A lot of us know how helpful (and advisable) it is to let go. Nobody that I know is all that good at it. It's what some folks would call a 'growing edge' for us. I practice letting go enough to realize that I don't practice letting go enough! But I think it gets easier to practice as we get better at recognizing its potential and experimenting with the many, many opportunities we get to let go.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has a wise perspective on it--a wise perspective sometimes obscured by overlong sentences and complex syntax!
But it's easy enough to forgive Brother Jon when we stay with him long enough to discover what very insightful things he knows and is committed to passing on. I'm very grateful to him.
What follows is one short chapter from his book, Wherever You Go There You Are.
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The phrase “letting go” has to be high in the
running for New Age cliché of the century. It is overused, abused daily. Yet it
is such a powerful inward maneuver that it merits looking into, cliché or no.
There is something vitally important to be learned from the practice of letting
go.
Letting go means just what it says. It’s an invitation to
cease clinging to anything—whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a
particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with
full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To
let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for
something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be
as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of
them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It’s
akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.
But it’s not only the stickiness of our desires concerning
outer events which catches us. Nor is it only a holding on with our hands. We
hold on with our minds. We catch ourselves, get stuck ourselves, by holding,
often desperately, to narrow views, to self-serving hopes and wishes. Letting
go really refers to choosing to become transparent to the strong pull of our
own likes and dislikes, and of the unawareness that draws us to cling to them.
To be transparent requires that we allow fears and insecurities to play
themselves out in the field of full awareness.
Letting go is only possible if we can bring awareness and
acceptance to the nitty-gritty of just how stuck we can get, if we allow
ourselves to recognize the lenses we slip so unconsciously between observer and
that then filter and color, bend and shape our view. We can open in those
sticky moments, especially if we are able to capture them in awareness and
recognize it when we get caught up in either pursuing and clinging or
condemning and rejecting in seeking our own gain.
Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle
into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or
reject anything. This is a testable proposition. Try it out just for fun. See
for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on
doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.
