The importance of letting go

As I grow a little older, I am reminded more and more how important letting go is. The Four Noble Truths state Buddhism’s fundamental principles and the second one links suffering to craving or attachment. I like the way it is explained on the Zen Buddhism site:

The second noble truth tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment. To avoid suffering, we need to understand what causes suffering and then weeding out these causes from our lives.

According to Buddha, the basic cause of suffering is “the attachment to the desire to have (craving) and the desire not to have (aversion)”.

My wife reminded me about this with a good post she published on her blog which touches on this theme:

#Zombieprompts Week 13

It is so easy to create expectations of our world and form attachments to how we want things to be. That just creates so much stress and it’s only when we pause, take a breath and let go a little that we realise just how damaging our attachments are. It’s also easier said than done but little releases help a lot too.

Image credit: Bossfight