Letting Go

Very helpful teachings.

Interestingly last week I just changed my MSN messenger message to 'The more we want to let go, the more we reify'. When the student is ready the teacher will appear :). Add me on MSN at iamnick@pop.allomail.com  

http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/letting-go?offer=dharma

Judy Lief teaches us to walk through life without holding on.

By Judy Lief

IN OUR FAST-PACED SOCIETY, letting go is often paired with moving on. People encourage friends who have suffered a loss to learn to let go of the past and get on with living. In New Age terminology, “just let go” has become an all-purpose piece of advice. But we humans are very cunning: While we talk a lot about letting go, we usually find a way to have our cake and eat it, too—to let go and still manage to hang on. In fact, it is easy to use the notion of letting go as yet another ego-tool. We can use it to prop ourselves up, to cloud things over, and uphold our illusion of solidity. We are so clever: we can take a concept like letting go, so threatening to our ego-fixation, and turn it completely on its head, so that instead it becomes a credential, an ego adornment. We can take pride in our letting go and revel in how pure we are now that we have pared down and simplified and become so much less materialistic. We can mask our laziness by seeing it instead as a letting go of ambition; we can mask our inability to connect with other people with the more spiritual notion of letting go of frivolous attachments. The possibilities are endless. So if we are to deepen our understanding of letting go, it is important to begin with an insight into how easily it can be distorted. Then we may be able to discriminate between a pretense of letting go and the real thing.

To learn to let go, it is necessary to understand how averse we are to change, and how attached we are to our idea of a solid, separate self. At times, of course, we do want change, for various and sundry reasons. But when we begin to bump up against the fact that no matter what we want or do not want, change just happens, we begin to feel a little uneasy. We feel protective. Of what? We’re not completely sure, but we hang on anyway, struggling to secure our ground. We are reactive and we dig in our heels. The greater the threat, the more tightly we hold on. We try to capture something moving and to make it still, so that an experience that has come and gone seems still to exist. Viewing our life as something we can fix and possess, we become completely attached to our mental snapshot of ourselves and equally threatened by its potential loss. We have taken a tiny speck of the vastness of the universe and staked it out as our territory, and now are stuck with protecting it from change.

HOW DO WE DEEPEN our approach to letting go and undercut some of these distortions? The Buddhist teachings provide a pretty clear answer. The starting point is realizing that letting go is not a dramatic moment we build up to some time in the future. It is happening now, in the present moment—it is not singular but ongoing. Letting go is based on our present realization of the reality of impermanence.

Change is continuous in spite of our efforts to resist it. We begin to realize that we do not have any way to stop it or to slow it down. The more we try, the more we suffer. But there is a way to let go, to break this cycle of suffering. We can slow down and have a closer look at our experience of it. When we have a look, we begin to realize what we have been doing, and the whole enterprise begins to feel more and more dubious. It becomes more difficult to hide from what in our hearts we know to be true—the fact of impermanence. We recognize that we have fabricated a false and fixed identity based on self-deception, delusion, and fear; that we have enslaved ourselves to the never-ending project of shoring it up. And we begin to long for another way of going about things. The process of letting go begins at the point when we recognize how trapped we are. Being trapped is the bad news, but the fact that something or someone has recognized we’re trapped is the good news. It’s as if we have spent all our life living in a house with very dirty windows, so dirty we had no idea any windows were there. What at first had seemed quite cozy gradually begins to feel claustrophobic. We begin to question what has been so safe and familiar. That questioning is very powerful. To our surprise, as we gingerly explore our little house, a smidgen of dirt falls off a window and we discover a peephole—we see that there is an entire world outside. That tiny glimpse awakens our desire to be free.

Even the smallest glimpse of freedom heightens our awareness of the pain we have created by our ego-fixation. Seeing the contrast is what inspires us to go forward on the path. In particular, each time we sit on the cushion and meditate, we relax and let go a little bit more. The notion we’ve held onto—that if we don’t keep up our ego-momentum something bad is going to happen—dissolves bit by bit. In a traditional analogy of walking the path, it is said that our ego-attachment is like a pair of shoes. Without such shoes we wouldn’t start out on the path, although as we walk along, we find that our shoes begin to break down and wear away. But if someone told you to toss out your shoes right at the start, you would be offended. “How dare you! Do you think there’s something wrong with my shoes? I love these shoes!”

As you walk the path, the letting go happens naturally, just as your shoes wear away. You do not need to make a dramatic statement by tossing them out; you just need to continue on. The path that initially seemed so inviting and accommodating slowly and surely begins to be more sandpapery and scrapes away tougher and tougher layers of leather.

