The Art of Letting Go: Early Buddhist Teachings for Everyday Life

Maybe you're like me. When I was younger, I craved attachment. I had a very close relationship to somebody who broke my heart. We had been dating for years. We had even gotten made plans for the wedding. And within a few days of the wedding, she backed out. And it was, of course, devastating for me. And this brought to mind, I think directly, the importance that attachment had for me, and the way that attachment could lead to suffering. In early Buddhism, attachment is understood as one of the main causes of our suffering, and that it stems directly from craving. But there are ways of minimizing that suffering, minimizing that attachment, through a practice of letting go, which is what we'll talk about in today's video. In one early sutta, the Buddha was asked, what exactly is the purpose of living the spiritual life under the Buddha? And his answer was, the purpose of living the spiritual life under the Buddha is extinguishment by non-attachment. In this video, I'm going to deal with some of the practical aspects of dealing with attachment, and how a practice of letting go can increase our mental well-being, our relationships, and indeed our overall happiness. So this video will have six parts, six aspects here. First, we'll talk about attachment itself, why letting go of it is difficult. Third, we'll talk about some practices of letting go, then some benefits that those practices can give us, some further practical tips, and then I'll do a recap at the end. First, what is attachment? Now, attachment is something that I think we all naturally crave. When we find something that makes us happy, we naturally attach ourselves to it, we cling to it, we identify ourselves with it, we think of it as who we really are, some part of us, in the sense that if we find happiness in material things, a car, maybe some jewelry, money, that we attach ourselves to it, we want those things more and more, we find it difficult to give them up. We can also attach to people, to family, to friends, to workers, co-workers. We can even attach ourselves to ideas and ideals, such as freedom or country, these abstract things that seem to make life so important for us. In all cases, however, these things to which we attach ourselves are impermanent by their very nature, and we tend to maintain unrealistic expectations of how these things will remain the same, even as they change age and decay. This is perhaps most apparent in physical things that surround us. Let's say a car, when we first buy it, shiny new, but within a short period of time, rust develops, perhaps somebody dings it in the parking lot, it springs a leak somewhere. The same can be true of people that we are attached to. Perhaps they decide to have different interests, their interests change over time, and we tend to grow apart. That's not something we'd planned, and that's not something we had foreseen when we first met the person, but inevitably perhaps it may happen with certain people in certain ways. And if our growth does not coincide, somebody who was a friend at one point becomes a distant friend, or we lose the friendship. And even with ideas and ideals, the concepts involved in them may change over time, or from situation to situation. What freedom means to us at one time may be indeed completely different from what it means to us or to other people at a different time. What a country is at one time may be different from another time. Our ideas and ideals may be coincident with people around us when we're young, but then change as we grow older, or the reverse. So it's this constant change in the world, and indeed constant change in ourself, that brings suffering. Buddhism talks about the three fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. And greed, or craving, is the direct cause of this attachment, which then brings suffering. It brings suffering because sometimes we cannot find those things to attach ourselves to. There's something that we want, but we can't achieve. Want to attach, but we can't find. Or, we may have found it, but now that we've found it, we have to expend effort, energy, stress, worry, on retaining it. On keeping it the same, so that it serves us the same function as it always has. We have to maintain that car, or that relationship, or perhaps argue with somebody to try to bring them to our side so that we can maintain them in a certain way, fitting into our lives. Or, we may lose the thing. We may lose our sense of freedom. We may lose our sense of country. We may lose a friend, or a family member. We may lose a possession. And in all of those cases, of course, suffering follows. Second, letting go of these attachments is difficult. We seem to be biologically wired to want to accumulate more and more stuff in order to feel safe and secure. Whether that stuff be material things that we can perhaps use at some time, whether it be friends, family, other people around us that we can sort of accumulate, put on our side. All of these things make it seem as though the important part of life is to accumulate more and more. It may seem to us, indeed, that our safety and our very happiness depends upon this continued accumulation. Now, there's some truth to this. Having some things, of course, makes life easier and makes life safer and more secure. Having friends and family can do the same. But this attitude of continual accumulation and attachment can be misapplied in ways that lead to our suffering. Basically, our attachment to these things leads us to believe that we can control our lives through the possessions that we have, through our attachments. That