Letting go is a mysterious process. It usually begins with our nurturing a feeling like anger, dislike, desire or fear. These feelings can be motivating, and among animals they can fuel a swift reaction. Humans usually respond through language, and it usually takes longer to choose the right words than it takes a cat to hiss.
This can leave us with a slow response time during which our feelings linger, grow, and torment us. Or we create a new problem by blurting out intemperate words.
Either way, we live with these uncomfortable feelings until we eventually want to let go of them. Even then, we often seem to be stuck with them. However unintentionally it may be, we’re clinging to stories about what happened, like mind worms, that cause dukkha, our emotional suffering.
I recently had a phone call that got a bit heated. It left my nerves on edge. For the rest of the day nothing I did went very well, and a headache grew and lingered into the next day. By early afternoon I was seriously tired of the drama and the physical feelings from the day before.
Then I had a mental and emotional sensation of stepping back from them. In that moment, from a different angle, I could see how insignificant this drama was. A sense of relief came over me with an almost tangible sensation of something heavy falling off me. My heart finally felt at ease.
This goes on all the time but usually I’m not mindful in the moment(s) when these shifts occur. What allowed me to see this happen was being focused on the physical sensations of that suffering, not the lingering stories about that phone call. I was seeing clearly how unpleasant and unnecessary that dukkha was. I had finally become entirely willing to let go of the stories I’d been telling myself. And they fell away.
Then it was easy to see the best way to respond. I needed to get out of the problem and into the solution. Embrace impermanence. Try new approaches. Ask for help.
For decades I’ve been teaching this method of letting go, but this time I saw the process work in a relatively brief time. Here are the steps:
- Recognize that stewing about events solves nothing and causes suffering.
- Focus on the physical discomfort of that suffering instead of repetitive stories about what happened.
- Get completely disenchanted with the stories and the feelings they induce.
- Become willing for your mind to step back and broaden your perspective about it.
- Stay mindful of how the mind and body feel in the moments after you step back.
- Recognize that this is a liberation from dukkha. Learn from it and practice it whenever you can.