If You Can't Let It Go, Work It Through

I left monastic life in 1984. One of my failings as a Buddhist monk was my inability to “just let it go.” Eventually, my inner work included dealing with anger, self-concept, negative belief systems, shame, and self-forgiveness. By working on my issues, I gained access to valuable techniques for working through the emotional issues that prevented me from merely “letting it go.” If You Can’t Let It Go, Work It Through is inspired by the original lojong teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. The lojong teachings contain 59 “slogans,” which we call “contemplations” to appeal to a broader Western understanding. As you train with the 59 contemplations over time, you will see how they deepen your self-awareness and self-acceptance. They can open your mind to a path of inner growth that brings compassion for yourself and all humanity. This process gives you freedom from fragmentation and a new, integrated design for living. It acts as a remedy to your needless suffering. You will learn to utilize a specific relevant contemplation to make a choice other than pulling the trigger on your reactivity. It may take several iterations to identify the kinds of stimulation and impact that bring you to the point where you become reactive. Reshaping and integrating a new, more effective design for achieving your goals takes time. Know that you are worth whatever effort it takes. In time, you will refine your process, integrate the path of lovingkindness, and become established in treating yourself with spaciousness, generosity, and compassion. The daily practice of lovingkindness embraces the personal development of the six perfections, known as the paramitas: generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and wisdom—each developmental step toward perfection grants more freedom from reactive tendencies, more space for yourself and others. Spaciousness allows you to see ways of relating to your life circumstances other than reactively, yielding a more expansive emotional range of motion with new freedoms and happiness. Spaciousness, generosity, and compassion will be available when you need them. These valuable tools also give you a strong foundation for everyday living. By reflection, you will encounter the aspects of your life that create your most significant challenges. By full self-disclosure, you will reveal parts of your life that you are unable to fully let go of through the normal process of release, entailing simply letting it go. These are the doorways of your potential, revealing your actual depth and growth potential. Reviewing each contemplation, notice where you see the thought reflected in your own life. You may initially see others behaving a certain way and think, “Oh, there it is.” But the contemplation becomes very personal as you see it in your own thoughts, emotions, and behavior. You may also be amid another cycle of hurt feelings and reactions. Notice how familiar specific thought and emotional patterns are and who they remind you of. When you are experiencing another round of reactivity and wonder why this always happens to you, you have identified what you are challenged to release. This book is for those desiring spaciousness, generosity, and compassion for themselves and others. It will assist those of you who are seeking an accelerated growth model to identify habitual patterns that no longer serve you, inspiring you to evolve. The contemplations in this book expand your awareness into areas of limiting habitual patterns and show you how lovingkindness assists you in finding freedom from the domination of your ego, which is the core cause of your suffering. This freedom, in turn, provides new horizons of fulfillment. When you find one of the contemplations that reflects your life’s circumstances, this reflection may open you to a deeper inquiry. You discover that the contemplations unravel your old reactivity pattern. This process creates an opportunity for a more heartfelt way of living. If you seek freedom from needless suffering and find yourself in patterns that seem inescapable, this book and its practices allow you to disrupt your patterns. From this disruption, a choice is born. You will find a response that allows you to reinvent yourself, free of the programmed reactive patterns. I suggest using this book as a self-paced learning opportunity. Lovingkindness practice always begins with how you treat yourself and speak with yourself. You make a generous offering to everyone else by reducing your needless suffering. These rewards grow into greater fulfillment, appreciation, and acceptance of life with practice.