10: #10 – Letting Go of Our Stories

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As soon as we’re born we’re faced with what life throws at us and we develop ways of coping that may or may not be beneficial. We’re also bombarded with messages from family, friends, school and society at large about who we are and what we should or shouldn’t be. These habits and messages become embedded and we may not even be aware of them, but they influence us on a daily basis. This is what the Buddha means when he talks about our conditioning. This conditioning can harden into the unwise stories we believe; craving and addiction are a destructive way of handling these beliefs.

In order to move towards freedom we have to wake up to our conditioning and disentangle it. Slowing down the mind and taking a step back to see the impersonal nature of the mind and developing a deep intimacy with our experience is how we move toward letting go of the craving and addiction. This talk will offer ways to examine our stories and the baggage we carry with us and investigate how to let them go in order to live a more liberated life.