Ajahn Chah writes: “If you let go a little, you will find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you will find absolute peace and tranquility.”
Among Buddha’s earliest teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the Noble 8-fold path which is the path from suffering to liberation.
The cause of suffering in the second noble truth is attachment, sometimes called greed, sometimes craving or wanting, sometimes striving. It has been illustrated as a closed fist. We have all known moments of grasping and moments of letting go. In our national scene recently, we may have been aware of our own deep wanting for things to be different from what they are. As meditators, we may have also experienced this deep wanting and the frustration of it as intense suffering. And many of us have turned that wanting into action. If this action is wise, it can be freeing. It allows us to do what we can to bring a different energy to the situation. We get caught, however, when we have expectations of a certain outcome. Certainly, we may wish for a certain outcome but our expectations are what cause us sorrow. If we can’t get what we want when we want it, we will suffer.
There are so many areas where this wanting comes to the fore. Certainly around our basic survival needs - air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter from the elements, from dangers. These are healthy needs and satisfying them is essential. But these needs and their satisfaction must also be in balance. Wanting too much food, too much in shelter and safety can lead to suffering of a different kind.
This applies to our meditations as well. It is wholesome to want good things from our meditation, to want to be free of our entanglements of mind and heart, to be free of suffering. And yet, we can get out of balance in our meditation by striving too hard which is a common pitfall for meditators. The mind can be so stubborn, so flighty, so uncontrollable that we may bear down harder to concentrate on our breath, striving to force our minds to stay with the meditation object.
Ajahn Passano in his book on metta called Abundant, Exalted, Immeasurable, says it this way: “For the mind to settle, there needs to be an application of interested energy and ease. If there’s too much forcing, it creates tension; if it’s too loose, the mind gets nebulous and cloudy and drifts. We need to balance the mind by working with what is.” (p.6) He further advises, “Pay attention to what the mind is doing. Balance is an important quality to bring to the practice. How can you best sustain the continuity of awareness? That’s where the mind becomes peaceful. It doesn’t become peaceful just by forcing the mind onto the object and holding it there. Even it you succeed in doing that, it doesn’t actually make the mind that peaceful.”
So relaxing, allowing, being easeful, letting go of results, accepting - these are all words and expressions we can use to talk ourselves into letting go a little. If we let go a little, we get a little peace. We all know how this feels. When we let go of our anger towards a family member… or let go of our desire to have what someone else has…or finally see through an obsessive thought pattern and let it go …. We get a little peace. And the peace feels wonderful. And we might want more of that peace and begin striving to let go until we see ourselves grasping again. Then we can sit back and allow just as much peace as there is.
This great attachment and letting go is nowhere more stark than in the dying process. Wanting to live is hard-wired into our DNA since we were the smallest amoebae. All beings want to live; all beings want to be happy, to be comfortable, to be peaceful; beings of all kinds don’t want to die.
Part of our practice of letting go is learning to be with what is. When we sit in one position, we may be happy for 15 minutes or so. And then our knees hurt or our back aches, or our foot goes to sleep, or we realize we are thirsty, hungry, or we have an itch. Then we have choices. We can change our position. That may lead us to change our position over and over again looking for the perfect position. We can turn our attention to our breath with greater diligence and sometimes the discomfort is forgotten in the concentration practice. And we can choose to do nothing but to observe the discomfort. This takes some discernment. We don’t want to injure our knees in meditation but we may find we can tolerate some discomfort without lasting harm. Or we may discover the pain is mixed with fear and once we have allowed the fear, it dissipates and the pain is less noticeable.
So our practice is not just about sitting blissfully. It is also noticing what arises on our way to blissful sitting. It is experiencing the frustration, the discomfort, the fear and anger of not getting the sit we want. And it is finally remembering to let go, let be, not to get too involved in solving our transient wants and desires, aversions and discomforts.
And this process is practice for the increasing pains and discomforts that the body and mind will experience on the way to dissolution. Many people fear the ending of the body and the inevitable suffering that attends this end more than they fear the end of consciousness. However it is for us, letting go is a practice. Our mindfulness and meditation practices have been helping us relax into the vagaries of life all along. Things will not always go our way. What we like will not last long enough. What we don’t like will come all too soon. We learn to allow, to abandon our striving, to open our hands to what is. It’s called practice for a reason.
People often think the Buddhists are too pre-occupied with death. Yet our elemental existence is at the core of all of our beings. Some people live in such a way that they don’t think about it. The Buddhist point of view is that if we live knowing our death can come at any time, we value each minute of our precious lives and do what we can to live each moment fully - up to our last breath. And this may mean practicing to let go a little, a lot, and, if it is meant to be, completely.