From 'Letting Go' to 'Being Present': Reclaiming the Clichés

On Letting Go

‘Letting Go’ is, unfortunately, a much confused notion in spiritual circles, and particularly in mindfulness circles.  The concept has essentially ceased to function as it was originally intended, it’s become a cliché. Popularity and widespread adoption of ideas can do that, and not just in mindfulness and Buddhism.

For many practitioners, especially those coming from Buddhist spaces, "letting go" can become performative—something we try to bring about through force of will alone, mistaking suppression for release.

For some others, the idea of ‘letting go’ actually serves as a deterrent to practice: “I don’t want to ‘let go’ of everything” (the same sentiment carries over to its alter ego, ‘non-attachment’) The belief that letting go or embracing non-attachment means throwing all your belongings away, becoming celibate and disappearing into a cave. (I’ve done all three of these, btw, and not necessarily willingly!)

Everywhere in between these two extremes, this phrase, ‘Letting Go’, is regularly misused and misunderstood. When I teach, I try not to use the phrase, even though there are times when it should be used and needs to be used. But, because of the over-familiarity with it as a concept long disconnected from its intended meaning, I know it doesn’t convey what it’s supposed to anymore. Often, instead, pointing toward its opposite in its pursuit.  I see it whenever it is inserted into the discussion; the casual and clouded over nodding along, and I know that it’s not landing as anything more than a cliché.  So, I try hard to avoid using it... and sometimes, when it’s in a reading or poem that I’m offering, I cringe a little inside as I read it -  sometimes I even feel like I need to make a point of saying something about the notion of letting go as an aside, to try to debunk a reflexive understanding.  

So, here’s a little foray into the notion of ‘letting go’.

Letting go is at the center of mindfulness practice. Yes, you heard me...  I just spent the opening of this essay saying how much I don’t like this phrase, how it’s a cliché; and now I’m saying that it’s really important.   Its importance is why I don’t like how it is usually understood; how it is understood at its laziest.

The first clarifying question we should ask is, what is it we’re wanting to let go of?

Often times, this is understood as letting go of a bad habit, or a person, or a thing (or, for the hardcore aspiring Buddhist: of ALL ‘material possessions’).   These ideas have one thing in common: they suggest that what we’re asked to let go of is an object: an idea, personal belongings, a relationship.  But that’s not actually what we are being asked to let go of. 

What we are wanting to let go of, is a certain kind of relationship to those objects. Not the objects themselves.  We can have the idea, the relationship, the personal belongings; and let go of our habitual ways of relating to them that keep us stuck.  

The example I use most often to demonstrate this is to pick up the Tibetan singing bowl I use as a meditation bell, and hold it up in the palm of my hand, gripping at the sides with my fingers. I show everyone: If I am holding on like this, and I try to ring the bell, what happens? And I demonstrate it – the muffled clanking sound that results is not the beautiful resonating sound it is meant to convey.  I then relax my grip so that the bell remains balanced on my hand. I don’t get rid of the bell or throw it off to the side, but just the same, I’ve ‘let go’.  Now, when I hit the bowl with its striker, a gentle tone reverberates throughout the room.  The only thing that changed is how I’m holding it. The bell hasn’t changed at all.

When we try to ‘let go’ of the object itself, what is more likely happening isn’t letting go, but aversion. We’re trying to push something away or get rid of it. The paradox here is that by trying to push something away, we’re effectively keeping ourselves trapped in a negative relationship with it rather than letting anything go.  Letting go through mindfulness practice isn’t about pushing unpleasant experience away; it’s about how we are understanding it, and how we are relating to it.  This is where the notion of ‘attachment’ comes in. We are wanting to let go of attachment to the object, not the object itself.

This ability depends on a shift in how we meet experience. If we are relating from the mind and its concepts, we can't truly perceive the difference between the object and our relationship to it.

Lots to unpack!

And here’s, also, where the two ideas – Being Present and Letting Go – become important to one another.

But.

Before we go there, I want to introduce the other central understanding, and how it, too, has lost its essence:  Being Present. 

On Being Present

Another beloved exhortation by mindfulness and Buddhist teachers, poets, and, well, everyone else: we all know ‘it’s good to be present’.   What we don’t tend to know though, is what that actually means. And more importantly, how to do it.

