Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation (Shambhala Classics)

by Larry Rosenberg

The essence of the twelfth contemplation is to feel that liberation, to see what it is like when the mind is not attached to things. Also to notice the mind when liberation is absent, when the mind is attached and clinging. You don’t suddenly subscribe to a new philosophy: attachment is bad and letting go good. You just watch these two states and see for yourself how they operate. The sure way to nonattachment is by studying, observing, and understanding attachment. There is something false about trying to let go. It is often really pushing away. Our practice is to observe the holding on.

When you are really intimate with the state of attachment, there is no thinking involved. There is no wish to let go. You surrender to the feeling of being attached. Even if you perceive it as painful, you don’t try to get away. You stay with the pain until you see it is unnecessary, then you instinctively let go. If you really get intimate with attachment, what sometimes happens is that it is transformed, and you find yourself feeling free. That might last just for a few moments, but you see what it’s like. It comes about because you’re not trying to do anything with the feeling; you’re just letting it be.

we are giving back to nature the things that we have falsely appropriated from it. This mind, these feelings, this body, the breath itself, do not really belong to us. When we see that, instead of feeling deprived of something we thought was ours, we feel a great freedom, the liberation that the Buddha promised.

To take a hard look at impermanence is to undergo a Copernican revolution, shifting the attention away from content and toward process. Most of us are fixated on content. But true vipassana practice requires us to see that it all arises and passes away. It lacks solidity. It is not real in the way we once thought. Meditators need to be somewhat at home with the content before they can do that. It can’t keep startling or overwhelming them, which tends to make them cling to it or push it away. This shift from content to process is a major turning point in practice, a major advance in freedom.

The breath is a gateway into all that is other than breath.

I don’t feel that going out to the kitchen to cook my dinner is inferior to sitting. Talking to my wife is certainly not inferior. Going to the bathroom is not inferior. These things are all just life in that moment. Look with naive eyes and you will see that life is just one such thing after another. Practice isn’t a part of life. Practice is life. And life is practice.