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Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits By Martine Batchelor ( Wisdom Publications )
Release Date: 2007-06-27
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List Price: $15.95
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Product Description
Everyone has negative habits — even the smallest ones can take control of us. Let Go is a much-needed guide to getting that control back. Martine Batchelor helps readers focus their minds and uncover the roots of their repetitive behaviors. For Batchelor, it's all about how we relate to our thoughts. By adopting the kind of "creative engagement" that she teaches in Let Go, readers can start to see real change, and recognize problems for what they really are: growth opportunities! Batchelor’s methods are applicable to all unwanted behavior — from the slightest undesirable recurring actions to more serious patterns of cruelty, self-abuse, and negativity. Each chapter concludes with Batchelor's expert guidance in exercises or meditations that helps readers begin to work with their harmful habits in a new, creative, and empowering way.
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 Breaking Free of Habits
In Letting Go Martine Batchelor gives us a Buddhist handbook for liberating ourselves from compulsive habits. She clearly describes the process of habituation, from experiencing an emotion, "there is fear in my mind", through identification with the emotion, "I am afraid", to solidification of this into fixed identity, "I am a fearful person", which then colors and restricts all our subsequent experience. The rest of the book presents antidotes and practices to unlink these steps. Wearing lightly her years of experience as a Buddhist nun and meditation teacher, she presents practices and stories with simplicity, humor, clarity and compassion. I cannot imagine anyone who would not benefit from reading this seemingly simple but deeply wise book.
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 A fresh look at meditation
I recently heard Martine speak at my meditation center. She is delightfully humorous, warm and insightful. The crowd really enjoyed her talk and she was very available afterwards for questions.
The book does not transmit as much humor and freshness as she shows in person. Nevertheless, she has a core of very unique and practical thoughts about what Vispassana meditation is all about that can be found here. She is trying to put a focus on mediatation as a way to observe the habits we seldom see and evaluate ones that don't really work for us so we can change.
Something she said in her talk that I didn't see made explicit in the book was her comment that Vispassana is not best translated as "Insight" (the outcome) but Experiential Inquiry (the process). I think this idea informs what the book is all about.
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