From beginning to end, the path of dharma is about letting go. As we let go of one thing along the way, we find ourselves attaching to the next. As we let go of gross attachments, we find our more subtle attachments becoming heightened. For instance, we may let go of clinging to material possessions, but then find ourselves totally attached to our philosophy of simplicity. It is hard to let go of things, harder to let go of ideas, and even harder to let go of spiritual pretensions. Over time, as we familiarize ourselves with the many subtle twists and turns of letting go, we begin to be more savvy about how ego steps in to appropriate the entire process. In the millions of mini-decisions we make day by day and moment by moment, we are challenged each time either to let go or to re-solidify. To let go cleanly—without re-solidifying—we can practice what my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche referred to as “disowning”:

Even though the acceptance of what is happening may be confusing, just accept the given situation and do not try to make it something else; do not try to make it into an educational process at all. Just see it, perceive it, and then abandon it. If you experience something and then disown that experience, you provide a space between that knowledge and yourself, which permits it simply to take its course.

The letting go itself is not held, but immediately dropped. Then letting go becomes simple and natural, like a snake shedding its skin.

The process of letting go is a tender one. We should notice the poignancy and humor of this very human struggle. It is less of a battle and more a path of acceptance and accommodation to the natural arising and dissolving of our ordinary experience. The two-step process—first letting go, and then letting go of the letting go—allows us to approach the idea of letting go gently, precisely, step by step. In doing so we see that even though we so often tend to re-solidify our experience, between the letting go and the re-solidifying there are real glimpses of openness.

ALTHOUGH LETTING GO IS SOMETHING that happens all along the Buddhist path, it tends to rise to the surface most vividly in relation to death. When dealing with terminal illness, someone else’s or, finally, our own, we are bluntly confronted with the ultimate futility of holding onto anything. Our concept of our own mortality, once safely distant and abstract, suddenly gets close and personal in the face of death, exposing powerful emotional undercurrents and deep attachments. At this point, telling someone to simply “let go” may not be very skillful or effective. The problem with the phrase is that there seems to be something solid to let go of, and someone solid to do the letting go. Furthermore, trying to force an experience tends to be a stumbling block in terms of practice.

Death has a way of bringing us back to what is most essential. In the presence of death, I have found that many extraneous concerns and preoccupations fall away quite simply and naturally. A lot of letting go just happens, simply and effortlessly. So we can approach death by attuning ourselves to its presence and all that it has to teach us. In that heightened atmosphere, our own sticking points become more obvious. In working with a dying individual, we can begin with our own letting go—especially letting go of how we want that person to be. We can relax our opinions and moral judgments as to how that person is going about dying. We can be a more true support, less cluttered by our own fixations. On that basis, we can encourage the dying person to use her remaining time to continue on her journey—to let go of attachments and distractions, and at the same time to hold what is truly meaningful.

In terms of our own practice, when we ourselves come to die, we can remain in the space between holding on and letting go. In that space, you are not trying to get rid of anything or force anything to happen. Instead, you are being present with experience, whatever it is, as it arises and falls. Things go, accept that, be with what is. Being present is the best way of letting go, and, curiously, as we let go we become more present. It may even be possible, as Trungpa Rinpoche suggested, to die with curiosity, and to breathe our last breath without expectation or regret.

Judy Lief is a Buddhist teacher, a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and the author of Making Friends with Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality. She lives in Vermont with her husband, Chuck, and her dog, Jasper.

Image: Vulture, Angelo Filomeno, 2004, embroidery on silk shantung stretched over linen with crystals and garnets, 116 x 80 inches. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY, NEW YORK

CHOGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE ON LETTING GO

Obviously, letting go is more than just relaxation. It is relaxation based on being in tune with the environment, the world. One of the important principles of letting go is living in the challenge. But this does not mean living with a constant crisis. For example, suppose your banker calls and says that your account is overdrawn, and the same day your landlord tells you that you are about to be evicted for failing to pay your rent. To respond to this crisis, you get on the telephone and call all your friends to see if you can borrow enough money to avert the crisis. Living in the challenge is not based on responding to extraordinary demands that you have created for yourself by failing to relate to the details of your life. For the warrior, every moment is a challenge to be genuine, and each challenge is delightful. When you let go properly, you can relax and enjoy the challenge.

From Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa; ©1984. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Talks on Mindfulness, Chogyam Trungpa

Posted by Wisdomeye in http://www.sgforums.com/forums/1728/topics/401155
I find the following sections very helpful in guiding our daily mindfulness practice.

Synopsis/paraphrase of talk 5, Mindfulness of Mind

May 22, 2010

This talk is about relating to the variety of experiences in practice, experiences of clarity and confusion.





