This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Holding On; Insight (22) Suffering as Clinging to Release.. It likely contains inaccuracies.
Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Holding On; Insight (22) Suffering as Clinging to Release.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 08, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Introduction
As an introduction to this meditation, I would like to say a few words about letting go. Letting go is often associated with Buddhism, sometimes in more dramatic terms like renunciation, perhaps. Certainly, letting go, or release—liberation from clinging—is a very important part. But what is often not appreciated enough is that the Buddha rarely talked about letting go of anything. What he talked about releasing, letting go of, is holding on. We let go of clinging to things, not necessarily the things themselves.
To paraphrase a common teaching of the Buddha applied to letting go, he would have said, "If letting go increases what's harmful for you, I don't teach you to let go. If letting go decreases what's harmful and increases what's beneficial for you, I teach letting go." So there's always this understanding that letting go has two purposes. One is to let go of what is harmful or stressful for oneself, and the other is to let go so that it's beneficial—so we grow and develop.
But the issue is not to let go of things. Maybe the English word "letting go" implies releasing, letting things go away. But it's like opening a clenched fist. We don't lose the fist; we don't lose the hand. The fist just disappears. So the idea is not to hold on.
There are two ways we can let go. One is that we let go and something drops away. The other is we let go of the clinging and the grasping, but we can still hold the thing. We can still hold it lightly, openly.
So, as we sit this morning, see if you can let go of the clinging, the grasping, the holding on to things, and then see what happens. A lot of what we cling to and hold on to are ideas, thoughts, memories, and beliefs, and we don't even know we're holding on because, in the grasping, we take it as natural. We think this is how it's supposed to be.
But no, as we sit and meditate, we don't have to hold on to anything, grasp anything, or cling to anything. And we also don't have to reject anything, except for the clinging, except for the holding tight. Letting go this way is very respectful. It allows everything to exist in its own way without our perpetuating it, reacting to it, holding on to it, or pushing it away. This is a phenomenal gift to ourselves, to the world, and to all the different parts of ourselves—to let it be free of our entanglement with it.
Part of the purpose of Buddhist meditation is to become acutely sensitive to how we cling, how we tighten up, how we resist, how we become guarded, how we become defensive, how we become insistent or assertive—all as manifestations of clinging, grasping, and attachment.
Guided Meditation: Letting Go of Holding On
Assume a meditation posture. Right at the beginning of meditation, assume a posture that lets the body relax. Relaxation is a letting go of grasping and clinging in the muscles.
Gently close your eyes and orient towards a deep relaxing, a deep softening of the body.
Perhaps take some fuller breaths to feel the torso, the shoulders, and the belly more fully. And then a longer exhale to relax, let go, soften.
A byproduct of relaxing the body is that it can relax the mental tension that might be the cause of the physical tension.
Allowing your breathing to return to normal.
Softening the belly, both as you inhale and as you exhale. If the belly expands as you breathe in, let that be like a gentle massage, relaxing in the expansion. When you exhale, see if you can relax the belly still.
On the inhale, feel the shoulders, and relax the shoulders on the exhale.
Feeling the face and relaxing the face.
Then, feel any tension or pressure in the thinking mind. With care, compassion, and kindness for the thinking mind, as you exhale, soften the tension, the pressure. Maybe you can feel the drive, the insistence to think. Maybe there's fear and desire that drives the holding on to ideas, beliefs, and thoughts.
Relax. Soften.
Or maybe where clinging and holding on resides is in the heart area, or maybe deep in the belly. It may be fueled by feelings of fear, maybe even a form of assertiveness or insistence. As you exhale, gently, softly, slowly release your holding. Release the force of attachment to anything.
With each breath, let there be freedom and ease by slowly letting go of holding.
With the help of your imagination, imagine not holding on to anything. Nothing sticks. Nothing gets attached. Everything is free-flowing. It comes and goes, like sitting in a river as everything flows right by. If we try to grasp at the water, we come up empty-handed.
Imagine letting go of everything, sitting here quietly, letting everything be free to flow, including the freedom of awareness. That present-moment awareness flows freely. Nothing is let go of; only clinging is released.
As we come to the end of this sitting, I'd like to begin by evoking the idea that the opposite of freedom is clinging, clamping down, tightening up, freezing the heart, resisting, being stuck in loops of thought, bracing oneself against life, against feelings, against thoughts and emotions.
Non-clinging is the release of all these things: letting go, releasing the clamping down, being stuck, and bracing oneself so that we have breathing room. So we can breathe easily in the midst of all things. We can have a soft, relaxed belly. Our hands, jaws, and shoulders can be at ease wherever we go. So that our thinking is not stuck, it doesn't overpower us with beliefs and opinions, projections and fantasies.
To let go of clinging. To open the fist of the hand, the fist in the mind, the fist in the heart, so our good heart can meet the world. Our friendly thoughts can meet the world. Our open-handedness can meet the world.
May it be that by being open-minded, open-hearted, and open-ended, we can live in this world for the benefit of all beings, including ourselves. May our openness that comes from letting go of clinging be for the welfare and happiness of all beings.
May we freely offer our goodwill. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.
Thank you.
Dharmette: Insight (22) Suffering as Clinging to Release
Hello and welcome to this series on insight. Right now, we're discussing the insight into dukkha1—insight into suffering, stress, or unsatisfactoriness.
