn’t make sense, but this is our brain we’re talking about. ut whether we want or want to not want, the result is the same. We have forged an attachment with something we’re holding too tightly to see.

Letting go is simply dropping the struggle. It doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. It’s not pushing anything away. It’s not self-denial, nor a denial of that which we’re holding. It’s simply releasing our relentless struggle to keep things in place. This release not only eases tension, but it also creates the space for clarity. We love more deeply when we allow the things we love to be themselves. Letting go of our children is not sending them away unattended. It’s allowing them the room to grow into who they are. Which, allows us the room to discover who they’ve become.

Attachments are often the boogeyman in Buddhist thought, but this is not because what we attach to is necessarily problematic. It’s because attachment creates a stickiness that keeps us from moving through situations with ease. We get stuck, as Pema Chödrön would say.

That sticky quality of mind—our attempt to appropriate what we see and hold it in place—serves to keep us emotionally tethered. The things we cling to keep us from seeing alternatives. If we have the openness and bravery to experience life as it is, rather than clinging to what we like and pushing away what we don’t, our world becomes three-dimensional.

The primary binary—like/don’t like—reduces life to a two-dimensional experience. Some people find that more manageable. This is my reference point. This is who I am. I will always love this person. I will forever be the one loving you. But in truth, the things we hold can trap our mind in cycles we never grow beyond.

Who are we without the things we cling to? Who would we be without the tethers we create—the things we think will save us?

Whether we see it or not, life is carrying us down the river of space and time toward a final waterfall we will never navigate. We are all final girls in this horror show. But along the way, we navigate what we can. And if we let go into the beauty and the tragedy of existence, we may find peace along the way. And when the time comes, perhaps we will choose to be present for our final letting go.

If we understand that—if we truly feel it—there is great power in this moment of being. We don’t need to grasp at the reeds along the riverbank. We don’t need to pick up a cigarette out of fear. We don’t need to hold our children so tightly that they cannot grow into who they are.

To live a life of openness, we need to develop the bravery to open. This is more natural than clinging, so when we open, it feels like a release—a return. We come back to openness. We can’t create openness; we can only open to it. On the other hand, we do create the blockages that keep openness at bay. When we move past the fear of letting go—of abandoning reference points that have shaped our identity—we may open into a sense of release. We may feel the real joy that comes to us naturally and is not a product of our control.

Letting go is not getting rid of anything. It is, in fact, accepting everything—allowing things to be as they are. Non-appropriation.

It’s like traveling to a foreign land and allowing the people we meet to be who they are, letting them enrich us through the simple act of encounter. We don’t need to turn everything into a trigger or a belief—something to wear and perform. We can let things be.

We can let animals live and roam—even destroy one another, if that is their nature—without needing to turn them into trophies. There is nothing brave about hiding in the bushes and killing an animal with a weapon it doesn’t have.

We are greedy. We want, and we want, and we want. That’s okay. The question is: can we stop grabbing? Can we stop harming? Can we stop appropriating?

I once asked an older student in a Dharma community where I was practicing, “Isn’t studying and practicing the Dharma also an attachment?” He said, “Yes—but it’s an attachment you can’t hold onto.”

The practice is to notice the impulse to grasp, recognize it, accept it as the habit of the mind, and then release it.

Learning to accept what is here as enough—and experiencing the joy in that.

A few precise suggestions (for your ear, not the page)

• Opening repetition (“Letting go is not getting rid…”)
  You use it three times. It works as a refrain—but if spoken, consider leaning into it intentionally (slight pause each time) so it feels like structure, not repetition.
• “Final girls in this horror show”
  This is bold and contemporary. It will land—but it shifts tone. Decide if you want that tonal rupture (I think it works, but it’s a choice).
• “We are greedy…” section
  This is one of your strongest spoken moments. Consider a slight slowdown and emphasis—almost confessional.
• Ending line
  You might tighten the landing in delivery only:

  “Learning to accept what is here as enough…
  and the joy in that.”

