‘Holding onto anything is like holding onto your breath. You will suffocate. The only way to get anything in the physical universe is by letting go of it. Let it go and it will be yours forever’ Deepak Chopra
We must focus on letting go to the thing we are holding onto, a past event, some friction, a person and their actions that upset us, and talking about it, thinking about it, analysing it, as devoting our consciousness to something is worship, and event hatred can be worship. We must be able to let go.
A beautiful story about letting go is the story of the monkey and the nuts & sweets. When the monkey catchers in India or Morrocco want to catch a wee monkey to sell as a pet to the wealthy, they employ a very simply technique. They dig a little hole in the ground and place a small timber board over the top with a hole the size of a monkey’s wrist. Under the board in the hole they place some sweets and nuts. They wait patiently until a monkey comes along, and smelling the delicious nuts and sweets, he sticks his little arm down there to snatch at the treats, and then wraps his hand around them forming a fist. However the fist won’t fit through the hole, only his skinny wrist. So he starts scrambling around attempting to get them out, and then the monkey catcher comes along and as he approaches the monkey starts screeching and wrenching his arm around but he refuses to let go of the sweets and nuts. He knows he will be caught, and even when the catcher simply throws a sack over him and picks him up he clutches onto the sweets with his little fist. If he had only let go of those treats he would have been free, but he rigidly would not let go of them. The irony is those nuts and fruits can be found in all the local trees. He is captive to something so readily available all around him.
We must ask, where in life are we like these monkey’s, screeching and making a fuss over something so small that we could have let go of so easily, that is so feel available to us elsewhere, to create our own freedom?
‘You wanna fly? You got to give up that shit that weighs you down’ Toni Morrison
Image from here