Letting Go

I was reading about letting go last night. There are so many things we hang on to and in so many ways. We hang on to favorite possessions or those that remind us fondly of others. We often choose odd possessions to keep but they are filled with meaning that only our subconscious can discern. We hold onto photographs to remind us of old times and old friends.

We also hold on to emotional baggage. We want to hold on to the joy we had one day. But it fades and we reluctantly let it move on or we chase that feeling for many other days, no allowing the joy of each of them to fill our souls and so we miss out. We hang on to arguments and anger. We hang on to things that we don't even want to hang on to but we don't know how to let go.

Lama Surya Das' book Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be describes how we hold on to things. He describes in this book about the idea of mindfulness to keep us in the moment and allowing that moment to die as we exhale our breath and move on to the next moment with the in breath. It is difficult to train out minds to follow the breath and be in the moment but for those that can sit, we find the deepest peace of all and perhaps even find ourselves.