Ground: Balance of tight and loose, inclusive and restrictive


Mindfulness includes watchfulness. We know what we are doing, what's going on. There is a watchful intelligence functioning. Practice is not a purely mechanical process but includes intelligence.


So, there is the experience of conflicts, struggle within practice and experiences that come up when we practice, and also the technique itself, coming back to breathing. There is a sense of balance in relating to conflicts, but also not indulging in them. One accepts conflicts as part of the process of meditation, but also controls them by coming back to the technique. One is inclusive, including experiences and whatever mental states arise, keeping things fresh, not too rigid. On the other hand, one does not get lost in daydreams or fist-fights with experience. Not too tight -- not too loose. The watchful intelligence is "light-handed."


Not too tight, not too loose also means being aware of being tight or loose. Different people tend to have different styles, more tight or more loose, and some go back and forth.




Path: Simplicity, the small immediacy of experience, the dot of nowness


Mindfulness of mind, of being with mental experiences, brings the four foundations of mindfulness together. It is about developing a sense of accuracy.


If you are not there, you miss yourself. But if you realize you are not there, you are there. Back to square one. This is a simple matter. It is about you and your world. It's not particularly about enlightenment. It's about the small area that you are at moment by moment. We are just little people concerned with this dot that exists....nowness.


Mindfulness of mind is the austere attitude of "one at a time." All experience is personal; it cannot be thrown away. It is limited, "so limited that there is no room to be claustrophobic." Each experience is a one shot deal, thinking. "I think I hear a sound.... I think I smell scents.... I think I feel hot ...." Sexual fantasy -- thinking.






Fruition: The imperialism of mindfulness. Mindfulness and totality


Everything, every experience, is included in mindfulness. If you try to get away from mindfulness, when you notice that, that is also mindfulness. The back door is also the front door. If you try to sneak up on yourself, you are already there.


Bare attention, even, is not two personalities. There is watchfulness, but watcher and actor cannot be separated. Bare attention to what you are doing is impossible. That would require two personalities. There is no one to watch you being mindful. "Bare attention is being there all at once." If you try to look at yourself, that's "too much watcher.... So just watch. And when you watch, you are there."


Synopsis, Talk 4, Techniques of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Effort






May 19, 2010




This is a talk about discipline, patience, and exertion in relation to practice and everyday life conduct. It is about the effort involved in relating to mind-itself, simple self-consciousness.






Discipline arises as a question because of the apparent conflict between instinct, referred to here initially as doing what one would like, and ethics. Pejoratively, discipline or effort means to go against the "indulgency of the natural flow and behaving oneself," being a good boy or girl. This could feel alienating, and could bring loss of heart. Effort/discipline seems like a struggle, unnatural, counter to instinct. So this is a teaching on working with resistance, resistance based on the conflict between doing what one would like, which seems natural, and practice. One could feel like a naughty schoolboy or schoolgirl, not wanting to practice, or seeing practice as some punishment or deprivation.


In mindfulness of effort, Chogyam Trungpa points out that instinct, our basic mental equipment, is not just a vague sense of naturalness or flow, but is related to simple self-consciousness, "unconditional self-consciousness," referred to elsewhere as "first thought." This is the first flash of relating with anything, simple duality, separateness. This goes back to the definition of mind (sem) in the earlier talks as "that which has an other." Mindfulness of effort has to do with developing the "clear-seeing vision" that is able to relate to this simple mind, which is always available.


So discipline, here, means being subtle enough to relate to simple dualism, this and that. Since the potential for this simplicity, this plain cognition, is already part of our mental equipment, it is referred to as instinct. In mindfulness of effort, this basic structure is exploited as the basis of practice.


In particular, this effort in meditation as basic discipline is related to simply getting to the cushion and engaging with mind and body on the cushion, "breaking the ice," or, one might say, working with resistance. Just touching the resistance itself, or the resist-or, is practice. It is "easy to break down" the naughty schoolboy mentality by simply being aware of resistance. With that awareness, one has started already, one is there already. One is already back. Resistance becomes the "doorstep." [This is a basic theme in many of Trungpa Rinpoche's mindfulness teachings. For instance, the seminars on which the book The Path is the Goal is based also include teachings related to using resistance as a stepping-stone and overcoming the naughty schoolboy mentality.]


Patience means to maintain nonaggression in practice. Aggression, here, has to do with looking for the results of sitting practice, or evaluating one's practice, with the notion of trying to gain something. However, mindfulness is not about trying to eliminate all goal-oriented thinking from our lives. If we try to do that, "you can't even open your mouth." But when there is a greater "spiritual implication," behind one's practice, a self-improvement project, that's a "greater goal, which is a greater problem."


