Desires, Acceptance and Letting Go

Accepting some things are easy. For example, your bike gets stolen and you never recover it.  Few days of discomfort, few days of thoughts dedicated to accepting the fact and forgetting about it gradually. Not much of a challenge.

Now take this scenario - Your best friend steals your stash and you find out. (Just an example!) You spend hundreds of nights fighting with yourself trying hard to gulp down the emotions and feelings hindering the process of acceptance. For me, there have been few things I am still struggling to accept and let go.

That brings in another important fact- ‘Letting go.’ Accepting by itself is not such a tough job. You just need to tell yourself “Okay! This happened. All right, let’s face it and accept what happened.”  But along with it you have to deal with the feelings and emotions that arise with this acceptance. Sometimes those feelings are disturbing, sometimes they are deeply related to memories or ideas we have created with so much hope.

I feel acceptance always comes with letting go. In case of the bike example, you may not need much effort to let go of your bike. You accept you are not going to get it back and make peace with the sad feelings or regret that comes with it.

It is always difficult to let go of things that are related to someone close to us. It hurts to accept the facts and letting go takes years if not the entire lifetime. And why is it so difficult? Letting go becomes painful when we are strongly attached or clinging to the thoughts or ideas that we want to let go. These thoughts and ideas mostly take shape based on our desires and cravings.

So, lettings go begins with breaking the thoughts and feelings down to realize our own desires. It is not possible to control our desires completely unless you practice some form of meditation. Buddhism holds the view that you can overcome your desires by meditation. But in normal life many of us end up suppressing our desires in trying to overcome them.

There is a HUGE difference between suppressing and overcoming. You can also overcome your desire if you indulge too much in it. For example, you crave for chocolate ice cream and eat it regularly for a year. Then one day you open the fridge, take the cup of ice cream out and realize you don’t want to have it anymore. You had so much that you are content and that desire has been met. Like in economics. When demand meets supply there is equilibrium.

This has to done for each particular desire separately. But what happens when you don’t have means to satisfy your desire? Or maybe you just don’t want it to control your life or go out of bounds. Then foolishly we suppress our desires at the same time craving them. Gradually the frustrations and pain caused by trying to stay away from those desires combine with the cravings and build up enough power to cause an outburst, like maybe an atom bomb. A great person once gave a perfect example for this. A popular firecracker called Tubri or Flowerpot is made by stuffing the mixture inside a cone with a great magnitude of pressure. When ignited, this pressure causes the sparks to rise up to great heights above the ground. Desires which you keep holding down, will build up pressure and burst out at greater rates eventually. It is not possible to get rid of desires just like that, you have to find some way to overcome them.

Back to the topic, once you have made peace with your desires, letting go will be an easy process. I haven’t been able to find out exactly what needs to be done to actually let go of those few painful things, but what I have been able to do is break down the process and identify the areas which need to be worked upon. It all goes down to reaching inside yourself and understanding the self. This is not an easy task and cannot be done in one day. You have to develop the practice and take the time to sit down with yourself.

 I have found that asking yourself proper questions leads to better discovery. For example, ask yourself “Why am I feeling this? What exactly is the basic need or desire which is giving rise to this feeling?” You have chances of getting a proper answers which help in the overall process of accepting. Form the proper questions and do not ask yourselves things which can only be answered by another person. Every thought, every feeling and every want stems from you and no other person is responsible. They are in you because you have given them the permission to be, either consciously or unconsciously. So stick to yourself only when you are dealing with things like accepting and letting go.