If you want next pass, we can do pure performance shaping—breath marks, pauses, emphasis—without changing a single word.

The Role of Prayer in a Non-Theistic Tradition

Buddhism has largely been divorced from the idea of an overseeing creator—someone to whom we can supplicate, someone managing our experience, someone to yell at us when we’ve gone astray. This is called Theism. Turning an object into a thing that, in turn, becomes a solid reference.

Refuting the existence of God, as we know, is called atheism. Sometimes atheists can be more dogmatic than theists, turning a non-thing into a very solid proposition.

Then there is a story of the Buddha, when asked by Indian scholars why he did not refer to a god. Buddha reportedly answered, “Because that’s not important. This was not a denial of gods. It was a repositioning. By placing the question of a deity into the realm of theology, he freed himself to be a teacher, not a priest. This was his great reformation. And this is what we call non-theism.

As Buddha removed the idea of a spiritual hierarchy he placed responsibility back into the hands of human beings. The gods were not the issue. The issue was how we wake up in this life right now.

But what if I simply want to pray? 

When I am faced with confusion, reaching out to something feels important. When I have failed myself—as I have, repeatedly in my life—it would make sense to look beyond myself for solace.

Before I came to Buddhism, I would fall into treating God like my butler. Someone to do my bidding when difficulty arises. I’d ask for this, ask for that—often with more demand than humility. And when I didn’t get what I wanted, I’d recoil in a huff, turning the name I once called in reverence, into a curse.

It would seem I was invoking a codependent, rather than empowering, relationship.

The point of Buddha’s teaching was not to establish a system of divine dependence, but to guide people toward leading themselves on the path of awakening. Nonetheless, I have secretly envied the certainty of deeply religious people. I am moved when I walk down a busy street and see someone kneeling in prayer, facing Mecca. I am struck by the conviction of those who feel aligned with a power they trust completely.

Non-theism is not a denial of god. It is a refusal to rely on a deity as a solid, external savior. Instead, it suggests that when we call upon something beyond ourselves, we are co-creating an experience between our mind and the wisdom beyond the conceptual limitations that mind. So, praying to the sky, indeed crying to the sky in sadness and frustration, with the hope that we can go beyond ourselves is actually a very practical method.

When I am in states of confusion or despair, praying to Padmasambhava gives me relief. It gives me orientation outside of my habitual patterns. Over time, this has developed into a kind of faith.

But it is a practical faith.

I don’t assume this process would work for everyone. I don’t believe it is better or truer than any other object of prayer. It is personal. A gateway. A way of stepping beyond myself and receiving.

The non-theistic view suggests that we can use the idea of a deity—or prayer itself—as a gateway to access something larger. If someone believes wholeheartedly in a deity and finds strength in that, then that’s great. Buddhism has not rejected these forms. And although in its fundamental form Buddha’s teachings turned away from reliance on a deity as the teachings spread, it adapted and changed. In Tibet, for example, figures like Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) were said to transform local spirits—forces of fear and chaos—into protectors of the Dharma.

Whether taken literally or symbolically, the message is clear: what is frightening, chaotic, and unknown can be transformed into something that supports, even protects, our path.

That is deeply compelling to me.

So yes—I pray to Padmasambhava. Not because I believe in a solid being somewhere granting favors, but because I have faith in the transformation of darkness into awakening.

When I am lost in confusion, doubt, or fear, I remember my teachers. I remember the Buddha. And sometimes I call out—to Padmasambhava, to the sky, to something beyond myself. My work is to find passion in a belief that opens to possibility rather than narrows down on expectation.

Whether I visualize a deity, a teacher, or simply cry to the very sky amounts to the same thing. Rather than limiting my prayer to a fixed, external god I am asking for guidance to step beyond myself.

Buddhism tells us to rely on ourselves, why do I still feel the need to pray?

Because I have run afoul relying solely on myself. So I ask for help. And the simple act of asking opens the gateway to a greater possibility. And rather than limit those possibilities to my own usual thinking I’m simply opening with the question.

