[~ from Waylon’s forthcoming “Self-Help is Bad for You” book.]
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Sometimes, letting go sucks. Sometimes, letting go isn’t pretty.
You won’t find “letting go” on Pinterest. You will find it in your red, raw, tumultuous, rivetingly beautiful heart.
Sometimes letting go isn’t about birds and cages and things coming back if they truly love you. Sometimes letting go is about heartburn, claustrophobia, heartache, angst, growling.
Sometimes letting go ain’t sad. Sometimes it’s bad.
Letting go is about needing, needing happy music, old 1950s How do you Like Your Eggs in the Morning with Dino or Greensleeves in the morning, ’cause you’re so sad and bitter you can’t breathe oxygen, you haven’t breathed in days.
Letting go is about the anger right before you open up and hug a friend and get their shoulder wet and salty.
Pablo Neruda is a poet for sad, bad mornings.
~
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
~
There is a Buddhist meditation practice for working with anger, or sadness, or loss, or things falling apart. Essentially, it keeps things flowing through you, instead of getting stuck and viewing the emotions as solid, or self-confirming. It works against the ego’s tendency, which is always to cling to pleasure and push away pain, even when reality is painful and pleasure is fleeting.
Ironically, our ego’s tendency tends to keep us cycling through dissatisfaction, disharmony, and self-centered turmoil—and one winds up not letting go at all, but just adding fuel to the neurotic fire called “samsara” in the Buddhist tradition.
The practice that, in my limited experience, works best as a tonic for sadness or madness is called tonglen, or sending and taking practice.
Via Chogyam Trungpa:
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“Sending and taking is a very important practice of the Bodhisattva path. It is called tonglen in Tibetan: ‘tong’ means ‘sending out’ or ‘letting go’ and ‘len’ means ‘receiving’ or ‘accepting’. It is the main practice in the development of relative Bodhicitta.
…The practice of tonglen is actually quite straightforward ; it is an actual sitting meditation practice. You give away your happiness, your pleasure, anything that feels good. All of that goes out with the outbreath. As you breathe in, you breathe in any resentments and problems, anything that feels bad.
The whole point is to remove territoriality altogether.
The practice of tonglen is very simple. We do not first have to sort out our doctrinal definitions of goodness and evil. We simply breathe out any old good and breathe in any old bad. At first we may seem to be relating primarily to our IDEAS of good and bad. But as we go on, it becomes more real.
Sometimes we feel terrible that we are breathing in poison which might kill us and at the same time breathing out whatever little goodness we have. It seems to be completely impractical.
But once we begin to break through, we realize that we have even more goodness and we also have more things to breathe in. So the whole process becomes somewhat balanced…
But tonglen should not be used as any kind of antidote. You do not do it and then wait for the effect—you just do it and drop it. It doesn’t matter whether it works or not: if it works, you breathe that out; if it does not work, you breathe that in. So you do not possess anything. That is the point.
Usually you would like to hold on to your goodness. you would like to make a fence around yourself and put everything bad outside it: foreigners, your neighbors, or what have you. You don’t want them to come in. You don’t even want your neighbors to walk their dogs on your property because they might make a mess on your lawn.
So in ordinary samsaric [neurotic suffering] life you don’t send and receive at all. You try as much as possible to guard those pleasant little situations you have created for yourself. You try to put them in a vacuum, like fruit in a tin, completely purified and clean. You try to hold on to as much as you can, and anything outside of your territory is regarded as altogether problematic. You don’t want to catch the local influenza or the local diarrhea attack that is going around. You are constantly trying to ward off as much as you can.
…The [Buddhist] Mahayana path is trying to show us that we don’t have to secure ourselves. We can afford to extend out a little bit—quite a bit…if you develop the attitude of being willing to part with your precious things, to give away your precious things to others, that can help begin to create a good reality.
How do we actually practice tonglen? First we think about our parents, or our friends, or anybody who has sacrificed his or her life for our benefit. In many cases, we have never even said thank you to them. It is very important to think about that, not in order to develop guilt but just to realize how mean we have been. We always say “I want”, and they did so much for us, without any complaint…
If we do not have that, then we are somewhat in trouble, we begin to hate the world—but there is also a measure for that, which is to breathe in our hatred and resentment of the world. If we do not have good parents, a good mother, or a good person who reflected such a kind attitude toward us to think about, then we can think of ourselves.”
~
The path out of sadness so sad it’s bad is empathy. It’s the transformative emotion: in caring about others, truly caring, we learn how to let go. And what’s let go is our rigid attachment to a happiness that’s been stolen from us by reality. A dream of happiness that was never happy. So good riddance.
But empathy is different than “Empath.” We are not special because we care. We do not use our feeling caring as a holy excuse to draw up the castle walls around our hearts, and close ourselves in. That’s cocoon, the opposite of empathy.
We all long for everything to be nice, safe, bright, like an unending Hallmark movie. Until we’re in the movie, and realize it’s fake. It’s devoid of real squishy feeling. It’s like mistaking a neat AI romance for a messy human one.
Positivity, in this context, is bullsh*t.
We shouldn’t want to make everything nice and positive. We should want to care about others.
And in so doing we find our path to caring about our own wounded silly sweet broken hearts.
Real empathy ain’t pushing away pain, and clinging to safety. Real empathy is caring about others because you too have been hurt, you too feel. Real empathy ain’t reading Brene Brown then going and eating your bacon from a factory farmed pig, snacking on slave labor chocolate, or needlessly polluting in this climate change “future” our children are inheriting.
Real empathy is being willing to try without needing to be perfect.
Real empathy is being unwilling to give up—as long as there’s a point to it all—no matter how hard it all is. Being willing to walk our talk because we care, not because we’re instagramming our emotions for “likes.”
Real empathy is opening up and crying, broken open, willing to rest in your heart when everything screams: get comfortable. Get away. Get positive. Don’t complain. Don’t feel. Don’t struggle. Scrollll. Watch something soothing.
Real empathy sucks.
It’s the best.
~
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