Holding On and Letting Go
September 3rd, 2006 by 
jack
There are many admonitions in Zen about “letting go.” Whole books have been written on the subject; they mostly expound the merit and virtue of doing so, or exhort one on page after page to do this. Very few have useful advice about how to go about doing this. It seems like simplicity itself, yet I have not found it to be that way.
The obstacles I’ve encountered include the following:
- I did not see or want to see that I was holding on to something.
- I did not want to let go.
- I wanted to let go.
- I tried to push or hurl something away that I didn’t like.
- I reached for something thinking it was part of letting go.
During the last several months, I realized that for me – at least for now – there were just two essential parts of letting go. One was to clearly see the things I was grasping, even fundamental things that are so instinctual or habitual that I mostly don’t recognize them. The second part, is to keep them in focus while I deliberately relax any effort to hold or push them away. Like a hand opening up when the controlling muscles relax, this relaxation has neither the fatiguing effort of grasping something or holding the hands spread wide with fingers in forced extension. Deliberately staying in this relaxed mode does take an effort of sort, but the effort is only one of mindfulness, not of extension or retraction. Some of the letting go has seemed a bit uncomfortable, but relaxing in the midst of pain has seemed to work too. Relaxation here has meant providing open space for pain and letting fear or anxiety that usually encase it dissolve. Active relaxation gets at the core of effortful wanting, trying, and reaching that are key ingredients in the above list. You can’t do those things with an “open relaxed hand” mindset.
Relaxation seems like a poor admonition for people diligently trying to learn something with determined concentration (e.g., dancing or juggling). People shouting “Relax! Relax!” become the antithesis of their own advice. The advice usually isn’t helpful, because relaxation also means accepting the results of whatever relaxation brings. Holding fast to a desired result is usually a reason one isn’t relaxing to begin with. In extreme circumstances, this relaxation can even mean accepting that the only thing left to do is sit still and die.
So focus of my current practice is intentional, open, relaxed-hand meditation, recognizing that if this technique is successful, even this metaphor will eventually drop from mind.
Posted in Ordinary Delusions | 
September 3rd, 2006 at 3:28 pm
I’ve studied Alexander Technique in the past, and allow me to draw some interesting parallels if I may. According to Mr. Alexander’s discoveries, good posture is not a matter of forcing yourself upright, it’s a matter of relaxing over-tense muscles to let them release. Of course, you could think of a person relaxing so much that they fall over (how about death, the ultimate state of relaxation?)
In practice, it’s a dynamic relaxation, muscles not tense, but not over-extended or over-stretched either. Rather than learning new ways of moving, it is actually a case of un-learning faulty ones. It is a subtle thing, but just as you can’t forcibly relax a muscle, you can’t forcibly let go of mental tension.
I think the key point for me is the word you used when talking of letting fear and anxiety dissolve: Space. If you want to let something go, just give it some space.