No doubt at some point you’ve heard the meditation instruction to “let go.” Letting go is a valuable practice; however, many people make the mistake of letting go of the wrong things. We do not need to let go of the objects we perceive, the feelings we sense, or the events we know to be occurring. Instead, we let go of the craving for things to be different than they are.
When we are caught in desire, we disconnect from what is real now. In that moment of reaching for something else, present experience is unsatisfactory and we also unknowingly create the conditions for future discontent. There is suffering—dukkha.
Three kinds of craving are identified in the Buddhist tradition: craving for sensual pleasures, for becoming, and for non-becoming. When we crave a thing or an experience, to become something or to avoid something else, or when we assert self into experience through desire and aversion, we are seeking satisfaction that cannot last. There might be a moment of relief, a brief delight when a desire was satisfied, but the pleasure never lasts, because it is characteristic of craving to fixate on yet another object, experience, or perception.
What do we do?
In the practice of letting go, we focus our attention on our relationship to what we perceive instead of on the object we perceive. As part of this, we investigate how we relate to life and to the individual patterns that condition our response to perception.
This is not an abstract and unattainable teaching: simply consider what is real right now. Notice what you are missing now when you are entangled by craving for future satisfaction. Notice what your mind reaches out to desire. Notice what lures and entraps your attention. Turn your attention to what is happening right now in the present, not in the future, not in a fantasy. Let go of preoccupations with personal conditioned reactions, and relax the mental constructions that reinforce formations of me, mine, myself, and I. Let go of the habits of wanting, craving, clinging, and attachment.
Letting go is an undoing, a cessation of a habitual pattern. It happens without altering the experiences that arise at the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind doors. When we see how habits feed unwholesome states of desire, causing craving and attachment, we stop feeding the habits. A fire will go out when it is not fed by grass and wood, and a glass of water will become still when it is set down. When starved of energy, craving ceases. By practicing this kind of letting go, you can gradually stop creating the causes of suffering.
We don’t have to become anyone. All we have to do is stop giving fuel to the wanting. Then we will discover that in the absence of craving, we are right here, where we are, with what is real, present in the here and now.
“As a drop of water does not stick to a lotus leaf or as a lotus flower is untainted by the water, so the sage does not cling to anything seen, heard, or thought.”
Sutta Nipata, Jara Sutta, verse 812:
Shaila Catherine is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online Dhamma classroom and Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley in California.
Shaila and Phil Jones will be leading a residential retreat for Mid America Dharma in St. Louis November 3-10, 2019.