This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Practicing the Path of Letting Go ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good evening. I’m going to start the talk tonight with a poem. It’s by Rosemary Traummer. Of course, those of you who come here often know that I’m often reading her poems; she’s a beautiful poet and a Buddhist meditation practitioner. This poem is called “When the Stakes Are Low.”
For the fourth time in four weeks I slip my spade into the dark soil of the half-circle garden. I make twenty shallow holes, then lift the pansies from crinkly plastic containers and drop the rootbound squares into the earth.
Within hours, the small brown bunny arrives with his pink, twitchy nose and his small, round lump of soft bunny body. And while I wash dishes, I meet through the window his innocent, unblinking gaze as he consumes a dozen deep purple petals in small, efficient tugs. He looks at me as if to say, “You love me,” and I do.
I coo at the bunny, how cute his small ears, how perfect his bliss, how good he is for eating his pretty bunny food. Tomorrow, the rest of the blooms will be gone. In a week, the leaves will be gone too, every single one. And I will go buy more pansies.
How sweet it’s become, this path of surrender, the strange joy that rises in me when I see my precious pansies nibbled to the roots. Now that the stakes are low, it’s much easier to bow to the way things are. For the price of pansies, I can practice again and again how to find true delight in this art of letting go.
True delight in this art of letting go. We could say so much of Buddhist practice is about learning this, and that’s a little bit what I’d like to talk about tonight.
Letting go is a way that helps us navigate the constant change of life. Maybe we don’t even think about it, but letting go helps us to reduce stress. If we are insisting that things be the same every single time, then that’s a recipe for stress. Things change, people change, the weather changes, the durations of daylight change. We know this, and yet sometimes there’s a way in which we have an idea of how things should be, and we’re holding on to that idea. The holding on to that idea causes stress and discomfort—dukkha1, we might say.
For example, you might have this idea that you would spend some time with your friend one afternoon, but at the last minute, your friend cancels. “Oh shoot, we were going to go for a hike.” There could be this little disappointment and anger and frustration with this friend. But you could just let go of it. “Oh, okay, great. Now I have some time to do nothing, go for a hike by myself, sit and watch the clouds go by, do something else.” This is letting go of the idea that things have to go the certain way that we’re planning.
Maybe this shows up in meditation. During a meditation period, we sit to meditate, hoping for peacefulness, but then we find that the mind is all over the place and can’t settle at all. Instead of fighting it, instead of thinking, “Oh, when is this going to settle down? It seems like other people can meditate, why can’t I? I’ve been doing this for so long and I still can’t do it,” or all these stories that we come up with for ourselves. But if you let go of the wish for stillness—implicit in this wish is “things are not okay now and I want them to be different”—if we let go of that, that invites calm. Even though there might be some of this agitation in the mind, there can still be this calm.
This idea of letting go is part of the foundational teachings of the Buddha. One way we can understand this is if we use the Four Noble Truths as a framework.
I’m going to highlight the Second Noble Truth: there is a cause for dukkha, for suffering, for stress, for things being a bummer, and that cause is craving or clinging or grasping. There are a lot of teachings on how to abandon, how to let go of the clinging or the grasping, and that leads to the end of suffering.
This idea of letting go is inherent in these core teachings. Not only that, it’s also in the Fourth Noble Truth, the path that leads to the ending of suffering, known as the Eight-Fold Path. Step number six is about effort—what we apply our energy towards. We apply our energy towards four things, but one is the abandoning of unhelpful states. This is what we put our energy towards: abandoning those things that aren’t helpful for the ending of suffering. So in some of these core foundational teachings is this whole idea of letting go, abandoning, renouncing. In Pāli, there are half a dozen words that have this meaning, just because this is such an integral part of the teachings.
We might feel uncomfortable with this idea of letting go because, after all, society, media, and the advertising industry are all about “more, more, you need more, get more, buy more, be more.” There’s a real movement towards instituting a sense of lack or insufficiency or inadequacy into people, so that there’s this real sense of, “It’s not enough, you’ve got to have more.” Whatever it is: more stillness when you meditate, more friends, more friends that show up on time when you want to go hiking, more cars, more houses, more stuff.
