““Letting go is more a process of seeing differently than you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider. It is making room beside your old habitual perceptions, beliefs, and experiences, the ones that may — or may not — have served. But in any case, they no longer comprise the entirety of what you can imagine. Your horizon is larger than that. There is room for more.

It takes courage to simply look, not for what might have been or what will be, but at the truth — and the beauty — of what is.”

Lea Gibson Page, On Being Contributor”

You may know that the autumnal equinox is Saturday, September 22.. So, in the seasonal moment when we naturally relinquish the summer and welcome fall, I thought an exploration of the idea of "letting go" would be a good topic of inquiry.

In Buddhism, letting go is most often understood as the necessary releasing of our attachments to people, places and things. The release is necessary because the suffering in life comes directly from our clinging to how we want things to be versus how things really are. Importantly, this understanding of clinging and attachment is also directly parallel to the expansive understanding of our True Self versus the Separate Self we most often believe ourselves to be. As the quote above suggests, it is all about "seeing differently that you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider." One of my early teachers talked about this expansive view as our being able to see that "we are not merely human -- we are ultimately an expression of the universal."