Not expecting reward. Not demanding results. But praying to the open sky – and the loving spirit of the universe – removes the burden of having to do anything my way. All I have to do is open and trust that I will understand.

Navigating the Traffic of Life

In my coaching I use the analogy of traffic lights to illustrate how we might move through life with grace.

Some people rush through life as though red lights were a personal challenge. They think they’re outrunning danger by never slowing down — like someone racing home before the consequences catch up. Others never take their foot off the brake, as though they’ve forgotten the point of being in traffic in the first place is to move toward a destination. They inch from red to cautious yellow but never relax into the open, fluid travel that makes for a joyful life.

Neither approach is particularly graceful. Neither is mindful.

If we want to travel through life with fluidity, we need both mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness pays attention to what we are doing right now. Awareness senses where we’re headed and what lives at the edges of our experience. The cooperative interplay between the specificity of mindfulness and the expansiveness of awareness is exactly what we train for in meditation practice. And it’s transferable to life.

Mindfulness without awareness can become narrow and dutiful. We focus so closely on the task at hand that we lose sight of the larger landscape. Awareness without mindfulness can become ungrounded — expansive but drifting, easily pulled off course.

What we’re cultivating is balance. A cooperative relationship between grounding and spaciousness. I like to think of their union as mindful awareness — attentive to the point we occupy while conscious of the flow surrounding it.

We often talk about developing flow in life. But what about danger?

When something feels off, that’s often a yellow light — not red. Yellow means slow down. Pay attention. For example, if someone we’re dating is harsh toward children or animals, that’s a signal to pause and look more closely. A red light would be something unmistakable — physical abuse, clear harm. Red means stop.

Yellow is different. Yellow is dropping into a lower gear while climbing a steep hill. You’re still moving — just carefully, consciously, with heightened awareness.

The problem is that some of us live as though every light is red. Or we forget to shift back up once the hill has leveled out.

Traveling carefully through perceived danger requires discernment. But when the road opens, we must allow ourselves to move freely again. Green means go. It means trust the conditions. It means flow.

This is especially true in relationships. Sometimes we need to slow down, let go of our personal momentum, and resynchronize with our partner. But we cannot live forever in repair mode. We cannot make a home at the yellow light.

A common pattern I see in clients is that their relationship becomes a series of red lights. All complaint. All caution. All obstruction. So they go elsewhere to find green — work, hobbies, friendships, even fantasy. Inside the relationship, they believe there’s no open road left.

But there is almost always some way forward. The question is whether we can find it together. That may require slowing down first — synchronizing — before gently pressing the gas again.

This is true with our relationship with ourselves. We may find places in our body, heart and mind that we are stuck. Places we just don’t want to go. Shadows in the mind, create blockages in our body, that manifest as limitations in life. Sometimes the red lights in life have their roots from red lights in our mind. We can run the lights, pushing past our doubts, with eyes on a supposed destination. But this is a disregard for our actual experience. The experience we need to learn.

Patience is so important. Finding the gentle perseverance to keep moving forward one step at a time, one day at a time, and stopping to synchronize as we need. But always remembering to allow ourselves to move forward.

Where Do We Go If We Let Go?

I was heading into a massage session when the instructor entering behind me gently touched my upper back. She leaned over my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “what do you think will happen if you let go” and pressing the point said, “right here?” It was stunning. My tears welled up. I didn’t know what it was, but I had been carrying it around since I was a child forever being the good soldier.

Why not let go? What will happens if I lose? What the hell am I trying to prove? What is it I’m carrying?

I can be like a dog with a bone sometimes. When I’m passionate about something I hate the idea of letting go. It’s mine, damn it, even if it’s hurting me. But that’s me. Everyone has their own style of attachment. And attachment will always lead to struggle because we’re trying to hold something still in a universe that is always moving. Reality is stretching and expanding, dissolving and moving away from us, as we desperately cling and grab to anything we can. Oh what joy when we find that bone to gnaw!

The late absurdist auteur, David Lynch, once drew a multi-frame cartoon he called “The Angriest Dog in the World.” It was a picture of a dog straining against its tether growling fiercely, that was copied in several frames unchanging, as day turned to night, the the seasons changed around him.