our life, our future, is under our direct control. And that if we let up our attachments, if we begin to let go of our attachments, our control will somehow slip out of our fingers. But if we begin to look at that idea of control, we can begin to see how it's an illusion. Because we really don't have control over our lives. In fact, we don't even have true control over the things that we seem to possess and hold and that we're attached to. That's the whole problem, is that these things change under our very fingers in ways that lead to our suffering. So, if we can begin to see the problem of trying to control everything, we can begin to see why letting go is so difficult. Third, we can turn to some practices of letting go. And we can begin this idea of practices with some mental practices of simply considering the idea of letting go. What is the problem here? What are the concerns we have? If we begin to think of holding on to the world, like trying to hold water in our hands, we begin to see how gripping it more tightly simply makes it flow more quickly out. That we cannot really grasp things that are fluid and flowing. This growing awareness of how the world is fluid and how we really cannot control that kind of change. When we begin to see that, we'll begin to relax around our ordinary tendency to grasp things and hold to them. The same, we'll find, is true often with people. That is, the closer and harder we grasp onto them, the more that we push them away. In this sense, letting go doesn't mean isolating ourselves, and it certainly doesn't mean pushing other people away from us. What it means is allowing the other person to breathe in their own space. We begin to learn the deep truth that we cannot change another person unless they themselves want to change. And even then, change in a particular direction that is the same as yours, let's say, or the way you would like, may not be possible. We begin to learn that true happiness, our own true happiness, does not depend upon our craving for the attachment with other people, but instead on a more open awareness that our happiness does not depend upon agreement with the attitudes and opinions of other people. True deep caring depends upon our ability to hold the other person as they really are, and not on expecting or requiring them to be as we want them to be. Another practice that we might consider is to pursue a more minimalist lifestyle with our possessions. The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright used to build houses that didn't have attics or basements in order to force people not to hoard and collect junk that they would stick in attics and basements. Of course, nowadays what we'll do is, if we don't have an attic or a basement or enough space, we'll go and rent a storage unit somewhere and chuck stuff that we don't want into the storage unit and leave it until we're dead and then somebody else is gonna crack open the storage unit and throw all the stuff out for us. We know how life tends to work that way for us, and that's the kind of attitude that we perhaps should consider getting away from. I've talked about how our house fire, which some of you may have heard about. I did some videos about it quite a while ago. We had a house fire a few years ago, a couple years ago, and although I did lose a few things that I'm sorry to have lost, the vast majority of what was lost and thrown out and fire damaged and smoke damaged was a burden off my shoulders, off of our shoulders, my wife and my shoulders. Less things to worry about, less things to have to deal with later. So in that sense, we can find that a lighter, more minimalist lifestyle is freeing in that way, that there's less to be attached to and that that's a good thing. When it comes to our ideas and beliefs, letting go means holding them more lightly, not having to be right all the time or get in the last word. It means an awareness that we ourselves can be wrong and indeed often have been wrong in the past, and that we've changed our mind many, many times over our lifetime. If we can just sit and spend a little time thinking about all the ways that our own opinions and views and beliefs have changed over time, we can begin to see how we were wrong in the past, or at least we disagree with the way we believe things to be in the past. Maybe the same problem exists now. And this attitude can help us to live a life freer of stress and conflict with others. Now this doesn't mean that we don't have opinions, much less that we're completely unprincipled. It simply means that the beliefs and opinions that we do have are ones that we hold a little bit more lightly, with open hands we might say, rather than clutching them hard and being unwilling to consider another option. We could also say that far from being unprincipled, one of our basic principles is that of epistemic humility, that is, being humble about our own ability to know the world. And again, we recognize that trying to change another person's opinion almost never works, and simply leads to argument, dispute, anger, hatred, enmity. And so, although at times trying to convince others is worthwhile, we have to be careful in how we do that. Another practice of letting go can be in formal meditation. When we're sitting down to do mindfulness meditation, we can close our eyes, focus on the breath, and simply become aware of the thoughts, the feelings that arise and pass. When a thought arises, we practice letting it go, letting it simply float off to be replaced by a different thought or a different breath. We can even reflect on our obsessions and worries, and consider, spend some time considering, what were