So this idea of letting go, this opposite movement of acquiring, can feel a little bit radical, maybe a little bit revolutionary, because it’s so different than the message that we get so often. Letting go can also feel like renunciation, and we might feel like, “Well, I don’t really want to be a monastic. I don’t really want to sell all my belongings, shave my head, and move into a cave.” Or maybe letting go feels like surrender. Because of the way we’ve been socialized, this whole idea of letting go can sometimes feel not so attractive, especially when we have this feeling of “there’s not enough”—not enough love, not enough care, not enough attention, not enough security and safety. This idea of letting go can feel pretty threatening.
But the Buddha never said that you have to get rid of your belongings or give away everything, or that you can’t have wealth or personal possessions. We come through a tradition that was preserved by monastics, so the teachings have that flavor. But there were also teachings for laypeople, and they were about how to use your money wisely to support having more freedom for you and your family. The Buddha said that we don’t have to get rid of our wealth or our possessions, but to let go of what’s not useful, what’s not helpful, what’s not skillful. So much of this practice is about our discovering for ourselves what is useful, what is helpful for having more peace, more freedom, more ease, for having a sense of sufficiency and adequacy.
This letting go points to that which isn’t helpful. There’s a quote from the Dhammapada3. Letting go is not this denial or asceticism; instead, it’s related to happiness, as Rosemary Traumer wrote in the last line of her poem: “the delight in the art of letting go.” This quote in the Dhammapada is: “If by giving up a lesser happiness one could experience greater happiness, a wise person would renounce the lesser to behold the greater.”
Part of this practice is for us to understand what these lesser happinesses are. We might say that some of these are just pleasures that are fleeting and might even be causing harm to ourselves. Those are lesser happinesses. Some of these greater happinesses are a sense of well-being, a sense of ease, a sense of peace and freedom. So this letting go is really pointing to something that should bring some delight, some joy, some happiness.
Along these lines, this idea of letting go or abandoning or renouncing—what if instead we thought of it as “giving up,” as in, up above? Giving up can be almost like making an offering at an altar, giving something for a higher purpose. Maybe it’s an act of generosity, like those pansies for the little bunny. Maybe this letting go is more of a movement of the heart, and it has this flavor of something that’s beautiful and is associated with more spaciousness and ease.
Letting go is not so much about what you lose; it’s about what you gain. There’s the obvious sense of relief. Some time ago, I put on a blouse that I used to wear to work back when I had a job in corporate America. I thought I would wear it for a particular occasion, and I put it on and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this blouse is so itchy and scratchy! How did I never notice this before?” I just took it off and put on something else. I didn’t have to debate, “Should I let go of this? Should I not do this?” It was just, “Oh, this is uncomfortable. I’m going to take it off.” That’s what’s being pointed to here. Part of the practice is for us to learn what is uncomfortable, and part of how we learn that is by learning what’s comfortable, by experiencing more and more states of ease and well-being. Some of that happens with meditation practice; as the mind and the body settle, there can often be this greater sense of well-being and ease that then highlights all the other places where there’s tightness, gripping, striving, and straining in a way that’s not so helpful.
One of the things that we gain when we’re letting go in a helpful way is joy or happiness. The Buddha pointed to this in the “gladness pentad”: letting go leads to gladness, which leads to joy, tranquility, happiness, and concentration, and then seeing things clearly. This is a cascade that gets pointed to over and over again in the Buddhist teachings. Gladness, joy, and tranquility are integral parts of the practice. I would say they’re required, actually, because we need to have some lightness of being to do the work of letting go, as well as to help us see clearly—see clearly about ourselves, the things that we’re doing that are leading to dukkha, and the things that we’re doing that help us to have less dukkha.