I kind of loved that guy. I think we admire people who are fighting cancer, or refusing to go gently into the night. There seems to be virtue in struggling against the laws of the universe.

One thing about human experience is when something goes awry, it reminds us how little control we have. This makes us feel small. When things don’t go our way, it’s not a punishment. It’s an opportunity to adjust and even grow. But it generally feels pretty bad.

On the other hand, when things work out the way we expect, or better than we expect, there is no end to the auto-backslapping. Perhaps it’s best to employ the middle path and not to take too much credit. It’s just life. It happens to all of us.

But it’s not about any of us.  Still, this stubborn Taurus often feels there must be something at the end of the struggle other than a pile of discarded discord.

Once I’m engaged in a struggle, I seem to have to prove something to somebody. I’m going to save this relationship, or I’m going to tell this person off though I never do and just toss about in my bed all night.  At some point, I’m just struggling for the struggle. I’m attached to the energy. Attachment brings suffering—I’ve done the research—and it’s a pretty universal human experience. When we grab hold of something we deem important, we don’t want to let it go. Our ego latches on, and whatever grand justification we started with, the war becomes all about us.

Whether we’re gnawing on a bone to pick or basking in a relationship we hope will never end, we’re stuck in attachment. No matter the rationale, the outcome is suffering.

When we grip tightly enough, we lose sight of the suffering altogether. We keep going because after all the investment, letting go feels frightening. Being right and refusing to listen can feel like strength, like clarity—but it isn’t clarity at all. It’s ego blindness. The part of us that needs to prove a point takes over. Our view becomes so narrow, so refined, so focused on our objective that it feels like certainty.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says one obstacle in science is when people know enough to think they’re right, but not enough to see they’re wrong. Since we actually don’t know, the wiser move is to let go.

Letting go doesn’t mean we’re wrong. It isn’t judgment or punishment. It’s a physical experience of loosening our grip.

Dogs eventually have to drop the bone to eat. Children eventually leave the tattered, saliva-ridden doll behind when they go to school. The attachment was soothing—but it isn’t sustainable.

Everything changes. Everything is subject to the movement of the universe. Things only appear solid and unchanging. Great pain comes from believing “this is the way it is,” or knowing it will change but insisting it change our way. Needing control, we choose to suffer, holding onto it, growling if anyone tries to take it away.

I once said to a struggling student, “Have you noticed how when you’re tired and underslept, everything feels more important and more dangerous?” She stared at me with dagger eyes and said “no.” An amazing teaching: sometimes the best thing is to shut up and let people discover it themselves.

Surrender means letting go with body, spirit, and mind. Wherever we’re gripping, there’s tension in the body. Feeling that tension, knowing it’s causing discomfort, and doing nothing to fix the story is the first step. We get addicted to the drama because it feels like control.

Letting go in spirit means releasing our attachment to how the struggle makes us feel—powerful, victimized, justified. Letting go in the mind is harder. We don’t just “stop thinking.” We replay arguments in bed at night. The way out is through love and kindness, drawing the attention out of the body. Until we let go of attachment to feeling bad or feeling victorious, we keep planting seeds of suffering.

Love naturally brings openness and surrender. Mindfulness helps us remember that whatever we latch onto becomes inaccurate and becomes suffering—for us and often for others.

In 12-step communities they say, let go and let God. In the Pentecostal tradition I grew up in, surrender was physical—tears, release, catharsis. In Buddhist tantric traditions, a transmission can release gripping in an instant, sometimes with nothing more than a clap of the hands. Letting go doesn’t have to be heavy. It can be joyous. A relief. An offering.

As we surrender and let go of proving anything, our body softens, the struggle ends, and we sit upright and open. We are making an offering to the universe, while allowing ourselves a fresh start.

Is Where We Are

The good news is, you’re already here. The trick is to remember that.

And to recognize that.

And to experience that here, now.

