You Can Only Lose What You Cling To -- A Meditation
The Phrase
I recently downloaded an App called "Buddhist Meditation", along with several others along the same lines. This app provides you with a single phrase to meditate on for three minutes. It suggests that you do this once daily. They also give you a bonus for "sharing your wisdom".
Instead of using their app to share the wisdom I gained from today's meditation, I thought I would just share it here.
You Only Lose What You Cling To
That was the phrase of the day when I clicked on the picture of the meditating Buddha. I enjoyed thinking about this one, because this phrase is easy for me to find joy behind. It isn't about loss, so much as it is about what we might gain.
If You Love Something...
There is a phrase that came into my mind as I thought over my "assigned meditation": "If you love something set it free; if it returns its yours forever, if not it was never meant to be.”
This phrase has been a kind of mantra in my life in the past. When there is a difficult situation, I know I need to let it go. Sometimes in our lives, we hold people too close. There's a difference between being close with a person and suffocating them, and it's easy to lose track of the difference.
Sometimes, when we lose sight of what is important, we must take full stock of the people, emotions, and dreams in our lives. It isn't all worth keeping on. Life can get bogged down with negativity as well as with feelings.
I've found that I have a tendency to hold on too tight. To everyone and everything. And I forget that the people in my life, like my own self, need space and time to breathe sometimes. This is when this phrase (both the mantra and my meditative phrase) come in handy.
I know that if I do not let what I love free sometimes that I could lose it. What do we lose when we cling too tightly? Everything. The thing we cling to withers and dies, like a plant choked out by ivy. It's an ugly truth, but something many need to be shown in order to see.
Do you cling when you should release?
In general, there is a fundamental truth to the phrase "You only lose what you cling to". On deeper reflection, perhaps you can see, as I did, that this is very true. That which you cling to most is the first thing you lose, and, on that note, clinging to what you've already lost is a danger to yourself, and to everything in your life.
Yes, you can lose things that you do not cling to, but it is similar to the relationship between rectangles and squares. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. You only lose what you cling to.