Letting go is sometimes about letting go of those things that are obstructing or obscuring what’s already in our hearts. This can be the Seven Factors of Awakening4. These are qualities that really support awakening, greater freedom, peace, and ease. There are also the Brahma Viharas5—four qualities of the heart: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity6. We could call them the four faces of love. This is all inside of all of us; sometimes we just have things that are getting in the way. This practice of letting go is about releasing the things that are obstructing these heart qualities.
So what are some of the things that we can let go of to make this a little bit more tangible?
1. Grasping to objects. It’s not objects themselves that we have to get rid of to have more ease and peace; it’s the grasping. It’s the belief that they are going to be lasting sources of happiness and therefore we have to hold on to them. Objects are not lasting sources of happiness. We have to maintain them, clean them, replace their batteries, or they die and we have to replace them. Even if they’re perfectly fine for our whole life, when we die, they just go to the next person. They don’t bring us the lasting source of happiness that we really want. They do bring pleasure, but there’s a lot of data that shows that when you’re purchasing something, for example on Amazon, the biggest hit of delight, measured with neurotransmitters in the brain, is when you put the item in the shopping cart—not when you buy it, not when it arrives. It’s when you put it in the shopping cart, and it can just stay there. This is a practice I do sometimes; I just put things in the shopping cart without buying them. I don’t need to buy them.
2. Clinging to our views. So long and so often we have this idea: “This is true and everything else is wrong. I know it’s right, and those people over there, they don’t know anything, they’re wrong.” Of course, we need views. We need to be oriented in the world and have a direction in which we want to go. It’s the clinging to them, thinking that our understanding is the right one, that’s the problem. This morning, I was teaching a class, and as part of the reading, people started having comments about what they had read. Then I just dropped in who the author was and the context in which it was written. All of a sudden, everything changed. It was quite striking to see how a reinterpretation of everything happened, how they understood everything differently. I said maybe three sentences, and everything changed for them. This is a good reminder for us. We have a certain amount of information and we have views based on that, but how can we be sure that there won’t be some other new information that will change our ideas? Instead, can we hold our views provisionally? “Well, my current understanding is this… this is what makes sense to me now… from what I’ve seen so far, this is my view on this,” instead of saying, “This is right and everything else is wrong.” Your life will just unfold so much easier.
3. Trying to control others. “If only those other people would get things right, do things the way that I think they should.” There’s this way in which we try to possess them so that they will do whatever we want them to do, whether these are complete strangers, hypothetical people, or even our partners, family members, children, or aging parents. It doesn’t work, and it’s annoying. Have you ever had somebody try to control you? It just doesn’t work. We often set up this battle, but for whatever reason, the person doesn’t want to do what we want them to. Can we be okay with that? Can we be okay with recognizing the autonomy of other people? It doesn’t mean that we don’t ever make suggestions or support them, but we stop trying to control them. We let go of trying to control people and instead, we find a way in which we can just love them, just love them the way they are.
If we are letting go of this clinging, grasping, and controlling, it can provide some spaciousness in our hearts and minds. If we’re not always chasing things, there just seems to be more space in the heart and mind, and more time in the day. Letting go also provides clarity with regards to desires versus needs. When you go on meditation retreats or travel with just a subset of your belongings, there’s this recognition of simplicity that highlights, “Oh yeah, I don’t actually need so much of this stuff that I own.”
Confidence also grows with this letting go. Often, a sense of lack or inadequacy is driving this desire for more. But if we’re letting go of some of the clinging and grasping, there starts to be more of a feeling of okay-ness, a feeling of “this is sufficient, this is adequate.” We can spend our whole life chasing after the next thing, trying to get more and more, on what’s known as the hedonic treadmill.
So what are some ways to support this letting go?
Of course, not 100% of letting go is helpful. We don’t want to let go of things that take care of our health or let go of our responsibilities for others. But notice the uplift in the heart after doing these small bits of letting go. This is a tremendous support. It does take time to stop trusting the promise or the allure of objects or unwholesome activities. They’re seductive, and it’s not easy to let go of always wanting more. But it takes time.
Maybe I’ll just read this poem as a closure.
For the fourth time in four weeks I slip my spade into the dark soil of the half-circle garden. I make 20 shallow holes, then lift the pansies from crinkly plastic containers and drop the rootbound squares into the earth.
