Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about letting go. So I'd first like to read a quote by the great teacher, Ajahn Chah. He says, "Do everything with a mind that lets go. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace.

If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace. Your struggles with the world will have come to an end." So it's very important to understand that letting go does not mean passively resigning to the world. It does not mean apathy. The letting go that Ajahn Chah is referring to comes from embodying the depth and breadth of one's mind that is vast and spacious enough to meet a moment with love and fierce compassion, with the understanding that what follows is not within our control.

The development of a mind that can let go like this does not happen by turning away. It happens by turning toward, by going into the fire, the discomfort, the confusion, the complexity of life, so that we can clearly see the futility of our ego's death grip on controlling what will arise next. Seeing this clearly, and the exhaustion that comes with it, well, the previous boundaries of our mind expands, and we're able to hold more to see more clearly. This isn't mystical. You see this at any stage of development.

As we learn more, experience other perspectives and go through pain, our psychological infrastructure organically expands its beliefs, mental models, and emotional bandwidth to meet the newly discovered complexity of life. You've no doubt experienced this already, whether you realize it or not. You go through a breakup, experience the intense pain, see that it eventually passes and next time around, there's more understanding and calm in holding that grief and despair. So the more we bring our attention to how our mind is relating to experience, as one does in meditation, like mindfulness meditation, the more we see and feel the aspects of that relating, which create tension. Instead of turning away, we stay present to it, which becomes more intense and uncomfortable at first, but eventually it forces something within us to soften similar to a lobster, expanding out of its shell, due to sheer stress and pressure.

The more we expand, the more we can let go, not of caring, but of being tormented by the endless, truly endless pursuit of trying to find refuge in some future arrangement of conditions. With more space and less constriction of ego, emerges and organic compassion for others and a more skillful action in the world. The peace we develop is not from turning away. It's from turning toward. Letting, the bigness of life illuminate the bigness of you.

Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.