Letting Go

I was doing some organizing today and came across an old journal I kept when training at Esalen. It was then that I learned a lot of stuff that saved me from myself. My teacher Jack Kornfield said regarding the difficulty we seem to have being compassionate with ourselves that we must recognize that "compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things." I hope that you can and will feel some sense of interconnection to nature, music, art or whatever else is present for you. It is important to recognize that "when we shift attention from our experience to the spacious consciousness that knows, wisdom arises."

Another quote that speaks to the work done in cognitive behavioral therapy was "Thoughts are often one sided and untrue. Learn to be mindful of thought instead of being lost in it." CBT tells us - You are not your thoughts and your thoughts lie. But it does not teach us letting go, only replacement. Being mindful of our thoughts means that we are capable of letting them go.

This brings up the idea of grasping. Thinking that we must hold on to a certain thought or belief system or identity so much so that we grasp onto it and try to believe that it is who we are instead of allowing in the truth that all we are is a thing in compassionate interconnection, a tiny boat in a vast sea of awareness. We lose sight of this and we cling to untrue thoughts and continue to suffer. From the Buddhist cosmology "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is not. Suffering arises from grasping. Release grasping and be free of suffering."

This is how I learned to let my thoughts go.

Rachel