Learning to let go : The sweet story of Dechen

Attachment is mental and emotional fixation on something we think we need or want. We get attached to things like people, views, outcomes, or material possessions. The reason we get attached to them is that we’re afraid we’ll lose them, and therefore, we’ll be unhappy, or we may even think we won’t survive.

Many of us confuse sensual pleasure, or emotional gratification, with happiness. They are not the same. True happiness comes from freedom from suffering, not sensual pleasure. Yet our society teaches us that if we achieve or acquire things that bring us pleasure, then we’ll be happy.

Intertwined in our attachment to things is the illusion of control. We often believe that if we get all the material things and circumstances just right, then we’ll be happy. So, we try to manipulate people and circumstances in order to get them the way we want.

The problem with this way of thinking is that everything is impermanent. Nothing ever stays the same. We get attached to certain things we like, and expect them to remain that way. This will always lead to disappointment. In reality, the only thing we have control over is ourselves. But we act as if we have control over other people, and not ourselves.

Let’s leave behind for a second this mania to control every action and reaction So that we can open our minds to chaos, to the unexpected.

 

The video above is a short animation film whose main character is a child named Dechen who discovers this theory of “unpredictability in a very sweet way, he is in a Tibetan monastery where he is preparing to become a Buddhist monk, he has a passion for gardening and one day finds a beautiful flower under a terrible storm; His instincts and the thought of protecting the flower from the storm leads him to pick it up and take it to the monastery by putting it in a vase. The flower does not react as the child would, because that flower does not follow the same rules as other flowers, but above all not follow the rules of the child, the protection from rain is not good but rather a bane.

As the flower withers in spite of the treatments and the love that Dechen devotes to it, he struggles to accept this sort of defeat … deciding to surrender control of the situation and thus restore the flower into its environment …what happens to find it by watching the video!

 

What does this short film teach? We simply don’t have to pretend to control everything, which if we even think about doing the right thing, it may not be so. The flower can represent different aspects of our lives, a relationship, a job, a child, we must learn to let things go as they must go, let them go, do not try to possess or control.

The flower may also represent a thought, an idea or an emotion we seek to rationalize, control, impose even if we realise that we cannot do so or that it makes us feel bad.

At the end, if you think deeply, we think it is normal to think that if someone loves someone, they cannot impose their ideas, but they must be what they wish to be, that they can live their own experiences and mistakes, as the flower survives under the storm, and then perishes when suffocated in a vase, who is around us will live happily and serene if you let it go and suffer if you have caged in a control net and suffocated by the too much apprehension.

We ourselves must realise that there is not only one way to do things, but different roads to take along, different obstacles are met along these roads and often force us to change direction, and these new paths can be truly embraced by letting go of our constant need of control. You have to live without tarping or tarping the wings, embracing life and its consequences, winging the opportunities and tackling the circumstances that appear before us, letting events follow their course and not resist, accepting what is happening by giving it meaning and adding a piece of our personal vision to our experiences. We must learn to have confidence and not to bend our heads before time, without interfering with the nature of things so that we can live peacefully.

Embrace life, dispose chains and release the randomness, do not keep everything under control and give the unfocused release to fantasy, flexibility, adaptation and life!