Letting Someone Go | Taoism for Heartbreak The philosophy of Taoism revolves around letting
go, accepting, yielding, and going with the flow. All Taoist sages seem to agree that it’s
better to be detached and indifferent, allow change to happen, and move along with life’s
constant transformations than to resist change and cling to what’s already in the past. When we are romantically involved with someone,
we often see the opposite happening of what the Taoists teach. We attach, we cling, we control, and we’re
usually very fearful of being abandoned by the person who generates immense bliss within
ourselves. At the peak of the so-called honeymoon phase,’
when everything seems carefree, joyful, and happy, we wish it would never end. But as we all know: this period of mutual
infatuation never lasts. No feeling is final. The changing nature of our emotional world
causes us to fall out of love, sometimes as quickly as we fall in love. When feelings change, the relationship changes. Frequently, the consequence of declined feelings
of attraction, for whatever reason, is a breakup. Such a drastic change is challenging to handle,
especially when the decline in attraction isn’t mutual. For some, it takes years (or even a lifetime)
to get over someone. Others never truly accept the breakup and
move Heaven and Earth to win back their old flame, to no avail. When we cannot change outside circumstances,
the only way to move forward is to change ourselves, including how we look at the situation
at hand. The Taoist ideas in this video could help
us see the breakup (and heartbreak in general) in another light. The art of letting go is a recurring theme
in Taoist texts. In the book of Zhuangzi, we’ll find a short
story about Pei Kung She, the tax collector. In order to make a set of new bells for the
king, he had to collect sufficient taxes. What seemed an impossible task, Pei finished
without effort, and within three months, the bells were completed. The king asked: “Master Pei, what is this
art you wield?” Then, Pei explained that he didn’t wield
anything. I quote: “Mysteriously, wonderfully, I bid farewell
to what goes, I greet what comes; for what comes cannot be denied, and what goes cannot
be detained. I follow the rude and violent, trail after
the meek and bending, letting each come to its own end. So I can collect taxes from morning to night
and meet not the slightest rebuff.” End quote. Master Pei didn’t force anything and got
great results. He didn’t get into arguments and simply
bent with the situations he encountered. This story has nothing to do so far with breakups. But it displays the Taoist attitude toward
life in general, one of going with the flow and letting go of what goes. This attitude is the opposite of how people
generally approach romantic love. Instead of letting go, we tend to grasp. And when a breakup occurs, instead of accepting
it, we deny what comes and try to detain what goes. But by doing so, we’re opposing the way
of the universe, so to speak. Not only do we act in opposition to the outside
world, but also to ourselves. If we let go, we are soft and supple. If we refuse to let go, we are dry and brittle. From a Taoist point of view, life is soft
and supple; death is brittle and dry. Imagine the hurt caused by the unwillingness
to let go of what’s already passed. When we keep living in the past, we’ll eventually
become bitter and unable to allow the present in our lives. Like a river flowing past someone tightly
clinging to a rock, life passes by someone refusing to let go of a past relationship. What a waste, as life contains so many opportunities
that we cannot see because we’ve turned our backs to them. When we don’t bid farewell to what goes,
we seem to less likely greet what comes. Because as long as we don’t let go of one
thing, it’s impossible to embrace another fully. Once upon a time, the Taoist sage Zhuangzi
wandered in the mountains and encountered a vast tree. Its branches were thick and crooked. A lumberjack passed by but refused to cut
down the crooked tree. When Zhuangzi asked him why he replied: “There’s
nothing this tree could be used for! It’s worthless!” But Zhuangzi said: “Well, because of its
worthlessness, this tree can live out the years Heaven gave it.” End quote. Again, the story itself may have nothing to
do with heartbreak, but there’s a lesson to be learned about the blessing of rejection. The woodcutter rejected the tree because it
wasn’t good enough in his eyes. But this rejection allowed the tree to grow
old and beautiful, and over the years, people came to admire it and even declared it a holy
place. Someone rejecting us is just another change
that comes with loss but also with gain. Take, for example, the many benefits of being
single regarding personal growth, finding meaning in life, and tranquility. And the calmness that’s available to us
after an emotionally draining relationship ends can be recuperative. We may also come to see that we’re not compatible
with the person we struggle to let go of, and, perhaps, we’re designed for another
path that better suits our nature. The crooked tree shows us that not all trees
are fit to be turned into wooden planks. Likewise, not all people are suitable for
each other. And for some, it may even be better to remain
single in certain situations. The crooked tree simply followed its nature;
it became what it naturally would become: useless from one perspective but still valuable
in the eyes of others. In accepting the end of a relationship and
letting go of someone, we also follow the way nature (or fate) intends, which is that
the person we were once romantically involved with goes another way. As we’ve learned from the crooked tree:
everything has a part to play in this universe. And the roles we’ve played in the lives
of the people we’ve lost (how unfortunate this may seem) are over. After letting ourselves become attached to
another person, there’s often no way to eradicate this attachment overnight. What resists, persists, and the more we fight
the pain caused by separation, the more painful it becomes. The attachments that develop between people
that are romantically involved are often deep and stubborn. Such a bond either dissolves slowly over time,
or it’s ripped apart by sudden separation. The latter is painful: the more we attach,
the more we grow into each other, the more drastic the breakup is. When this separation happens, there’s a
wound that needs time to heal. Many people try to accelerate this process
by seeking distractions and repressing thoughts and emotions, but to no avail as the wound
heals at a natural pace. We can choose to keep running from our pain,
but we’ll have to face it someday, often when we don’t expect it. We can choose to fight our pain, but by doing
so, it only increases because we put an extra layer of pain on top of the pain that already
exists. The more we want to be free of pain, the more
pain we experience. So instead of trying to get rid of the pain
that comes with letting someone go, we can accept it as an inevitable part of a breakup
until it naturally subsides, like cloudiness naturally transforms into a clear sky. I quote: Mastery of the world is achieved by letting
things take their natural course. You can not master the world by changing the
natural way. End quote. The beauty is that we can trust the universe
in solving the problems that we cannot solve ourselves. Even though change seems to work against us
when we lose someone we love, it also works to our advantage as it will eventually rid
us of our grief and sorrow. And this process itself has valuable things
to offer, like becoming familiar with pain which is a root for compassion and empathy. Moreover, the pain of heartbreak has been
a source of inspiration for many artists. Impermanence can be a friend or foe, depending
on how we treat it. If we continually move in opposition to it,
our suffering will be endless. But if we allow it to be, we will enable it
to dissolve naturally and we won’t suffer the additional pain that comes with resisting
what is. Letting someone go can be a never-ending,
painful process if we refuse to move along with the changing nature of the universe. Nothing is permanent. Everything comes and goes, including the people
in our lives. Life isn’t supposed to play out the way
we want, but the way it happens. From a Taoist perspective, nothing that happens
is fundamentally wrong or right; it’s simply the universe changing. But it’s the mind that adds problematic
elements to some of these changes, making them undesirable in our eyes. So, we don’t suffer change itself, but the
way we look at it. A Taoist sage greets what comes and says farewell
to what goes. Change is the natural state of the universe;
it moves like the sea’s tides, between opposites like ebb and flow, high and low, front and
back. If we are supple and flexible towards change,
we may start to enjoy the way things are, at the moment, and accept their impermanent
nature. A breakup, then, isn’t right or wrong, but
just another change that we can ride like an ocean’s wave. Thank you for watching.
