Holding On To Let Go

A new essay for Consciousness Explorers Club

This is a new essay I wrote that went out yesterday for the Consciousness Explorers Club, a Toronto based Meditation Group founded by Jeff Warren that meets online every Monday. I’ve been involved with the CEC for over a decade and will be leading the online meditation this Monday, March 2nd. More info here.

From some time now I’ve felt like my life has been guided by two great wisdom traditions. As both a therapist and meditation teacher, I’m always trying to help the people I’m working with, and whether I’m teaching meditation or working therapeutically, I always end up relying on both of these perspectives. We could roughly call them Buddhism and Psychology, and if we take them at face value, there seem to be massive contradictions in their goals.

Take for example the idea of the Self. Psychology is aimed at developing a healthy, functional sense of self. But Buddhism, on the other hand, claims that the sense of a Self is a delusion and is responsible for most of our suffering.

Another seeming contradiction lies in the idea of attachment.

Buddhism claims that our suffering comes from attachment (it could be said that our sense of self is made up from our attachments), and that we should work to be less attached to things.

And yet, likely THE most widely accepted and tested and utilized idea in all of modern psychology is in fact called Attachment Theory. While many ideas in psychology are difficult to prove, Attachment Theory has been so well studied, so universally applicable, that its truth and relevance is more or less irrefutable.

The basic idea of attachment theory, without getting into all the anxious and avoidant details, is that for healthy human development it is ideal for a child to maintain a healthy sense of attachment with their primary caregiver.

What Buddhism misses is that we are biological beings that have these things called nervous systems, and nervous systems are very sensitive things.

When you feel safe, your nervous system relaxes and you can feel a natural ease. When you don’t feel safe, your nervous system activates, going into fight, flight, freeze or fawn (or fear, anger, dissociation, shame) — and very often a cocktail of them all

It is more and more common to hear the theory that all mental health challenges or pathologies are the result of not feeling safe. Both the body and mind work in overdrive to try to solve the problem of not feeling safe.

So the therapeutic approach is to help the person find a sense of safety. In Attachment Theory, the original sense of safety is provided by our primary caregiver. They either meet our needs consistently in a way that helps us trust that our needs will be met, or they don’t, which leads to a fundamental mistrust that others, and the world in general, will be able to meet our needs.

When we take this perspective, that a sense of safety helps us relax and trust, then we can begin to see that these principles aren’t actually in contrast to much of what’s taught in Buddhism.

Buddhism has these principles embedded all through it. If you were to become a traditional Buddhist, you’d do something that’s called Taking Refuge. You take refuge in The Three Jewels, which are The Buddha (the teacher or enlightened ideal), The Dharma (the teachings or truth of the path), and the Sangha (the community).

While the Buddha preached non-attachment, The Three Jewels definitely look like forms of attachment to me. My theory is that while The Buddha taught an ideal, it was also realized that there’s a very real process to ultimately achieving that ideal.

The Buddhist path, simplified into one idea, could be just this: Let go.

If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you will have absolute peace.”
-Ajahn Chah, Thai Monk and Buddhist Teacher

The thing is though, it’s not easy to let go. In a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, and full of potential threats, letting go doesn’t feel like a winning strategy. Instead we are constantly trying to assess the threats, to reflect on what we should do or shouldn’t have done, to try to make something of ourselves, to try to figure life out, and the world too, because it seems like that’s the only way to make the best decisions for ourselves.

One of my mentors, a Tibetan woman in her 70s who goes by Khadro, once told me something very interesting. Khadro is not just a Tibetan Buddhist, but also practices Taoism, teaches Chi-gong and actually helped Peter Levine develop Somatic Experiencing, a pioneering movement in somatic psychology that revolutionized how we work with trauma.

Khadro said to me that “all spiritual practices are only to help the practitioner feel safe to let go.”

I had never heard it put so simply before. And while I mentally tried to find exceptions to this statement, I haven’t found a solid one yet. All practices are just tools in the ultimate service of helping us to let go.

While the goal of Buddhism is ultimate freedom, the traditional practice asks for a very serious degree of commitment. The paradox here, and something I’ve learned over and over again through real world trials and tribulations, is that it is through commitment that I’ve become more free.

The juvenile idea of freedom, that responsibilities and commitments restrict our freedom, usually leads to feeling disconnected and disoriented. We end up at the mercy of our every whim and desire, and are profoundly disappointed when we realize that these egoic comforts and desires don’t bring us any lasting satisfaction.

A more mature sense of freedom is not the result of being able to do whatever we want at any moment, but instead seeing the nature of our mind, how it’s always wanting things, and never satisfied. And instead of doing what we feel like doing, we can instead do what we know is right, recognizing that helping others is also helping ourselves.

In my own life this couldn’t be more clear. I suffered from depression for many years, even when I had the money and freedom to more or less do whatever I wanted. When I enquired into my experience, I got the distinct feeling that something was wrong. That feeling of something being wrong marked every aspect of my life.

But over the last decade I’ve become more and more oriented towards doing things for others. I’ve realized that the more I care for others, the better I feel. That created a positive feedback loop, where I stopped being so concerned about my more selfish ambitions, and instead I’ve naturally become more oriented towards helping others.

By figuring out what I actually, truly cared about, and organizing my life more and more around those values, I’ve found a sense of fundamental okayness. There’s a sense of contentment, that things are somehow ok, even when they aren’t all that ok, that has brought me to more peace than I’d ever felt.

And this is how I see the complement between these two perspectives. Psychology has taught me how to care for myself, how to find a sense of safety not just through my relationships, but also through living in alignment with my values as best I can.

Through the psychological perspective I’ve better understood how I wasn’t really listening to my feelings. One of my favourite psychologists, James Hollis once said when speaking of depression, “The Self is always speaking to you, but when you don’t listen to it, the Self ends up leaving you, and takes all your energy with it” (this is paraphrased from his audiobook Through The Dark Wood).

Psychology in general, and depth psychologists like James Hollis specifically, helped me understand that a good life isn’t necessarily a comfortable or glamorous life, but a life that is aligned with our deepest values, and therefore personally meaningful. For me that meant stepping into the role of a therapist and meditation teacher, which carry great responsibilities —responsibilities that for some time I feared to take on because I was afraid they may infringe on my more juvenile ideas of freedom.

Psychology taught me how to be true to myself, and Buddhism has taught me not to get too wrapped up in any of this. Not to judge my value, or the value of others, based on successes or failures. And not to make a solid identity out of any of this, not even the achievements I’m proud of.

Buddhism helps me see the illusion of it all, that even though I’m very much a therapist and meditation teacher, who and what I really am is not these things at all. These are roles I am playing and although I take them seriously, they don’t define me outside of the work itself.

Who and what I am is not limited by any role at all. I can make every decision, and respond to each moment, not from a role or sense of identity, but from the unconditioned intelligence and spontaneity that we learn to access when we put all of this aside, and just be present.

The feeling of alignment with my values gave me a sense of comfort and peace that made me feel safe to let go further than I ever had. I’ve been able to let go of the idea that I need to do or be anything at all, instead seeing the raw beauty of humanity itself and appreciating the inherent value of all living beings.

It is the recognition of this innate wholeness, that we don’t have to achieve anything to be worthy, that we already are everything. This was the freedom the Buddha was speaking about, and the freedom that I was always looking for. And the more I do what I feel is good and aligned with who I am, the more I can let go of any agenda and appreciate the fullness of each moment.