Letting go
Not so easy!
People often talk about ‘letting go” in meditation. But letting go is not as easy as it sounds. Thoughts arise continually, involuntarily, beyond our control. This can lead to frustration and self-judgment. We may eventually give up on meditation, since we think we’re so “bad” at it.
Some thoughts seem random, superficial. Perhaps letting go of these is easy, like exhaling intentionally. But with experience, we become aware of persistent, habitual types of thoughts that arise from our particular karmic entanglement: worry, fraught relationships, a feeling we carry about ourselves, things we desperately want or want to avoid.
In this case I wonder if part of the difficulty in letting go is related to a subconscious sense that what is arising is a genuine concern. And so the emotional logic goes, Why should we let go of it into nothing, into a void? Who’s going to take care of us if we don’t, right now?
Recently I’ve seen how it can be helpful for me to have a sense of releasing these thought-concerns into something. But into what?
You and I are not separate from all the other elements of the one life around us. People, circumstances that arise, the way we all navigate emerging conditions: it is alive, connected, flowing together. And we are a part of that.
Releasing our thought-concerns into this network in the moment that they arise can be an act of trust that we don’t carry this, or anything else, alone. The interwoven energy of life within and around takes care of us, of all of life.
There is an old gospel song by the Louvin Brothers, slightly reworded by some contemporary groups so that it comes out like this:
Leave it there, leave it there,
take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust him through your doubt
He will surely bring you out.
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
While some forms of Buddhism do pray to semi-divine forms of Buddha, in Zen we generally don’t. So this lyric takes some translation for us. In sitting zazen, we can still “leave it there.” And we can trust in our lived experience that life itself - its networked, interwoven, living energy - “will surely bring us out.”
This is not a thinking process, a little speech we give ourselves in zazen, or some big realization that brings resolution. It is, for me, more like a brief gesture in the moment, a feeling. We grip on to something; we open the hand of thought, and release it into the trustworthiness of life itself.
Zazen is a good way to learn, in a much-simplified environment, how to be in daily life, where things are much more complex. By learning how to let go in zazen, we are more likely to do so throughout the day, especially with really big concerns.
All of this might seem like a lot when we’re just talking about letting go. But because doing so can be so difficult, perhaps letting go into something can help.