‘Letting Go’

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Topic: Letting Go

One Western lama came out of seven years of silent retreat to travel and teach for seven more.The biggest surprise for me was how much I still needed to learn to trust. For years I thought spiritual life was about some special state of perfection or enlightenment. It is really about releasing attachment. Life doesn't depend only on what you do. The big illusions we strive for, whether in the world or our spiritual life, turn out to be false. When you learn to let go, you find a tremendous faith in the ground of all things, that which is true before and after all our plans. Everything arises and passes—this is the true perfection. I found I could trust this.

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Topic: Letting Go

In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion. There are no laurels to acquire. Charismatic teachers and spiritual attainments can become traps of striving in which we lose sight of our own Buddha Nature here and now. Ajahn Sumedho, the first American abbot of a Theravada Buddhist monastery, cautions us against trying so hard to get something special.

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Topic: Letting GoFor minds obsessed by compulsive thinking and grasping, you simplify your meditation practices to just two words—"let go“. Rather than try to develop this practice, and then develop that, achieve this, and go into that. The grasping mind always wants to read and see more.

Instead, just be an earthworm who knows only two words:"let go"

Adapted by G Ross Clark