What are we still carrying that was never ours?

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

We are not asked to go cold, or to care less, or to step back from people. It is closer to the opposite.

Teacher Xu said it often, all through the retreat in China — this has nothing to do with you.

I resonated with the sentence immediately, but resisted it at the same time. It sounded like not caring (to my mind). Especially in the hard moments, the ones we cannot fix or change, holding on felt like the only honest thing to do.

But the holding on was the suffering. Not the situation itself. The gripping.

Attachment as a blockage

Grandmaster Pang Ming called attachment the biggest blockage in a life.

He never meant we stop caring. He meant the wave that rises — the worry, the sting, the old ache — does not have to become ours. We see it. We set it down. And again. And again.

Someone in our community said it differently that week — she had heard it from an indigenous woman: cry, sit in your bathtub, light candles, let your waters join the waters of the earth. And then she said: there is no boundary between qi bodies. No time. No space.

The practice of un-gripping

That's it exactly. Feeling is allowed to move. It only stays when we grip it.

Letting go turned out not to be one clean act. The old book says it plainly: on this path, each day you let a little more fall. Less and less, until there is nothing left to grip. A quiet, constant un-gripping, all day, while we keep living. Nothing kept in the mind. Not the praise. Not the insult. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow.

And from that open place, we are more able to be with people, not less. Hands that hold nothing can finally reach for someone else.

The reaction still comes. The body still does its work. But we are not it. "This has nothing to do with me" is not turning away. It is the watcher, choosing not to pick up the rope.

I watched someone in the group say something hard, then simply let it fall — and her whole face softened.

A question to hold

So look at what you have carried all week.

Not to push it away — just to ask: was it ever yours to hold?

If you'd like to practice resting there, the introduction to N-Tone chanting is open whenever you are.

→ Learn More: N-Tone Introduction

With gratitude to the lineage — Teacher Xu (N-Tone; the retreat in China), Grandmaster Pang Ming (The Science of Consciousness; Hunyuan Entirety Theory), Teacher Wei (Mingjue). With a bow to Lao Tzu, and to the research on acceptance — a feeling gripped grows louder, a feeling allowed moves through (Hayes, Gross, Wegner).