The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Hello. Hello. Hello and welcome and as we

as an introduction to this meditation

I would like to say a few words about

letting go.

Letting go is often associated with Buddhism,

sometimes in more dramatic terms, like renunciation perhaps.

And certainly it's a very important part, letting go or release, liberation from clinging.

But what is often not appreciated enough is that the Buddha rarely talked about letting go of anything.

What he talked about releasing, letting go, is we let go of holding on.

We let go of clinging to things, not necessarily let go of the things.

And to paraphrase a common teaching of the Buddha and apply to letting go, he would have said, if letting go increases what's harmful for you, I don't teach you to let go.

If letting go decreases what's harmful and increases what's beneficial for you, I teach letting go.

And so there's always this understanding that letting go has two, for two purposes.

One is to let go of what is harmful for oneself, and the other are stressful, and the other is to let go so that it's beneficial. We grow, we develop.

But it's not the issue to let go of things. Maybe the English word letting go implies

releasing, letting things go away. But it's opening the fist of the hand. We don't lose the

fist. We don't lose the hand, but just the fist disappears. So the idea is not to hold on.

And then there's two ways that we can let go, as I've showed before. One is that we let go and

something drops away. The other is we let go and something drops away.

The other is we let go of the clinging and the grasping,

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