Let Your Self’s Stuff Go

During Jeff Goin’s Medicine Buddha Meditation this morning, something struck me that was helpful to my own experience. I’m sure others have thought of this before, but being somewhat new in my meditation journey, as I’ve been attending meditations at Lotus for only a few years now, I was grateful for this insight.

Every Saturday during Lotus Center’s Medicine Buddha meditation Jeff says: let yourself go. And sometimes he slows down and says it this way: Let. Your. Self. Go. And of course in standard American English, these words have an alternate meaning when written this
way–Let yourself go!– meaning something along the lines of Have fun! Release your inhibitions! In meditation, we mean by “Let your self go” something entirely different.

The illusion of self is a concept integral to Buddhist teaching. In short, the self is, to put it simply, not a thing. T. O. Ling’s A Dictionary of Buddhism explains that according to “Buddhist doctrine there is not a permanent self (atta) within each individual being” (20). What we in the West call the “self” is really a set of factors including one’s physical form, “sensation or feeling,” perception, volition, and consciousness” (Ling 156-57).” Basically, humans attempt to construct
a firm entity from this “aggregate of factors” leading to suffering. According to Philip Kapleau in Three Pillars of Zen, the essential thing for enlightenment is to empty the mind of the notion of self” (185). Easier said than done, however, since we live in a society of cultivated and shared selves.

I have heard Jeff say Let your self go dozens of times, but this morning, a thought whisper followed his words: “and let your self’s stuff go too.” During the pandemic when I was spending a lot of time at home, including working from home, I fell into minimalism. I realized that I was swimming in stuff–mainly books, old journals, files filled with old papers, kitchenware, and tchotchkes. The pandemic seemed a good occasion to divest myself of some of these
items, and although there’s been a backlash against minimalism since then (through among other trends, maximalism, cottage core, and gallery walls), I’m still committed to owning fewer objects of all sorts.

Six months ago I moved offices at work, using the occasion to carefully separate what I truly needed to carry with me, from what would be better to discard, give away, or leave behind. I had for instance many TBRs (books “to be read”) in my office collection, forcing me to bring a fierce honesty to each title in that category: How long have I owned this? How many times have I moved it? If I haven’t read it yet, why do I think I’ll read it later? If I got rid of it and at some
point decided I did want to read this book, how hard would it be to borrow a copy from a library? Why am I holding onto this book really?

Of course, my self was behind much of this holding on to books. I was filled with negative feelings about having unread books on my shelf, some of which I believed were those a person my age should have read by now. In instances where I had read the books, but no
longer remembered them well enough to speak about them, I was also overcome with negative feelings, and so on. I’m happy to say that I let go of at least one-third of the books that I owned in the process of moving offices, but it wasn’t until this morning when Jeff said, “Let your self go,” and something in me responded, “and your self’s stuff too” that I recognized a specific connection my minimalist and Buddhist practices in relation to self.

My feelings were not about the books, but about my self. My “self” should read what I buy, and remember what I’ve read, and so on. This “self” that I’ve mentally fashioned out of biographical facts (such as birthplace and work history), personality traits, preferences and
dislikes, and physical characteristics is not real. It’s simply not. And yet I’ve allowed it to grow so powerful that it has collected a detritus around itself both at home and at work! And I’ve allowed
it to attach great significance to items when, in fact, although enjoyable at times, physical objects are often inconsequential in comparison to what gives life true meaning. Geshe Kelsang
Gyatso explains that “Until now we have cherished ourself above all others, and for as long as we continue to do this our suffering will never end . . . Our instinctive view is that we are more important than everyone else, while the view of enlightened beings is that it is others who are more important” (Transform Your Life. 2001, p. 100).

When I fuss with and focus on all of the stuff in my life, it’s in furtherance of a false notion of self. I’m a good cook whether or not I own the gadget of the hour. I appreciate books and their contents even if I don’t own a single text. Marie Kondo’s recommendation that we get rid of anything that no longer “sparks joy” has become a commonplace, but what I realized this morning goes deeper than that. If I’m holding onto items because they shore up a self that itself
needs to go, I will never be free of suffering. Instead, I can shift my focus to others, and commit to cherishing them, in contrast to self-cherishing. For example, I signed on to Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion, but how actively am I practicing compassion?

In “Bored in the USA,” Father John Misty laments, “I’ve got all morning to obsessively accrue / a small nation of meaningful objects / and they’ve got to represent me too” (2014). Thankfully, I’ve come to question the meaningfulness of objects, and when there’s no “me” to
represent, so much falls away, and perhaps I can finally Let. My. Self. Go.

Roberta Brown
Silver City, New Mexico