Within hours, the small brown bunny arrives with his pink, twitchy nose and his small, round lump of soft bunny body. And while I wash dishes, I meet through the window his innocent, unblinking gaze as he consumes a dozen deep purple petals and small, efficient tugs. He looks at me as if to say, “You love me,” and I do.
I coo at the bunny, how cute his small ears, how perfect his bliss, how good he is for eating his pretty bunny food. Tomorrow, the rest of the blooms will be gone. In a week, the leaves will be gone too, every single one. And I will go buy more pansies.
How sweet it’s become, this path of surrender, the strange joy that rises in me when I see my precious pansies nibbled to the roots. Now that the stakes are low, it’s much easier to bow to the way things are. For the price of pansies, I can practice again and again how to find true delight in this art of letting go.
Thank you.
With that, I’ll open it up to see if there are some questions or comments. Yes, I kind of liked that this poem had a bunny. It felt like this time of year there are bunnies. This morning I saw some baby ducklings; it made me so happy.
Question: If we’re in a relationship, it could be even just a boyfriend-girlfriend, and it’s causing us emotional pain, how do you know when the answer isn’t letting go of it being a certain way, but actually leaving that relationship?
How do you know when to let go of the relationship being a certain way versus leaving the relationship? This is part of the art of practice, and I would say it’s part of the art of living. There’s suffering that leads to more suffering, and there’s suffering that leads to less suffering. This is maybe the question you’re asking.
I think that maybe it’s helpful to make a distinction between harm and discomfort. If harm is being caused, that’s not the direction you want to go. If there’s discomfort—anger, sadness, confusion, whatever it might be—but it feels like you can get to the other side of it and move on, that’s different from harm. Sometimes discomfort feels like harm, so part of it is just really to feel into what is the difference. I don’t know if this is helpful or not.
Question: Thanks for the talk and for the poem. There was a part of the poem that I’ve been trying to interpret, which is, “now that the stakes are low.” I interpreted it as her realizing this situation with the bunny and saying, “Oh, the stakes are low,” because she’s surrendering, or she’s actively making this situation low-stakes. Another way is she’s recognizing this as one of the many situations in life where the stakes are indeed low. So I’ve been trying to riff with that and think about, is the idea that you want to pick out situations where you know the stakes for sure are low, or in every situation, find a way to make the stakes low by surrendering, regardless of how high you think the stakes are?
That’s fantastic. I love what you’re bringing up. I think we can do both. We can let go of the things where it’s easy, or we can let go of our ideas around things. For example, the idea that something will be a lasting source of happiness. If we realize it’s not going to be, then the stakes become lower.
This is an interesting line, “now that the stakes are low,” and it’s also the title of the poem. I was interpreting it as something that was happening in her personal life. I was assuming that there was something when the stakes were high that’s implied in the poem that we don’t know about. But I like your interpretation a little bit better. We’ve got to recognize the bunny, and there are other bigger things happening. Or maybe it’s because the first line is, “For the fourth time in four weeks,” so she realizes, “Oh, this is what’s going to happen.” But maybe the first time it happened, the stakes were higher because she was upset and actually expected to have pansies in her garden. I don’t know.
Okay, well thank you all for your kind attention. It’s time to let go of the time in which we’re having a dharma talk. I wish you all a wonderful rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you.
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Prakrit language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism. ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Seven Factors of Awakening (Bojjhanga): A set of seven mental qualities that are conducive to enlightenment. They are: Mindfulness (sati), Investigation of phenomena (dhamma vicaya), Energy (viriya), Joy or rapture (pīti), Tranquility (passaddhi), Concentration (samādhi), and Equanimity (upekkhā). ↩
Brahma Viharas: The four “sublime states” or “divine abodes” which are cultivated in Buddhist practice. They are loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). ↩
Equanimity (Upekkhā): A state of mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. In Buddhism, it is one of the four Brahma Viharas and one of the Seven Factors of Awakening. ↩