Quotes About Letting go

If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight - would she have begun?

When we do the work for the audience, we open the door to giving up our attachment to how the audience will receive the work. That's up to them. Our job is to be generous, as generous as we know how to be, with our work.

It's fine to experience regret when we abandon a sunk cost. It's a mistake to stick with one simply because we can't bear the regret.

Becoming unattached doesn't eliminate our foundation. It gives us one.

The time we spend worrying is actually time we're spending trying to control something that is out of our control.

Holding on tightly to what we've got is at the heart of so many bad decisions.

Sometimes you just gotta accept that hope is gone.

Fretting about time's passing will not slow it down one whit.

In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

The movement of the heart as we practice generosity in the outer world mirrors the movement of the heart when we let go of conditioned views about ourselves on our inner journey. Letting go creates a joyful sense of space in our minds

The art of concentration is a continual letting go. We let go of what is inessential or distracting. We let go of a thought or a feeling, not because we are afraid of it or because we can't bear to acknowledge it as a part of our experience; but, because it is UNNECESSARY.

Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

The poet Rumi says: How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne.

Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. It is not a harsh, straining, desperate effort but, rather, an ardent and wholehearted remembrance of our capacity for freedom. Right Effort is willingness to open where we have been closed, to come close to what we have avoided, to be patient with ourselves, and to let go of our preconceptions.

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

When we forgive someone, we don't pretend that the harm didn't happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness.

To truly love ourselves, we must open to our wholeness, rather than clinging to the shivers of ourselves represented by old stories. Living in a story of a limited self – to any degree – is not love.

Letting go—abandoning, relinquishing—is actually the same mind state as generosity. So the practice of giving deeply influences the feeling tone of our meditation practice, and vice versa.

Generosity has such power because it is characterized by the inner quality of letting go or relinquishing.

Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What's more, we're encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

We have one impermanent experience, and, unable to be at peace as it passes, we reach out and grab for another, The Tibetan Buddhist tradition defines renunciation as accepting what comes into our lives and letting go of what leaves our lives. To renounce in this sense is to come to a state of simple being.