Letting Go of Wanting: A Guided Meditation [Episode 46]

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I want to formally invite us all to settle into meditation—leaving behind the cares and concerns of the day and establishing our meditation posture.

Allow yourself to become aware in this moment. Aware of yourself. Aware of your own conscious presence here right now.

For this first practice, allow yourself to let go of wanting or needing anything in this meditation, in this moment. You don't have to think about your life and analyze all the things you want and try to let them go one by one. This is about this period of meditation. It's about where we are right now in meditation. Notice that you don't need anything other than what's already here.

Letting Go of Wanting in Meditation

As we go through life, there's a nearly constant drive compelling us toward certain things—wanting experiences, feelings, accomplishments, connections, and accumulation—and not wanting other experiences, feelings, or events. This drive pushes life forward, drives our lives forward. What would it be like to step out of that for a bit, to step out of the cycle of wanting?

There is a part of you that is already whole, already content just as you are. Allow yourself to come to rest in this part of you that doesn't need anything from the world.

Take a moment to notice any lack of contentment in your experience right now, or any part of your experience of meditation that you're not happy with, that you don't want, that you wish were different. Often when we undertake a practice like this, we notice some tension in our being. We take it as a sign that something is wrong or missing, that something needs to change because it doesn’t belong in meditation. We then try to release the tension, or let go of it, or relax it—something to change it—because we don't want it to be here.

We don't need to struggle against this. Just notice it. Don't resist it. Don't try to push it away.

Understanding Desire and Aversion

Not wanting doesn't mean that desires won't arise. It doesn't mean wanting won't arise in your meditation. In this context, wanting and not wanting are the same thing. Aversion—wanting it to be different, not wanting something to be present—is just another form of wanting.

It doesn't mean those things don't come up, that they don't keep arising. But going beyond wanting, or letting go of wanting, means that we are rooted or anchored in a place where we don't need or want anything. We don't react when desire arises, we don't engage, we don't act on it. Very simply, in the meditation context, it means we don't try to change our meditation. We don't try to make the tension go away. We don't try to make the uncomfortable experience change.

Similarly, many of us have consistently deep and beautiful meditations that bring us happiness and inner peace. When you sit down to meditate, you may find yourself trying to get there, wanting to reach that place of contentment, equanimity, peace, and joy because it's a very rich, rewarding experience. It's natural to want to go there.

But what is it to meditate without trying to go there? You're not trying to get anywhere. You're just doing the practice. In this case, the practice means not wanting anything other than what you have right now, right here, in this moment.

The Impulse to Move Away From the Moment

The way wanting expresses itself most simply in meditation is as an impulse to move. I don't mean physical movement, although it can include that. It's an impulse to move away from the simple, content awareness of this moment—either toward some experience we're wanting, or away from some experience we're having that we don't want. This basic movement—toward some things and away from others—is a primal expression of wanting in our practice.

I want to invite you to simply not move. Just practice being deeply, inwardly still. Be present with this moment as it is. Not grasping at positive experiences. Not trying to push away or move away from uncomfortable experiences. Just not moving at all. Resting in the part of yourself that has no need to be anywhere other than where you are right now. No need to experience anything other than what you're experiencing right now.

Allow yourself to ease out of the meditation.

Wanting and the Spiritual Path

I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting it's bad to want things. In human life, wanting is a drive. It's arguably what drives human progress. It's what moves our lives toward better and better things. We want things to be better, so we pursue growth and change and innovation and creativity. This is the driver of the great human experiment, the great work of this world, and so many good things.

It's not that. It's just that on the spiritual path, if we come to it wanting—wanting to get some experience for ourselves—this becomes spiritual materialism, which is a very subtle thing.

One way the end of the spiritual path has been characterized is as coming to the end of seeking, the end of wanting. It's the place where we finally realize we've been trying to get somewhere all along, only to discover that the place we've been seeking has always been right here. It's always been who I am right now. It's always been simply this moment.

In some ways, spiritual awakening is often described as a kind of giving up—no longer insisting that what we already have is inadequate, no longer rejecting the wholeness and fullness of life as it is right now, but finally coming to accept and surrender to what is. And in that, realizing it has always been glorious, always sacred, always whole.

Awakening as Surrender to the Present

It was only my insistence that it wasn’t. It was my inability to see the beauty already here that drove me to keep trying to get away from who I am, to escape this moment toward some imagined future when everything would finally be whole and complete and I could let go. The end of the path comes when we finally realize this and stop. We stop trying to get somewhere else, and then we’re fully here. Everything opens up, and this moment becomes the amazing moment we were always hoping for. We no longer need it to be anything else.

We’re really practicing stepping into that, aligning with that in our meditation. We're practicing.

See if you can not want anything different than what you have right now. See if you can just be with this experience and not be subtly steering toward some inner preference for another experience—not content with this moment and trying to get the moment to change into some other kind of moment you think you'll be more content with. This really goes right to the heart of the matter.

It can be challenging. It can be elusive. Somebody asked the question,

"If I'm not wanting to get something from my practice, what's motivating me to practice?"

