gradually letting go

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When Prince Gautama Siddartha decides to leave the luxurious life in his father's Palace, he is married and has a new-born child. However, his desire to know, understand and overcome illness, old age and death was so great that nothing could stop him. He left the palace in the dead of night, got rid of his long hair and exchanged his luxurious clothes for beggar's robes and a beggar's bowl.

By doing so the prince provides us with a beautiful example of complete letting go. He literally leaves behind everything familiar to him to go on a journey of discovery without knowing if he will ever return. That is the beginning of his transformation into the Buddha. In other words: by letting go of everything, complete peace (i.e. relaxation) and balance are finally found.

Now peace and balance are desired by many and often I’m one of them. Every time we feel unlucky, if life doesn’t deliver what we expect or if, in our perception, we’re struck by utter doom, we would give everything to experience peace and balance. Because every time life ‘doesn't go well’ our brain assumes a threat with the physical stress reaction as a result: heart racing like an idiot, accelerated breath leading to hyperventilation, crying fits, tightness and stiffness, tight band around the stomach, pressure on the chest or the feeling that the trachea is being squeezed shut.[1] Since we have learned to regard these symptoms as undesirable, we would like the opposite: peace and balance. Hence the idea of letting go has such unprecedented appeal because it harbours that promise.

But then, what needs to be let go to find peace? Money? People? A job? Luxury? Food? When it comes to material things, we get nowhere because what is crucial for one is trivial nonsense for the other. The same applies to spiritual matters. However, we all gross in attachments and habits. And lo and behold, without discrimination those appear to cause a lot of suffering, misery and stress reactions.

How does that work? Let's take my stay in China for example. The building where I sleep has no heating. That was known in advance and calculated as part of the challenge. But since I've never lived in a building without heating in wintertime before, it was easy to say, “Let’s do it.” Only now that the first winter cold arrives do I feel what a stone cold bedroom means. Immediately there is resistance and anger about the lack of "decent" heating and fear about how the hell I have to get through this winter. That leads to the well-known stress reaction with associated physical symptoms.

So I am clearly attached to in-house heating (otherwise I have no problem with the lack of it) and in winter I turn it on habitually. The fact that this is now not possible creates stress, because in my brains perception it’s necessary to be able to turn a button after which the indoor temperature rises to a comfortable height. Since that this is not possible, the stress response is triggered due to the alleged threat of cold. But with the energy released from that stress reaction, there is little to fight, flee or please,[2] yet it doesn't get any less cold. That again causes frustration with another stress reaction and highly undesirable physical symptoms, so much so that I am soon inclined to seek salvation in distracting behaviours.

As much as we don’t like to acknowledge, but we are masters of convincing ourselves that distracting behaviours actually bring us peace after our buttons have been pushed. Let's cite a few well-known examples and investigate whether that is accurate: Alcohol. Smoking. Food. Working. Social media. Sex and pornography. Gambling. Shopping. Drugs. Charity. Exercise.[3] As far as I know, the average physiological state in all these examples is one of excitement, the exact opposite of tranquility. Yet it is often claimed that they bring us relaxation. How does that conviction arise?

With a developed body awareness, physical excitement can be perceived just fine, like for example a rapid heartbeat or high, rapid breathing movements. If body awareness is hardly present or not at all, then we’re usually ruled by our ego, which tends to mistake its own fantasies, ideas and convictions for truth. Moreover, it can block our physical sensations by thoughts such as: “I feel bad but a drink always helps. Two’s even better.”

No wonder that I never calmed down from my particular distraction behaviours. It also made sense that I was unaware of this for a long time. I largely lived in the participation mystique, which means as much as “I know what I'm doing, but have no idea why I'm doing it.” But as explanatory beings in the West, we delude ourselves into believing that distracting behaviours reduce our stress. In doing so, we have converted potentially harmful behaviour into a supposed positive experience. If I am feeling down in de dumps and a few drinks, cigarettes or new clothes seem to provide relaxation and relief, there is a good chance that I will reach for them again if I am again down in the dumps. Return to those ‘stress relieving’ behaviours long enough and they’ll become habitual, where they once again enter the participation mystique realm. In addition, those behaviours have then acquired the same status as breathing, sleeping and going to the toilet, only they have never been developed as a distraction for stress or uncomfortable feelings.[4] [5]

Winter on the holy mountsin 圣经山 (shèngjīng shān) in Weihai, Shandong, China. Image: Erik Stout

So every time we are triggered into a stress response, we automatically resort to the easiest and most obvious distracting behaviour. This brings us to one of the most stubborn contemporary collective beliefs: “As soon as I step out of this situation, everything will get better." Whether it's a bad marriage, an anti-relaxed workplace, a rotten neighbourhood, a wet climate, or a rigid church, when we step out of it the sun will start to shine. Only to find out after a while that the new situation is just as bad, anti-relaxed, rotten, wet or rigid as the one left behind.

Prince Gautama found out about this when, in his ascetic existence, he could not find what he expected. He hadn’t exchanged his luxurious palace life for a life of deprivation for nothing, because underneath there was a deep desire to find the solution to old age, illness, worries and death. But it was precisely due to that desire (with the associated expectation that those solutions would present themselves by choosing deprivation) that the solutions drifted further and further away from him. Only after this was realized were the obstacles for his transformation into the Buddha removed.

