Letting go of Techniques — Letting Go Series

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Letting go of techniques — it’s easy to get caught in endless fixing. A bit of bodywork, a touch of meditation. And nothing “real” changes.

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Non-duality, revisited

The gist of non-dual­i­ty is that every­thing is ‘as it is.’ You could say that it’s all about non-sep­a­rate­ness. Or non-dis­tinc­tion. Non-judg­ment. And non-technique.

Non-dual­i­ty is drop­ping your insis­tence on the cor­rect­ness of your judge­ments and prej­u­dices, by bare­ly and sim­ply notic­ing what your mind is up to—while let­ting go.

What we let go of are dis­tinc­tions, sep­a­rate­ness, and dualities.

Not easy.

You are con­di­tioned to judge, and then to seek a ‘cure,’ as if you are sep­a­rate from your judge­ment, and sep­a­rate from what you are judging. 

Let­ting Go involves see­ing through dual­i­ty to the under­ly­ing uni­ty. But notice—seeing through some­thing means that the thing is there, and you are now see­ing through it.

Having and Being

This is a big issue. 

Notice how often peo­ple say, for exam­ple, I have a headache. 

It’s declared to be “a thing out­side myself,” like “I have a book on my desk.” 

Yet, the headache is not a for­eign ‘thing’—an ache that exists in your head apart from you. 

Rather, the sit­u­a­tion is,
“Among oth­er things that I am, I am headachy.”

Peo­ple objec­ti­fy and exter­nal­ize their exis­tence.

They might think that their lives are emp­ty and mean­ing­less, and that they should be full and mean­ing­ful. Then, they assume that they need to learn to do some­thing dif­fer­ent—learn a technique—and then every­thing will be great.

Except it just does­n’t work that way. Let­ting Go is not an ‘add-on’ that you imple­ment when things are going wrong. It is a way of being where­by you choose, always, to see through the game you are playing.

It’s liv­ing
in the here and now.

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Often, peo­ple start a spir­i­tu­al path—meditation, yoga, mind­ful­ness… what­ev­er… with the goal of “becom­ing more healthy and being less stressed.”

And, for a while, this works. As with any­thing new, there is a peri­od of bliss. (It’s like a new relationship—they always seem per­fect in the begin­ning, and then the nov­el­ty wears off, and you dis­cov­er, often to your hor­ror, that the per­son you are with is who he or she is, not who you imag­ine them to be.)

Fol­low­ing the bliss comes the real­iza­tion that this new skill set changed noth­ing about you or about the world. You might be phys­i­cal­ly more flex­i­ble, from, say, yoga, but your life is just as weird.

On the oth­er hand, show­ing up at yoga class with no oth­er goal than to be present with your body and to see through your body—to use the asanas to stretch your self-awareness—now that has a chance of working!

Tech­nique gets in the way if used improp­er­ly

I once had a client who was quite com­mit­ted to coun­selling and Body­work. One day, she stopped com­ing. A mutu­al friend asked her why she’d quit. She said, 

“Got­ta keep mov­ing, try­ing new things. Don’t want to get stuck with the same thing.”

What I saw hap­pen­ing was this: the work she was doing was help­ing her to peel away the lay­ers of the games she played with herself. 

What was under­neath all the sto­ries
she was telling her­self was
the non-dual, “real” nature of her­self.

She was begin­ning to see that all the dra­ma, all the blam­ing, all the guilt and jeal­ousy that she saw ‘hap­pen­ing to her’ was peek­ing out. 

She was begin­ning to see that she was the one mak­ing her life as it was, and this flew in the face of her ‘blame game.’

As soon as this hap­pened, she flipped on to anoth­er tech­nique, so she could escape from deal­ing with herself.

Our goal, in this series of arti­cles, and indeed in all of our work, is to con­vince you to let go of blam­ing and iner­tia. To con­front the veil of con­fu­sion and judge­ment and sto­ry-telling you are prone to do, and to see through it.

Our goal is to urge you accept the real­i­ty that all there is, in your life, is you and the games you play.

Let go.

Let go of want­i­ng to sub­sti­tute one sto­ry for anoth­er. If you want ‘hap­py’ instead of ‘sad,’ think about it. No mat­ter what lev­el of hap­pi­ness you get, it will nev­er be enough. Instead, sim­ply see your grasp­ing after hap­pi­ness as anoth­er veil, and drop it.

Set­tle into the moment, have a breath, and see how things are. If you can hold to sim­ply see­ing, you’ll dis­cov­er that things, right now, are as they are, and are nev­er otherwise.

And as you think about apply­ing this ‘tech­nique,’ remem­ber that it isn’t one.

As my super­vi­sor, Glo­ria Tay­lor,
used to say,
“You don’t do it, you be it.”

Fig­ure that one out, and you’ve got it!

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