The Art of Balance

These sessions were recorded in the Montreal Area during the Fall workshops of 2006

Letting Go and Being There are two of the most misunderstood clichés of the meditative lifestyle. ‘Letting Go’ is often used to excuse the attitude that anything goes, and ‘Being There’ to claim the past and future are irrelevant – that we can learn nothing from the past and that all planning is futile. These interpretations dramatically miss the point.

We all want to let go of our worries and stress, but the price is high. The idea is simple, and the relaxation techniques promised by so many ‘meditation’ techniques can be quite calming. However useful this calm is as a basis for mind-training, when we return to daily life it gradually wears off. The meditations taught by Gotama Buddha twenty-six centuries ago go beyond the symptoms of existential angst and get to its very root – the instinctive desire to protect and defend ourselves against a hostile world.

The reason that our letting-go strategies so often fail is because we don’t address this underlying neurosis. The self and the world are not separate entities in conflict but are contingent – they exist in dependence upon one another. Consciousness and the things of which we are consciousness arise and pass together. To let go of stress, we must let go of the cause of stress and to do that we must see for ourselves the connection between our attitude towards life and our experience of it.

‘Being there’ is a state of awakenened con­sciousness, quite opposite to the state of preoccupation in which we so often pass our days – and sometimes our nights too. Instead of worrying compulsively about the past and future, we learn to focus on the present. This is both a meditative path in itself and the goal of the path. The great misconception here is that this interferes with both learning and planning, but in fact, the present moment is able to incorporate these essential components of daily life with greater lucidity and with a greater impact on our well-being and on those around us.