“Skillfully, he practices breathing in, contemplating letting go. Skillfully, he practices breathing out, contemplating letting go.”
Throwing away is a wonderful practice. You might like to ask, “Throwing away what?” What is to be thrown away?
We have learned that wrong perceptions are the ground of all afflictions–fear, anger, discrimination, despair. So it’s easy to know that throwing away here means to throw away wrong perceptions–ideas or notions–that are at the base of our suffering. It is the most important practice in Buddhist meditation. You have an idea, and you entertain that idea for a long time, and you continue to suffer.
Every one of us entertains an idea about happiness. It may be because of that idea of happiness that we’ve never been happy.
So it’s very important to throw away that notion of happiness.
~Thich Nhat Hanh