Resistance only becomes solidified when one makes too big a deal out of it, identifies it as a "problem," and there is too much ambition -- for instance, the ambition or goal to obliterate duality, or to become a better person, which is a kind of aggression towards oneself. Patience is not looking for a way out of resistance, but a willingness and interest in relating to resistance. The key to this is to "start with what you are," be with what you are.


Exertion, then, is the ongoing practice and willingness to use dualistic mind, including the experience of resistance itself, as a stepping stone to mindfulness. From this point of view, as discussed in the questions and answers, there is no such thing as a "big resistance." Anytime one simply touches resistance itself, one is already back. That is already mindfulness. Simple self-consciousness, dualistic mind, is always available as a stepping-stone.


Beyond that, exertion is an unceasing interest in sitting practice and awareness practice. Looking for alternatives to what's actually going on -- one's mood, physicality, mental state -- is anti-exertion. In that sense, exertion is nondiscrimination. The metaphor is driving along a wet highway at night, the wet highway of life, just driving along and "disregarding the sign posts," and not looking for other routes. Exertion is continuity, steadiness, not looking for alternatives. Exertion is not making a big deal out of anything along the way -- feeling good experiences, feeling bad experiences -- but using everything that arises as a stepping-stone to mindfulness.


"Mindfulness awareness practice requires a lot of work, energy, effort, and surrendering. It has to do with recognizing that a working base does exist and not looking for an alternative to that. It is "bare attention that keeps going further."






Talk 3: Mindfulness of life/livelihood






May 18, 2010






Ground


This particular talk on mindfulness of life, or livelihood, (also "life attitude") addresses, first of all, the general misunderstanding that the meditative state is something to be captured, then cherished and nursed. "This brings regression on the path." Such an approach kills "freshness", and turns meditation into a "domestic hassle," "house chores," "a painful demand."


Path


Instead, while the object of awareness is focused on, "at the same time we disown it." Being willing to disown the object of awareness and disowning the meditative state itself is an attitude and approach which brings confidence. One is confident enough not to have to secure one’s practice, but just to "tune in" to practice. Trungpa Rinpoche refers to this approach, connecting to the tangibility of the meditative state and letting that go, as "touch and go."


So, all life experiences are included; nothing is rejected. In particular, the common human survival-mind, the tendency to protect oneself from death with every breath, with every living experience, is not rejected, but acknowledged and used. "Whenever there is a sense of survival instinct, that is transmuted into awareness of a sense of being, a sense of ‘survived,’ a sense of existence [...] I am alive. I am here. Sobeit." Touch and go.


In that way, the instinct to live, to survive, is shown to already contain mindfulness, both on the cushion and in everyday life. This "brings a sense of clarity, skill, intelligence... You are already living. Let it be that way. Let every beat of your heart and breath be mindfulness."


This approach to practice is not about "fantasizing a pure environment" or a pure mind. "You accept fear and pleasure as they are. Wherever you are, however you are, you are in the midst of it."


Fruition


Having "such an accurate relationship to the present situation" brings strength, energy, and power... dignity, ... delightfulness." If one tries to get away from the energy that is going on, that is what brings weakness. To reiterate, connecting with what’s going on at this moment includes the survival-mind, and the basic approach to working with any experience, positive or negative, whatever pleasure we might want to hold onto, whatever pain or threat we might want to reject, is "touch and go."


Postscript commentary


Unlike the "first turning" mindfulness teachings, these are not contemplative analytic practices aimed at discovering how the five skandhas do not constitute a permanent, independent, unitary self. While not promoting indulgence in or addiction to pleasurable states of mind, these teachings are not designed to help the practitioner develop revulsion towards seemingly pleasurable but actually painful worldly experiences. Similarly, unlike the "second turning" teachings, these are not contemplations which reveal how each of the skandhas are, in themselves, empty of self nature.


Rather, they are instructions on how to be, and how to conduct oneself on the cushion and in postmeditation. Acharya Richard John, following Dz. Pönlop Rinpoche, refers to the Vidyadhara’s mindfulness teachings as essential instructions, which reveal how to practice, how to place the mind. In this, all experience is included, including the mind continuously concerned with survival, which all sentient beings have.


Note. The next talk, talk 4, on mindfulness of effort has never been published.


Talk2: Mindfulness of body/forms






May 1, 2010






In this second talk on mindfulness of body/forms, Trungpa Rinpoche starts off by presenting mindfulness of body as being related to "the need for a sense of solidness, sense of being, sense of groundedness," in contrast to the vagueness and grasping of ego-process described in talk 1, and the tendency to "perch," to put special demands on one’s body. Here, he describes how placing one’s body simply on the ground with good posture and placing the mind simply on the breathing brings a sense of being, a sense of groundedness.


