Acceptance and Letting Go

 

Accept everything, good and bad, without discriminating, without pushing away.

That sentence sits in a subtle place. It describes the only path from being submerged to being free, and at the same time it describes the open state of mind that only a free person already has.

To practise relaxation is to practise acceptance without discrimination.

When a person becomes loose enough, they no longer rush to react to stimuli from inside or outside. It is as if a thin, transparent membrane wraps around them: you still feel clearly the swirl and flurry of the environment and the emotions, but the sense that it is happening to you fades. That membrane is the buffer between stimulus and response. It effectively stops us from being dragged around by the tendencies of our temperament and by habits cultivated over many years, and gives us a moment to breathe amid the unending stream of stimulation.

The reason people sink deep into cause and effect and get pushed and pulled by fate comes down to a single word — passive. When someone spends all day being done to, with not a trace of self-directed awareness left, their life is merely a product of the cycle of cause and effect. However hard they struggle to break free, every step they take happens to land exactly on the track fate had already laid down.

That membrane means one clear thought.

We often fall into a particular bind: we know perfectly well that our situation is bad, we have thought about escaping it, we understand all the reasoning — and yet, back in a daily life saturated with habit and causation, that thread of clarity is quickly drowned.

Many people have said something like this to me: "The method you teach is good, and it worked for me. But once I'm back in my everyday environment, I'm afraid I'll forget to practise again."

Human habit is like a tsunami. It piles up day after day and only grows stronger, strong enough that you cannot summon even one thought of self-awareness, and the day passes in a daze. To shake off habit, the crucial thing is that one clear thought. If you can win that brief blank moment between an event and your reaction, you have the chance for the intention to relax to arise, and your body and mind need not tighten. On that one thought alone, turning fate around becomes possible.

In that precious, brief thought, what should we do?

Accept — which is also to let go.

Acceptance and letting go are two faces of one thing. They look different on the surface, but in essence they are the same. Knots are born of things not going as expected. "Not as expected" can be large or small: from a plan you poured your life into being obstructed halfway, to someone chewing loudly at the table — each disturbs you to a different degree.

Not as expected, stripped bare, simply means unwilling to accept. You don't want it to happen; you want to shut it out of your life. And so each time a similar event occurs, you feel the emotion rise and fall in your chest.

The key to untangling the knot is acceptance and letting go.

Acceptance runs both ways. It means accepting that others may well do things that displease you or that you disagree with, and it also means accepting the you who is easily made uncomfortable by certain behaviours. When you accept both the outer and the inner turbulence at once, your heart no longer knots easily, and naturally you no longer need to make any unnecessary reaction out of emotion. Over time, the rising and falling of inner and outer tides flows through your heart without striking any resistance, and so raises no waves — it simply passes through, lightly.

Letting go means growing accustomed to viewing the world from emptiness. Stepping outside the limits of time, undisturbed by the division of you and me, feeling the formless, latent flow of all things, and acting accordingly. How others behave, how the ways of the world change — to emptiness these are a single grain in a vast ocean, not worth much concern.

It is like an astronaut looking at the Earth from space and realising in an instant how small human quarrels are, and how trivial so many troubles. This overview effect appears likewise in a practitioner who has entered emptiness, because everything in the world, compared with an emptiness that contains all things and spans time and space, is like one mote of dust among the sands of the Ganges. No event of any scale can stir such a practitioner's heart again.

Whether you enter through acceptance or ascend through letting go, there is no gap between the two. The key is always whether you are relaxed enough, whether you allow that one clear thought to surface. If you are, then acceptance or letting go is only a matter of time.