letting go; the pathway of surrender
Reviewing and remembering core principles of practice.
Charles
Charles is designed to remind everyone to be kinder to themselves and always points back to the core principles of practice.
Try: “I’m feeling stuck and don’t know where to begin.”
A mystery kindness
You have many fellow humans going through a similar experience. Send one a friendly message of goodwill, and see what a stranger sends back.
Remembering the essence of the path; the guiding principles that govern successful and correct practice: liberating freedom.
An ancient pathway
Letting go is an ancient pathway toward enlightenment — a natural state free from the suffering that comes from ignorantly attaching to the small self as real, and mistaking “my story,” “my pain,” and “my identity” for what we truly are.
When we stop feeding the habit of holding on, the heart gradually returns to ease. What remains is not emptiness, but clarity, peace, and a quiet freedom that does not depend on circumstances.
Not passive observation
Letting go is not a passive observer mode of being. That is not the skillful way of developing the path, though it is commonly mistaken as such.
True practice is active: we cultivate wholesome states, and we put in the effort to abandon states of mind rooted in these three things — greed, hatred, and delusion.
Flash card
So what do I let go of?
The old habitual pathway — the automatic grip of wanting, resisting, and identifying. Every time a difficult feeling rises, the old pathway says: hold tighter, push away, or become the story. Letting go is choosing a different path: notice, allow, release the wanting, and rest.
The old habitual pathway
The old pathway is familiar. Something arises — fear, anger, craving, shame — and almost without noticing we tighten around it. We feed it with thought, justify it, act it out, or bury it. That cycle is powered by greed (I must have / I must keep), hatred (I must push away / I must destroy), and delusion (this story is who I am).
Each time we follow that pathway, it deepens. The practice of letting go interrupts it. We meet what is here without adding another layer of grasping or resistance. Over time the old pathway loses its force, and a freer way of being becomes natural.
It’s about the choice
At the heart of the path is the choice you make — the inner resolve to let go of following the desires that bring dissatisfaction and unhappiness, and that take you out of alignment with Reality. That resolve, renewed again and again, is the practice.
Flash card
Nothing to gain
There is nothing to gain, nothing to attain, and no one more to become than what you already are. The practice is to settle totally into what you are, and to let go of the drive our culture instills to be something more: the conditioned belief of “I’m not good enough.” Then the natural state of your real nature can be realized.
Whatever you feel stuck on, surrender it
The practice is simple in description and profound in effect. You do not have to force change, argue with the feeling, or wait until you understand everything. You only have to be willing to let it go.
Whatever arises — fear, anger, grief, shame, the need to be right, the hunger for control — can be met, felt, and released. Each time you do this, the grip of the small self loosens a little more.