When I teach an introductory class of any kind, one of the first things I do is ask everyone: what is mindfulness? What is your understanding of mindfulness?  

And the answers I get are mostly two kinds: 1) some variation of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition: "Mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally." and 2) ‘being present’.

They’re both good answers, but quite often understanding remains only at a conceptual level.  They don’t really mean anything that anyone can relate to yet.  They’ve become symbols that represent something. A sign on the trail: ‘go in this direction’.

Sometimes, the idea of being present never gets examined at all. It serves a purpose as a place-holder in the language of spiritualese; as jargon that seeks to proclaim a certain, esoteric something.  It preserves a kind of holiness that holds it at arm’s length instead of giving us anything practical to work with.  This leaves us skating past a central understanding of our practice, bypassing the heart of practice and hanging out in the commentary.

And that’s why I then ask the second question: “Ok, so we all know/have heard, that ‘being present’ is really good, right?”  Everyone nods… because we’ve all heard this so many times, in so many places, we take it as a truth; but it still doesn’t have any practical meaning that relates to our lives; we still don’t know what it is we’re supposed to be knowing or doing when we’re busy trying to be present. 

At this point, I like to shout into the room, dramatically, with my arms outstretched to the sides, looking up and beseeching the heavens: “OK! Here I am! I’m being present!     What does that actually mean, though?”  (sometimes I like a little showmanship!) and everyone just kind of looks at me, waiting for the answer.

Because that’s when the realization hits that there hasn’t been a reckoning with that notion at all. It’s just something we’re saying to ourselves because it sounds wise and spiritual and actualized.

But the thing is, it’s actually incredibly simple and do-able! And, it’s also wise, spiritual and actualizable.  Not esoteric at all.

That’s where discovery begins.

Just as with ‘letting go’, which requires a shifting of our orientation to experience, presence asks us to make a similar shift to meet experience directly, instead of relating through the mind’s interpretations of it. 

To meet experience directly we shift from the cognitive, evaluative lens of the thinking mind to the immediacy of experience as it arises at the level of the ‘sense-doors’.

The good news is that it’s incredibly simple to do this. It doesn’t require a philosophy degree, or to contort your body into weird shapes, or to answer a Zen koan. 

To be present, all that is needed is to recognize, in real time, what is happening at the very moment experience arises at the sense doors, instead of getting caught up in the meaning-making about it.  We can know the immediacy of each moment of experience:  seeing images, hearing sounds, tasting flavor, smelling scents, feeling of sensations, and noticing the experience of thoughts as mental phenomena moving through the mind (which is altogether different from engaging with thoughts as ideas - think, being absorbed in a movie’s story, vs watching images move across a screen.)

That’s it.  Although it is simple, as the saying goes: it’s not necessarily easy. Which is why formal practice is needed to help train this capacity.   

To learn to be present is also to learn to be embodied.  Bringing attention to the sensations in the body shifts us from our habitual tendency to interpret our felt experience to meeting the body as it is: Instead of concluding the experience is “I feel sick”, it would be more like, “I’m noticing pressure sensations in my abdomen, and throbbing in the areas around my temples and forehead, these sensations grow more intense as I pay attention…” 

One very simple practice for cultivating this capacity is to make a habit of noticing the sensations of the feet against the floor whenever you think about it throughout your day: the sensations of pressure, hardness, softness, warmth or coolness, along with any of the other myriad fleeting, momentary, micro-sensations that defy easy language. To just recognize them as they are. Just this will bring you immediately into the present moment. Practicing this over time will cultivate this capacity as a default.  Presence involves simply this shift, from thinking about experience to directly knowing it.

‘Being present’ becomes a concrete practice instead of a vague, ethereal aspiration.

Letting Go into Presence 

Here’s the connection I’ve been promising you: the very act of shifting from interpreting experience to directly knowing it is itself an act of letting go; the letting go of meaning-making as a default orientation to experience. It allows us to recognize the difference between experience and perception.

Presence makes letting go possible. The shift into presence is the opening movement in what then becomes a much deeper process of genuine letting go. Not from pushing anything away, but through this simple shift, allowing the habitual and unconscious ways of relating to experience to be naturally released.