My hope in giving these talks about suffering is that most of you have been along for much of this progression of teachings from the beginning of the year, with samadhi2—cultivating a deep capacity to be calm, centered, quiet, still, peaceful, and relaxed—and also these talks about insight, the deep capacity to be present for the changing nature of this world. In doing so, we become aware of how we resist that change, how we stop it, how we hold on to it, how we struggle with it.
One of the ways we struggle, which Buddhism emphasizes, is that one way or another, we're clinging to something. We cling to how things were. We cling to how we want them to be. We cling to how things are. We cling to how they should be. We cling to our beliefs, our thoughts. We cling to identity. We cling to our possessions. We cling to people. There's no shortage of things that we cling to, get attached to, and hold on tight to.
If you're in a deep flow of insight practice, all of those can be felt as a resisting or interfering with the changing, moving, inconstant flow of experience. It's a way of standing in the river, putting up our hand, and telling the river to stop. Maybe even putting the hand in the water to stop it. You can put a lot of effort into stopping the water, but the water will flow right around your hand.
At some point in deeper practice, we can feel how clinging and attachment don't serve us. It actually feels like a distraction, an interference, a way of limiting ourselves. And so, the desire to let go of clinging is not an instruction, not something you're supposed to do or should do. But with samadhi and insight, at some point, we know for ourselves, we can feel for ourselves that this is not good.
Not only that, but we can feel more deeply that the very nature of clinging, in its heart, wants to let go. It wants to release. It's work. It's suffocating. It's tight. It's painful to cling. And in the middle of it, there's a desire to release, to be free. In deeper insight practice, it's not a matter of following an admonition, "You should let go," but rather listening deeply to the letting go that wants to happen.
When the Buddha talked about the suffering that he really wants to address through this practice, he defined it in a particular way. He defined it as clinging, sometimes as craving. Clinging is a kind of holding on tight, much more than is needed. And there's something about the nature of holding on tight that hurts, that is stressful, that is painful. One of the strong definitions the Buddha gave of suffering—he called the human suffering that we have "the bundle of clinging." It's a bundle. It isn't just that we cling to one thing; most of us cling to a lot of things. We have a big bundle, and some people keep accumulating bigger and bigger bundles. Every time we look at an advertisement or see something that we want, we hold on to that. All through the day, we're accumulating more things to cling to, more things to hold on to, more things that we're grasping.
The Buddha said that there were five primary areas of this clinging. We can cling to appearances, our own and others', which is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country. We can cling to sensations, to whether things are pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable. Many people are holding on to comfort, and comfort means so much more than just pleasantness; it can mean security or success. We cling to ideas of things, to stories, to imaginations. We cling to the stories of identity—me, myself, and mine. And we cling to consciousness or the cognitions that we have. The Buddha put these into five buckets, these five bundles that we're gathering up all the time.
It isn't the bundles or the things we cling to that are the issue—and this is a very important part of this dharma practice. The primary issue is the grasping itself. To separate those two is so important because otherwise, we think we have to let go of everything: our possessions, our wealth, our friends, everything. But we don't have to let go of anything except for the clinging to those things. In letting go of the clinging, we might have greater wisdom. Some things we see don't serve us, they harm us, and so we put them aside. But if some things benefit us, we don't have to put them aside. We can live with them freely, with an open hand, without clinging.
This deep movement of letting go of the grasping, the clinging, the holding on, the tightening is really the emphasis of Buddhism.
Yesterday, I talked about the three kinds of suffering. The word dukkha can be understood literally as pain. There is dukkha-dukkha, the pain of pain, like pure and simple physical pain. There is the suffering or pain of things changing—people die, get sick, things fade, things break, societies change. And then there's the suffering of the mental formations, the mental constructs that we have. The third one is really the primary concern. We can have mental constructs, mental clinging, and grasping towards physical pain. We can have mental grasping and clinging to a relationship, to how things are changing or not changing. And we can have mental grasping and clinging to our clinging, to the constructs we've created.
So it's this third one which is the primary concern, and addressing it makes the first two easier. If we're not grasping, clinging, or resisting, physical pain can be a lot easier. I'm not saying it becomes easy, but it removes the "second arrow." If we don't cling to change, then change becomes easier. It's not always nice, it's not always welcome, but it becomes easier to find our way. One of the remarkable things is how our hearts, our deep inner psychological life, generally know how to work through and find their way with grief, with loss, with change, with what's coming new, with adapting to a new way of living—if we give it a chance, give it time. But if we cling and resist, we don't give this deeper heart a chance to find its way. We interfere with it. And mental constructs are so much nicer and easier if there's no clinging, and we learn to let go of those constructs that harm us, for no other reason than because they involve this tightness and resistance.
The core suffering that the Buddhist practice is meant to address is the suffering that comes from our mental clinging and attachments. As I said at the beginning of this talk, the function of deep mindfulness practice, deep samadhi practice, is to help us become our own teacher, so that we can feel and recognize how we short-change ourselves, how we harm ourselves through our clinging and attachment.
But even more important, we can feel that deep inside, deep in the heart of our clinging, our attachments, sometimes our fears, sometimes our strong desires, sometimes our very clinging to identity, to me, myself, and mine—there is a wish, a feeling, a movement towards freedom, to letting go of that clinging. We become our own teacher when we recognize the wisdom of non-clinging and the deep request that even clinging asks of us, that our inner life asks of us: "Let go. Release. Put down this burden. Free yourself from all this work of clinging, the yoke of clinging, the bondage of clinging. Put it down. Let it go. Become free of this suffering."
The insight into suffering is invaluable, so we can see that in the heart of suffering is a desire for freedom, which is an invitation: let go of clinging, of holding on.
Thank you.