The Third Noble Truth flows directly from the Second one: the end of suffering occurs when you stop clinging. In simpler terms, letting go leads to happiness. If you let go a little, you get a bit of happiness; if you let go a lot, you get a lot of happiness. And if you can let go completely, you’ll achieve complete happiness.
You can practice letting go on both large and small scales. On a larger level, this may mean not stressing over things like traffic lights, payments, or whether your teenage kids give you a hug. While it’s natural to want things to go well and to take steps to make that happen, simultaneously adopting a peaceful, accepting attitude regardless of the outcome is essential.
On a more fundamental level, you should practice non-clinging with your moment-to-moment experiences. When you observe your experiences, you’ll notice they come with a feeling tone—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This feeling tone, often termed “feeling” in the Pali Canon (distinct from emotions), usually triggers a craving that leads to clinging. By being mindful of this feeling tone without reacting to it, you can break the chain of suffering.
In the short-term, you can’t change the feeling tone itself, but you can control your reaction to it, avoiding forms of clinging. The ultimate goal is equanimity: a state of non-clinging that is not insensitivity, indifference, or apathy, but simply being non-preferential. It involves not pushing aside things we dislike or grasping at things we prefer.
The way to develop equanimity is through wise attention and being continuously mindful from moment to moment. In the deepest insights, you realize everything changes so quickly that holding onto anything becomes impossible, and eventually, the mind lets go of clinging. Letting go fosters equanimity, and the more you let go, the deeper this equanimity becomes. Freedom comes when we start letting go of our reactive tendencies and work to expand the range of life experiences in which we are free.
By practicing this, you begin to notice how often you fall away from equanimity. However, by recognizing this more deeply and accurately over time, you will find that you lose balance less often.