Motivation Beyond Self-Improvement

It's a question worth pursuing. I won’t pour a lot of time into it today, but what could be a motive?

What could be a motive to do meditation other than “I want to feel better”? To boil it down. Most of us would say, “Well, it’s not just that I want to feel better. I want deep inner peace and joy and happiness and spiritual ecstasy.” Saying “I just want to feel better” makes it sound mundane, but I’m saying that for a reason. Because in the end, all of those things are just forms of wanting to feel better.

So, what could be a motive for spiritual pursuit that compels us to meditate every day, other than wanting to feel better—which is really wanting to get something for me, a nice positive experience for me?

It could be that I realize the human race is in trouble and I want to contribute to the awakening of consciousness. I see that this is actually an evolutionary movement. If I am waking up to who I am beyond ego, and starting to embody the higher capacities and virtues of awakened consciousness, then I will be able to show up differently in the world, in a way that positively impacts the whole. So in this case, it’s a kind of giving. I’m doing this practice as a kind of giving.

Seeing Through Spiritual Materialism

Now, you could say, “Well, okay, but that’s a wanting too. I’m wanting to make the world a better place. I’m wanting to give.” And of course, anything that motivates us to do anything could be described as a kind of wanting. Even the most noble aspiration to awaken, to meditate, is wanting something. Even if it’s very pure—not wanting a special experience for me, not wanting to become a special person, not wanting any outcome about what I get for me—but rather wanting to give to the human race, to God, to higher consciousness, to evolution. To simply do this as my contribution.

Yes, there’s still a wanting, though a nobler one. But the fundamental practice here is trying to get underneath what I described as spiritual materialism: the belief that there’s something I’m going to get and have for the separate self I think I am. That as a separate self, I’ll get this thing called awakening or inner peace, and I’ll have it, and it will enable me to have a better life somehow. It’s really that belief we’re trying to see through.

And in the end, this letting go, this giving up, is really a giving up of that separate self we’re so attached to—with everything it wants and everything it needs. It’s coming to a place where we’ve seen through that. It’s not that we’re no longer a person, or that we don’t still have an embodied being. But we’re no longer identified with this body-mind organism as the be-all and end-all of who and what we are. We’ve come to identify with something vast, something much bigger, something limitless that can’t be labeled, defined, or confined. And in that, we are free, open, expansive.

Freedom Beyond Self-Improvement

For that kind of freedom to take root, we can’t really be in a self-improvement project. That’s the point. We can’t be in a project where I’m trying to take me, this person, and make me better—even if “better” means enlightened. The context has to expand.

I think it’s almost better left as a question for each of us: What’s my motivation to practice that’s not about having a wonderful experience when I’m practicing? Something interesting to look into.

But let’s get back to doing some practice.

Let’s go ahead and settle into our meditation posture.

We come back to letting go of wanting, to resting in our essential contentment—not moving toward or away from anything. This time I want to add one subtle dimension to this. I want to invite you to take the fundamental position of wanting nothing from the meditation itself. Not just moment by moment, but in a whole, holistic way.

Meditating Without an Agenda

You’re just here to give yourself to it and to what might be revealed, with no expectation of an outcome, no demand for a benefit for you. You’re meditating for its own sake, because you sense that it is good. But you don’t need anything from the meditation today. You’re just here to do it.

Allow yourself the freedom to simply meditate easefully—without any agenda, without any need to get anywhere other than this.

You’re just here, present in this moment of experience, this moment of being alive. Allowing the moment to be as it is. Allowing yourself to be as you are. Without that background tension telling you that you need to get somewhere, that you need to get something from this. No need to get anything from it. No need to get anywhere else.

Continuing with the easeful simplicity of not wanting or needing anything from meditation. Just being here, present, embracing this moment as it is, without trying to change it. And as the moment changes from one to the next, your experience keeps changing. You just let it keep changing with no need to control it, no need to get anywhere. Wanting nothing at all, other than what’s already here right now.

Embracing the Wholeness of This Moment

I want to invite you at the outset to take the position that this moment that’s happening right now—this experience you’re having right now—is already completely whole. There’s a fullness in this moment. There’s nothing missing from this experience. There’s nothing lacking.

And therefore nothing needs to change. And therefore there’s nowhere to get to. You don’t need anything from this meditation because it’s all already here.

This moment doesn’t have to feel any particular way for you to embrace it, to accept and embrace the wholeness of this moment, the fullness that’s here. In other words, it doesn’t have to feel full, it doesn’t have to feel whole, it doesn’t have to feel perfect. We’re simply not insisting that it be any different than it is. That’s the position. We’re letting go of the idea that there’s some better future moment we’re trying to get to, which frees us to fully be here and give everything to this moment as it is. This experience you’re having right now is perfectly adequate.

We’re just letting go of trying to get away from the moment we’re in to some other moment.

Allow yourself to ease out of the meditation. Move your body, look around. Take a moment to notice the quality of your consciousness. Whether or not you feel you ever got beyond wanting completely, just the effort to do so can have a cleansing effect. Sometimes afterward we simply feel, Oh, wow. There’s a freshness to our awareness from having given our energies to something like this.