YOLO-ing and Letting Go: A sedative or a spiritual practice?

YOLO: You - Only - Live [this lifetime] - Once 

Being the yaadie I am I only just learned the term “YOLO” thanks to my girl Naika, a third year NM student at Bastyr. Naika teaches me A LOT about life because she concludes all her decisions with the word “YOLO” (even decisions made in the clinic lol!). This girl lives life to its fullness. She makes no excuses and choses to experience everything she possibly can, every opportunity that comes her way. 

What I think Naika has done is mastered the art of “Letting Go”. 

“Letting Go” can be one of those annoying pieces of self help advice that I am also guilty of using and teaching frivolously: “Okay guys use the exhale and just let go, just let it go of what is no longer serving you” (sound familiar? *puke*). 

From my experience so far the only way you can successfully “just let go” of a thought pattern, an emotion or a behavior in one yoga class with an exhale is if you had already been working on that pattern for yourself, or if your teacher is able to guide you to an authentic aha moment. 

For a long time I thought I was practicing letting go, but what I was really doing was avoiding - pushing things under the table only for them to re-surface later. So my yoga classes provided more of a sedative effect rather than a true experience of growth. Letting go is much more profound than that. It requires a life-time of work. Because letting go is really the practice of Non-Attachment. 

Naika’s ability to YOLO her way through life really comes with the recognition of the impermanence of life. When you realize the transient nature of all things - whether you perceive them to be good or bad - your attachment lessens and you dis-identify with them. You release judgements and resistance. Events are no longer personalized. No one is victim. 

Impermanence leads to non-attachment because it is illogical even to our analytical-mind to attach to something that is not permanent, and our intuitive mind is well aware of the illusion. So what DO we attach to? How do we find the permanence of life? 

When you begin to peel away the layers of the illusion, the transient layers of thought and feelings, of identities and relationships, of the material world, what are you then left with? 

Well, if you chose to hold on tighter to the transient illusion: tremendous suffering...guilt, regret, lack of understanding, hopelessness. 

If you instead chose to detach, there you find the permanence of the present moment. The unfolding of life itself. The formlessness and stillness of pure consciousness. If you attach to this you become aware of your everlasting Being-ness and the love that holds it all together. You Belong. You have inherent Value and Purpose. In this place all fear dissolves. 

Do you know why this is AWESOMENESS?! Because you can then enjoy the “good” while it lasts without the fear of loss or anxiety about the future. And you can de-personalize the “bad” and see it merely as a lesson waiting to be learned. So you YOLO!

Excerpt from “A New Earth”

The world IS REAL. It is relatively real not absolutely real. The relatively real world is like a dream -- a short lived play of forms. The dreamer is the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is consciousness. The substratum that makes the dream possible.

Excerpt from “The Seat of the Soul”

Become one step detached from a negative emotion so that you are no longer blinded by it or unaware that you are feeling it. Become a step away so that you can let it begin to work its way through you without penetrating as deeply as it does in terms of creating action and negative thoughts and emotional withdrawals and all the other reactions it creates within you. Become one step detached from it and every time that you are able to see it you will become more and more detached. You will begin to be able to see the illusion in motion and that is part of authentic power.