The basic logic goes: Mind takes on the shape of whatever it is placed on. As well, mind imitates body. So, when "psychosomatic body" simply places itself on the ground, mind takes on that shape as well and become simple. Thoughts become simple, "flat-bottomed. [...] There is the feeling that you are actually doing something ... a project of some kind which has a flat bottom ... rather than wings."


With respect to placing the mind, the technique of identifying with and following the outbreath is also introduced in this talk, identifying with the outbreath and letting the inbreath be "just gap, space...You breathe out and dissolve and gap." So psychosomatic body is placed simply on the ground and mind imitates that simplicity, that "flat-bottomness." And mind is placed on breathing out, the simplicity of the outbreath.


In the questions and answers, he makes a number of points. Among these, he encourages people not to be too tight, not to be too deliberate, not to be industrious or ambitious, but to be simple, to let go and go along with the technique.


Nota bene: It is easy to confuse this encouragement to simplicity with the notion that we’re not supposed to think at all, not even supposed to know what we’re doing. It’s because we know what we’re doing—we know something about how mind works and how we confuse ourselves—that we take on this simple approach. We can actually afford to exist, to be, simply, rather than jumping all over the place, or letting frivolous projects jump into our laps.


Introduction






April 24, 2010


The notes on Chronicles introducing the previous seminar, "Training the Mind," also provide a good introduction to this "Techniques of Mindfulness" seminar and to this 1973-1975 stream of teachings by the Vidyadhara which present the basic mindfulness and awareness teachings.


This first talk from the "Techniques of Mindfulness" seminar may be best studied in conjunction with the first talk from the "Training the Mind" seminar, also posted on the Chronicles, as well as the first talk from the Naropa meditation seminar. The notes and audio for this seminar are also posted on this website.


As well, the transcript of the 1973 seminary talk "8 Stages of Consciousness," if you have it, or the audio related to that, also applies. These together provide a broad window on the Vidyadhara's typical presentations of view as preparation for studying the four foundations of mindfulness and mindfulness-awareness practice in general.


Talk 1: Techniques of Mindfulness, summary


April 24, 2010






Trungpa Rinpoche begins this first talk by drawing the students away from speculative notions about the nature of spirituality and motivation, thoughts of power or transcendental happiness, or the project of searching for the best or easiest spiritual path. Instead, he asks us to consider mind itself as the necessary starting point and the basis for the path.


As in the seminar given in Colorado the previous week, Trungpa Rinpoche defines sentient beings as those who have a sense of other, discriminating awareness. Basic mind, sem (sems), in turn, is defined as that which can think of the other. Since this simple sense of other is too boring, and regular daydreaming and discursive thoughts are not confirming enough, waves of emotions are generated to prove oneself and one’s existence. This may start out as a game, but the game could turn desperate and deadly. (Elsewhere, Trungpa Rinpoche does go into further descriptions of the workings of mind, which are well worth investigating, such as teachings on the five skandhas and eight consciousnesses.)


Further frustration of emotional ego-process causes one to create a thing called "god," or "saviors, gurus, mahatmas… whatever." External objects are created as "hit men," so "you could re-round your territory again." This amusing, touching, and sad process is all mind.


Later on, Rinpoche briefly discusses the most desperate expression of this as psychotic process. "Mind cannot exist on itself alone, but on the other hand it cannot exist if it’s completely crowded, overcrowded. Mind looks for a mate, a friend. Mind losing that survival game could become psychotic. Meditation practice is trying to save oneself from psychosis."


Trungpa Rinpoche further states that, to meditate, it’s important to understand mind’s complexities, or at least that certain aspects of experience are organized by different aspects of mind. "Generally we get frustrated when we meditate, feeling wretched, hassled, putting all experiences in the same bag and blaming them on ‘this thing.’"


In this talk, he says that in order not to get caught up in some vague notion of mind as unworkable, the definitions of three traditional aspects of mind: sems, rikpa, yid are presented.


Sem (sems) was defined before as that very basic mind that has an other, that can think of the other. All mental experience is experience of "other than mind" by mind.


Rikpa is defined as a cleverness, sharpness, that develops from basic mind, sems. Rikpa is like a research worker that sees things from all angles, anything that could go wrong. It is "an intelligence which judges… which acts as spokesman for you and the rest of the world in a very simple way."


Yi (yid) is usually referred to as the sixth consciousness, the "switchboard or central headquarters" which mechanically integrates the experience of the five senses into a world, moment by moment.