It’s easy. Maybe too easy? We seem to want dramatic solutions to dramatic problems. We take classes in cognitive awareness, feel crystals, and throw the I Ching. The more anxious we feel, the more effort we think we need to escape. But when our thinking is hijacked by an inflamed brainstem, simply coming back to now can bring us into alignment and return us to an optimum mental state. As humans, we have evolved to employ higher mental functioning, but we need clarity of mind to fully access that state. Unfortunately, we’ve retained shadows of a less awake, fearful, scurrying mind that sometimes hijacks or clouds our reasoning. Reasoning becomes overthinking,  catastrophic thinking or distracted escapism. When our thinking is compromised, we would do well to pay less attention to the narrative of our thoughts and more attention to recognizing when the mind is distracted it’s thinking.

When we train in meditation, we are training to notice when the mind is distracted and to bring it back to the present. We don’t need deep psychological reasoning for this process. In fact, the simpler we keep it, the better. We notice, we return, and we do all of this with no judgment, no explanation, no concepts at all.

Quite simply, what is happening now? What am I experiencing now in the simplest, most tactile way? Not grand ideas, but simply the experience of my hands, feet and breath.  Letting go of ideas of what we think is happening, we turn our attention to our feet on the ground. I mean really do that. Really feel your feet on the ground. Not think about it. Just feel your hands on the desk or your thighs. Bring yourself back home. You can do this walking around your kitchen when anxiety arises. Come back to  the experience of your feet on the floor. It’s that simple to break the momentum of panic, thinking and fear.

Aside from placing a gap in the panic, being aware of ourselves, and parts of ourselves, is comforting to the frightened part of us that can take over our whole day.

Mindfulness of mind means noticing when the mind has hijacked us, taking center stage with some thought or idea that obscures everything else we might see. Mindfulness of being awake in the present moment reminds us to come back to what is verifiably happening, such as the breath or our posture. When the mind notices itself, that noticing is happening in the present. But when the mind gets lost in the narrative of its thinking, we are no longer in the present. We are removed from it.

Most of the time we are lost in regret over some past action or anticipation of some future occurrence, and both of these are imagined circumstances. When we bring ourselves back to our body, that is actually happening here. We can take solace in that. We can begin to feel grounded when we return.

That said, coming back to the present and then judging that experience—such as noticing how distracted the mind is or believing we have to apply ourselves further—are also thoughts that are not actually in the present. They are closer to the present than imagining we are in Tahiti on the beach, but they are still one step removed because we are talking to ourselves about the present. The experience of the present is nonconceptual.

There is a great irony in the art of meditation: being grounded in reality is not what we think. Being grounded in reality is an experience. Mindfulness of mind is the experience of stepping back and seeing what the mind is doing from a grander perspective. It is like a snapshot, and as soon as we start commenting on that snapshot, we darken our connection to the experience. We confuse it. We complicate it.

The aim of meditation is not to become better, smarter, or more productive. The aim of meditation is to become here and be awake right now, in this moment. As simple as that sounds, this is considered both the primary practice and the pinnacle experience of meditation training in the Tibetan Buddhist systems. When we are fully here, we are fully connected to the inherent wakefulness of the universe. As soon as we think about that, we take a step away from the experience.

Mindfulness, then, is the subtle and nuanced process of stepping back in order to see our experience without stepping into conceptualization. We are looking at the mind rather than being lost in the mind. The mind seeing itself is considered a sacred moment in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. As soon as we congratulate ourselves or conceptualize the process, we step away from that experience.

The pinnacle position for the meditator is to be in the present experience without comment, concern, or criticism. When those things arise, as they naturally do, the process of recognizing them and coming back to the breath, the feet, and the hands is the process of waking up. We are training the mind to recognize distraction and to recognize presence.

The process of coming back here becomes easier and more efficient when we train ourselves to recognize both distraction and what it feels like to be here. Without complication, our feet are on the ground, our hands are on our thighs, and the mind is returning to its resting on the breath. This gives us a base to which we can return anytime.

As Lennon sang, “wherever you are, you are here.”