our obsessions and worries a month ago, or a year ago, or 10 years ago? I can guarantee you that they were not the same. And the things that obsess you now and worry you now, they were not there a year ago, or a month ago, perhaps. And you can, by taking this kind of mindfulness exercise, become aware of the constant arising and passing of all things, which, on its own, that kind of awareness can make it easier, more natural, to simply let things go. Because they will go on their own anyway. Or we can practice loving-kindness, an attitude of well-wishing, wishing well on other people, on other beings, even with the awareness that they themselves are changeable and imperfect. Fourth, let's turn to some of the benefits of letting go. As we begin to let go of our attachments to the world, we, I think, will discover a lessening of our stress, a lessening of a feeling of reactivity, through an understanding that our grasping onto the world is not going to help us control things, because that ultimate control is always outside of our grasp. This lowers our sense of stress, our sense of worry, and gives us more ability to deal with things, a stronger capability to deal with things that arise unexpectedly. We understand that no situation is completely under our control, so we're better prepared when that lack of control asserts itself. This practice of letting go also helps us to have more genuine experiences with other people, more genuine relationships, because we're not intending to or trying to change the way they are through our attachment to them, through our identification with them, through our knee-jerk tendency to assume that our happiness depends upon their behaving in a certain way towards us. This, in turn, allows us to cultivate a more genuine kindness towards them, one that's not dependent upon our agreement on every issue. It allows the other person to express themselves more fully in our presence, because we're no longer trying to change and manipulate them through our attachment. And on the whole, by reducing our tendency to crave more and more, it allows us to be more content with the way things are. Not in the sense of attaching ourselves more strongly to things that are actually around us, but simply in the sense of being able to enjoy things as they are without trying to change them, and hopefully with the wise awareness that the way things are will itself change over time. Fifth, I want to touch on three practical tips here. First, when it comes to being mindful, one process, one strategy we can take is to be aware when attachment arises, because it will arise, and not try to push it away or reject it, but simply investigate it. How does it feel to be attached to something? How does it feel to identify ourselves with a person or an ideal or some object around us? How does that feel? And how does it feel when we perhaps relax around that attachment? Second, we can focus on the impermanence around us, whether it's within formal meditation, the impermanence of sounds and the breath and feelings, or whether it's impermanence in daily life. To simply be aware of the impermanence of the world around us. That awareness itself then can sink in deeper into our awareness, deeper into our wisdom, and help the whole process along. And third, gratitude. We can pursue a practice of being grateful for the things that we have, with the wise awareness that those things themselves may change, but that whatever is there, there's going to be always something to be grateful for, even if it's simply being grateful for the wise awareness that things themselves change. Sixth, let's do a recap here. Buddhism tells us that our cravings and attachments are a major source of our stress, our anxiety, and our suffering, but that all of this can be alleviated by a practice of giving up, of letting go. As the Buddha said in one early sutta, when that mendicant has given up ignorance and given rise to knowledge, they aren't attached to sensual pleasures, beliefs, precepts and observances, or theories of a self. Not being attached, they're not anxious. Not being anxious, they personally attain nirvana. So here, letting go doesn't mean becoming detached from or indifferent to life. The Buddha himself certainly was not detached nor indifferent. Indeed, he spent decades teaching people about the Dharma. He was very concerned with how people were and had great compassion for them. Letting go is rather about releasing our unhealthy tendencies towards assuming that things are going to be permanent, towards trying to control the world in ways that are outside of our possibility to control. So I invite you to try some of the practices that I've outlined here. Sit mindfully for a time. Allow kindness to release your tendency to try to control others and mold them to your image. Become aware of the limitations of your own ability to control the way things are. And find things to be grateful for right now. If you're able to practice some of this, then let us know how it goes down in the comments. I'd be really interested to hear. Meanwhile, if you're interested in this further question of what the difference is between mental detachment and non-attachment in Buddhism, I have a video about that which I'll leave up here on the screen as well if you want to see that and hear more about it. If you're getting something out of this discussion of mine, consider taking a look at my Patreon page, which is linked up here on the screen and down below in the notes, and see if you want to help support the channel and the work that I'm doing here. Thanks so much, and we'll catch you on the next video. And meanwhile, all of you, be well.