One Time, One Meeting

If you have spent much time in England, you may have noticed signs reading “To Let” in front of houses and office buildings. When, at the age of twenty, I first glimpsed one such sign, it was so unfamiliar to my American eyes that I misread it as “Toilet.” In fact—or “actual fact,” as my British friends were fond of saying—“to let” means “to grant for lease or rent.” In layman’s terms, to let means to allow.

The verb let also figures prominently in meditative practice and in spiritual contexts generally. If you are of a certain age, you may remember the Beatles’ song “Let it Be,” in which “Mother Mary,” speaking “words of wisdom,” advises a troubled Paul McCartney to “let it be.” If you are of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, you may have been enjoined to “Let Go, Let God.” And if you have explored Eastern contemplative practices, it’s more than likely that someone has instructed you to “let go,” without always specifying what is to be released, or how. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once described Zen practice as letting things “go as they go.”

As those who have tried doing so know, “letting go” is far easier said than done. During most of our waking hours, most of us expend enormous energy exerting control, whether we are driving, cooking, piloting a recalcitrant snow blower, or navigating a fraught social interaction. And the mental habit of maintaining control, even when control is unneeded or inappropriate, is not easily abandoned, having been reinforced at every turn.

Fortunately, the Zen tradition offers multiple practices for those who might wish to let things go as they go. In my experience, two specific exercises, one of them practical and the other reflective, have proven especially efficacious. Both foster awareness of the impulse to control, even as they promote the counter-habit of relinquishment. And over time, both can foster insight into our need to manage the future.

In his little book How to Sit, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers an unconventional meditation. “When you sit on your own,” he suggests, “you may like to think of the Buddha as sitting with you.” In this instance, the Buddha is not to be thought of as someone “outside of you.” Rather, he represents the “seeds of mindfulness, peace, and enlightenment” that reside within all of us. “When you invite the Buddha in you to sit, he will sit beautifully right away. You don’t have to do anything.” To support this practice, Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to say to ourselves, as we follow our breathing, “Let the Buddha breathe. / Let the Buddha sit.” In this way we set aside our ever-present need to supervise our experience—even when practicing meditation. We literally “let it happen.”

The second exercise is of a more cerebral nature. To explore it, sit in a comfortable, upright posture on a cushion or bench or chair. Take a few minutes to become fully aware of your breathing. With each exhalation, release the tensions in your body. When you have established yourself in the present moment, entertain the question, “What will happen tomorrow?” As possibilities occur to you, focus on one over which you have a modicum of control. You will go grocery shopping; you will do your laundry; you will keep a doctor’s appointment. Note how that scenario feels and how it affects your state of mind. Now explore the opposite. Choose an aspect of the future over which you have little or no control—the course of the pandemic, for example, or a pending diagnosis. Note whatever feelings of fear and uncertainty may arise. And now, as you conclude your meditation, resolve to accept rather than resist, deny, or ignore those feelings, however unwelcome they may be, and to remain open to the flow of life.

In his essay “The Wisdom of Not Knowing,” the Vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield offers this illuminating perspective on our need to know and control:

Underneath all the wanting and grasping . . . is what we have called “the body of fear.” At the root of suffering is a small heart, frightened to be here, afraid to trust the river of change, to let go in this changing world. This small unopened heart grasps and needs and struggles to control what is unpredictable and unpossessable. But we can never know what will happen. With wisdom we allow this not knowing to become a form of trust. . . . In wisdom the body of fear drops away and our heart comes to rest.

Here, as so often in meditative practice, the pivotal action is that of letting go. By so doing, we transform the body of fear into wisdom and the anxiety of uncertainty into a “form of trust.” To let or not to let: that is the question.

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Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Sit (Parallax, 2007), 64.

Jack Kornfield, “The Wisdom of Not Knowing,” http://www.jackkornfield.com/the-wisdom-of-not-knowing/

Drawing by Allegra Howard.