Non-Attachment: Meditating to Let Go
By: Remy Benjamin
Tags: Self Improvement, Mindfulness, Meditation, Anxiety, Mental Health

Non-Attachment: Meditating to Let Go

How to breathe your way to peace

Photo by Le Minh Phuong, Unsplash

The oft-given advice to “Just let it go” is easier said than done. Luckily for you, it doesn’t have to be.

Yes, it’s true that we have tons of worries in life. We worry about the next deadline at work, and how many grueling hours we’ll have to spend glued to our desk chairs.

Or we worry about other people — Did I offend that stranger at the party? Is my friend ignoring me? Am I attractive enough to get a date?

Or we worry about where our lives are even going. Whether all of this worry, this confusion and this struggle we experience every day will amount to something meaningful in the end.

We spend so much of our lives trying to conquer our fears and our pains, as though they were something big and powerful that dominates our lives.

Instead, though, why not make them small?

Why not spend a few minutes a day just watching them pass through?

And then, when you’re able to watch them without engaging with them, just… Let them go?

This is one of the key foundations of mindfulness meditation, traditionally called Vipassanā. This practice is how we start to let our worries go.

Photo by Keegan Houser, Unsplash

When we meditate, we take a neutral position to everything that appears in our minds. And I do mean everything — the feeling of breathing, the sounds we hear, the heat or cold in the air. We don’t focus on them, we don’t linger on them. We just sit back and notice them.

We also notice that they change moment-to-moment: the breath fills us and leaves us, the sound of a passing car grows and fades, the air touches our skin for the briefest second. We can’t control these sensations as they appear and disappear, and we can’t hold onto them for a moment longer.

Now, think about your worries in the same way. They come to you whether you ask them to or not. They appear as sensations, sometimes as words in your head, sometimes as a tightness in your stomach or your chest.

You can treat them like you treat the breath, and sounds, and the air. You can notice them — and then watch them disappear.

This is a powerful practice. It allows us to recognize our loudest, most intrusive, most unpleasant thoughts as nothing more than objects of appearance — as illusory.

Photo by Dingzeyu Li, Unsplash

In Pāli, the language of the ancient Buddhist monks, Vipassanā literally means “special seeing.” This is the kind of special seeing they meant. You can see every worry evaporate. You can see how immaterial they really are, and how they have no weight on the reality that’s right in front of you. It’s how we see the world clearly, unclouded by thought.

Buddhist philosophy teaches that it’s not the ups and downs of life that make us suffer, it’s how we react to them. We can fixate and worry about the bumps in the road, which doesn’t solve any problems…

…or we can let those bumps come to us, watch our reactions pass, and figure out what to do next.

This is an idea called non-attachment: that as the world around you changes, we can only find true peace of mind when we learn to accept those changes without holding onto the illusion of permanence.

Just like the everyday sensations we notice whenever we sit down and meditate, we can see that life comes at us whether we want it to or not. The course of time will change things in your life, and most of the time, those changes are completely out of your control.

We can try to hold onto the past, through nostalgia or regret, and pretend like the changes never happened.

We can try to control the future by worrying about it, and try to drive ourselves towards some hypothetical outcome in the far-off tomorrow, rather than letting life come to us as it will.

But nothing real happens when we do this. Instead, we spend our time in imagined realities, rather than engaging with the one we can actually grab onto.

All we have is the present moment. It’s the only place where we can actually live our lives, and the only place where we can live our lives well. Worrying, and suffering needlessly in the midst of that moment, doesn’t serve us at all.

If there’s something you can do about your roadblocks, do it, and move on.

If there isn’t, then you don’t need to worry about it!

This moment will pass. There’s nothing inherent about it, and nothing we can attach ourselves to. So in the meantime, you’re free to just enjoy the ride.

It’s as easy as taking a step back, and breathing.