Letting Go and Control

People come to meditation to let go. They have had a week of holding everything together and want half an hour where they do not have to. So when I tell a new student the first few weeks are about control, they look at me as if I have the lesson back to front.

Control and letting go are the same lesson taught from two ends, and the second only works once you have done the first.

What I mean by control

I do not mean gripping, and I do not mean forcing your mind to go blank, which nobody can do.

Control, as I teach it, is the ability to put your attention where you choose and keep it there for as long as you choose. That is all. It sounds small, and it is the whole foundation. Every ability you develop later, every healing, every message you receive and sort from your own imagination, sits on top of that one skill.

The daily sit in Thirty Minutes a Day is where you build it. This page is about what those first weeks are teaching you underneath the breathing.

The weekly lessons

When I run this as a course I give one element a week, done every day for seven days before the next. The order matters.

Week one is breathing. You tension and release each part of your body from the feet up, then you put your whole attention on the breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. See love and strength coming in and whatever is heavy going out. When your attention wanders, bring it back without a fuss.

Week two adds the big toes. Bare feet or socks, a gentle scratch of both toes to wake them up, then the breath and both toes held in awareness at once. Two things at the same time, on purpose.

Week three adds the hands and feet. A ritual washing first, warm water, a drop of scented oil, seeing healing energy soaking into your skin and the day's rubbish running down the drain. Then a scratch on the soles and palms, and four points held in awareness along with the breath. Your hands come to feel warm and glowing. This one grounds you very strongly too, which the Grounding page explains.

Every week there is a little more to hold, and every week you find you can hold it. That is control being built the way a muscle is, by small daily loads.

The turn

Somewhere around the third or fourth week, something happens that nobody expects.

You settle on the breath, and the thoughts that used to barge in start arriving more quietly. You see the worry about tomorrow's meeting form at the edge of your mind, and for the first time you have a choice about whether to pick it up.

That choice is letting go. It was never available before, because you had no say in where your attention went. Now you can decline. The worry is still there. You have stopped feeding it, and a thought that is not fed gets smaller.

Letting go is usually taught as a decision made once with the jaw set. It is a skill, and underneath it is the control from those first three weeks. You cannot put something down that you have never learned to hold.

Holding the reins lightly

The picture I give students is a horse and a set of reins.

A beginner either drops the reins and lets the horse go wherever it likes, which is what an untrained mind does all day, or hauls on them so hard the horse fights back, which is what forcing a blank mind does. Neither gets you where you wanted to go.

A good rider holds the reins lightly. The direction is chosen, and the grip is soft enough to feel every shift through the leather. Control and ease in the same two hands.

That is what you are after in meditation, and in life. When the horse shies, you breathe, keep the soft grip, and bring it back.

The curve ball

Years ago a curve ball came out of the blue and rocked my world to the core. I will not go into the details, but it is the reason this page exists.

By then I had been practising daily for many years. When the event landed I found out what all that sitting had built, which was the capacity to feel the full force of it without being swept away. I was not calm. Nobody is calm when their world tips over. But I could find my breath and hold my attention for a few seconds at a time, and those seconds were enough to stand on.

The practice did not stop the curve ball. Nothing does. It gave me somewhere to stand while it went past.

What came clear afterwards was how little of what I had been holding onto mattered. Money, possessions, standing, all of it paled. What was left was love, compassion, the people who turned up, and the practice. That was the letting go, and I did not choose it. It was done to me, and the control I had built was what I stood on.

Build the control now, while the weather is fine. There is no time to build it once the storm arrives.

An exercise for this week

Once the breath and toes are steady, add this to your daily sit.

1. Settle into your relaxed state and your breathing as usual.
2. When a thought arrives, and it will, name it in one word. Work. Money. Him. Her. Dinner.
3. Picture setting it down on a shelf just outside the room. You can collect it on the way out.
4. Return to the breath. Hold the reins lightly.
5. At the end of the sit, look at the shelf. Notice how many of the things on it you actually want to pick back up.

Most people find the shelf fuller than they expected and that half of what is on it can stay there. That is information about where your energy has been going. A journal of your waking thoughts and your thoughts before sleep gives the same information, and shows what has more control over the health of your energy than it should.

The mistakes people make

Skipping the control weeks because letting go sounds nicer. Everyone who skips them comes back to them.

Confusing control with tension. If your jaw is tight and your shoulders are up, you are gripping. Soften.

Treating one good sit as arrival. The horse does not stay trained because you rode it well once on a Tuesday. Chop wood, carry water.

Trying to let go of the big thing first. Start with dinner.

Where this leads

Once you can hold your attention and choose what to release, the deeper states in Going Deeper open up, because the sinking feeling only comes when you stop fighting the descent. The Brain Wave States page shows what your mind is doing as it drops.

You will be your own teacher in this. I can show you the reins. Only you can learn the feel of them.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Letting Go