Nevertheless, at first his desire was so great that he was willing to sacrifice everything in order to satisfy it. That gave him more than enough motivation to leave everything familiar behind and plunge into the depths without a life vest. It may sound crazy, but also the Buddha was once convinced that the grass was greener on the other side, because in the palace he was not at all happy. His conviction that he would find his desired form of happiness through a life of hardship allowed him to walk that path. It was precisely that conviction, however, that proved to be the final obstacle to what he so ardently longed for (making it immediately clear that his desire was causing his suffering – dukkha; the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism).

Now I am not a Buddha. For a long time I thought I had an ardent ‘desire’ to become a rich and famous drummer. But my desire is in stark contrast to the all–consuming desire of Buddha - or the desire of someone like Edward van Halen to learn to play the guitar as well as possible. Because while those two were literally busy with hardshipping or fiddling with guitars every minute of their time, I spent on average six to eight hours a week with the band of that moment. The rest of the time I was either working or doing life stuff as we all do. I didn't have the courage to leave everything behind to ‘make it’ in music, so apparently that desire wasn't that great.

Yet that dream was vital at the time. The imagination kept me on my feet in a dark period. Letting go of that dream was difficult, but felt natural because letting go only became possible when I realized that it had been a distracting behaviour. With the release of that dream, large blinders fell off at the same time. The subsequent widening of the view paved the way for a career in physiotherapy and massage therapy, something I could never have imagined. The self-invented certainty only provided rigidity, and letting go of it ultimately yielded much more than it cost.

By far the hardest thing I've ever had to let go of was my marriage. This was due to a long-held belief of being incapable of taking care of myself, combined with the fact that I had never run a household on my own until my divorce. At 45, I finally got to experience living on my own. In doing so, I was literally allowed to deeply feel the meaning of the word ‘agony’ because I was sincerely unsure whether I could take care of myself.

The first few months on my own were especially difficult because of my anxieties and grief, but practically things actually went fine. My cottages were clean and cosy and I was allowed to discover the joy in cooking and reading, learning and writing. So just as sunshine irrevocably appears after rain, so my fear and sadness also faded into the background to make way for the realization that living on my own is actually not that scary.[6] As a matter of fact it brings possibilities I could never have imagined or suspected, like being able to save for my current China adventure.

Through the examples above, it became obvious that letting go of deeply rooted beliefs opened doors to new possibilities that actually fit my nature. That brought an unimaginable relaxation and renewed curiosity in questions like: What would it be like if achievements that we take for granted in the West, such as heating or family and friends, were not there? How would the organism known as Erik Stout deal with it? Very interesting and equally frustrating when things don't go like the ego-creature-of-habit is used to. But those are the learning moments, because then I find out where there are still attachments and habits. Put the spotlight on them and we can investigate which of them are still valuable and which no longer serve us.

In this regard, I am in a gradual process of letting go to discover how I – that is, my organism (body and mind) – react in the absence of attachments and habits. Currently, all legal ties with the Netherlands have been temporarily severed and I emigrated before the law. The moments of deregistration from the municipality and the country and the cancellation of the mandatory health insurance felt a bit awkward, but otherwise didn’t result in any perceptible thoughts or physical reaction. Apparently, for me, these are unimportant matters.

The lack of heating and loved ones however results in very clear thoughts and physical (stress)reactions. I know this because intense emotions and stress reactions arose and attempts were made to mask them by means of distracting behaviours, in particular browsing online, watching YouTube videos and incessantly checking my messaging services for any new messages.

That is why I have decided, within the framework of gradual letting go, to go completely offline for a month in the near future. Because as with spending winter without heating, I can only know how being offline feels if it is experienced and lived through. January seems to be a good month for that: it starts in 2024 on a Monday and is considered by many to be a bleak month, so perfectly suitable for my research. Because if my online distractions disappear and frustrations arise, which distracting behaviours will try to manifest themselves?

We cannot do without attachments and habits. At least, most of us can’t. But we can learn to see them for what they really are: individually learned beliefs that usually arose to disguise, suppress or mask a deep anxiety. As a result, they can cause a lot of damage in the long run. By gradually letting go we can examine exactly what our attachments and habits are and whether they are still of service to us. If not, we can focus our spotlights (i.e. attention) on them in order to finally be able to say with sincere love and gratitude: “Thank you so much for all the time you have been there for me, but now I no longer need your services." The relaxation that this brings opens doors to possibilities that fit your true self and that, my jolly traveller, is guaranteed to make you happy in the long run.

Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

[1] This is just a small selection of possible physical symptoms as part of a stress response.

[2] ’Freezing’ happens anyway in this particular case, with or without a stress response.

[3] Of the examples mentioned, some may not initially correspond to the obvious picture of distraction or addiction behaviour. Nevertheless, any activity, when an excessive amount of time and attention is spent on it, has the possibility of becoming addictive. It all depends on the intention with which an activity is done.

[4] Breathing is used in Eastern religions and philosophies as well as in Western therapies as a means for self–discovery and transformation of consciousness, and can therefore essentially also be regarded as a distraction behaviour for undesirable situations, with the difference that breathing harbours the possibility of actually processing personal traumas so that many habitual behaviours – which often arise out of those traumas – can reduce and eventually disappear.

[5] In another blog post I will elaborate on the physiological stress response and the fable that distraction behaviour can calm us down when our buttons have been pressed.

[6] I would like to mention that Wendy and I not only helped each other through the divorce, but also forged an unbreakable family bond for which I am very grateful.

Addendum:

When talking about gradually letting things go, it’s remarkable that since yesterday I can’t access Squarespace anymore from my laptop (I’m guessing a certain great firewall having something to do with it). Fortunately I can still publish blogposts via the squarespace app on my phone, but some functions might not entirely work as expected. Our apologies in advance. 😅

A New Challenge (4)

gradually letting go

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