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Prompt: What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
This year I took the Buddhist teaching “abandon hope” to heart. I aspire to embrace it and have made progress but it’s dangerous to ever claim mastery of something spiritual.
In one of the first teachings I ever heard, the teacher said, “I don’t know why you came here, but I want to tell you right now that the basis of this whole teaching is that you’re never going to get everything together…You’re never going to get it all together.” There isn’t going to be some precious future time when all the loose ends will be tied up. Even though it was shocking to me, it rang true. One of the things that keeps us unhappy is this continual searching for pleasure or security, searching for a little more comfortable situation, either at the domestic level or at the spiritual level or at the level of mental peace. ~Pema Chodron
