My idea of letting go is not original. It seems to sit at the intersection of several traditions, whilst being not quite identical to any of them. Non-attachment is certainly discussed endlessly, but it is the emotional flavour of letting go as I teach it that seems less familiar to most people: a sort of cheerful, mischievous refusal to obey the ego, rather than either acceptance or ascetic suppression of it.
Zen
Zen's "non-attachment” comes close to what I mean. The ego craves status, recognition, certainty, control, revenge, vindication etc. We can simply notice the pull, learning not to follow it automatically. The resultant quality is often described as equanimity, freedom, or spontaneity.
What I add to this has a slightly different texture. It is a feeling of naughtiness. Like saying, "Ah, I see you wanted me to feel humiliated? Well I don’t! Ha!" Perhaps in Zen, this quality is implicit. No one can deny how frequently there is a glint in the eyes of a Zen master – understandable when so many great Zen stories are quite funny, not in a joke-book sense but because they puncture pretension. A monk asks a grand metaphysical question and the master points towards a broom. A student requests the path to enlightenment and the master slams a door. There's often a sense that reality itself, in all its paradox, is laughing at the mind's dull, linear seriousness.
Stoicism
In Stoicism's "indifference to externals", the argument is that reputation, status, wealth and comfort are not what make a life good. One may naturally prefer status to obscurity, wealth to poverty but refuses to become psychologically dependent on these “indifferents”. But Stoicism strikes me as often feeling rather serious and dignified.
My letting go has that additional layer of mischievous disobedience and the deliberate action of taking genuine pleasure in it. I like to notice the ego's game and nonchalantly decline to participate, which then feels like a fun game in itself. I enjoy my gremlins tempting me into insecurity or vanity so that I can deny them partly out of amusement.
Psychology
Modern psychology increasingly studies similar ideas under names such as defusing, decentering, acceptance, non-attachment and self-transcendence. It has even defined non-attachment in similar terms: noticing that whilst rewards such as praise, status, control, and elevated self-image can attract us, we do better not being compelled by them.
I quite like the small amount of psychological literature that I've come across around the concept of the quiet ego. The idea is not destroying the ego, but reducing its defensiveness, its constant need to protect status and identity. Referred to sometimes as self-transcendence or psychological maturity, quiet ego reflects something approaching my letting go: the ego is still there, it is meant to be there, just no longer running the show. But still there’s no obvious sense of amused delight at being defiant.
In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) there is a technique of making your negative thoughts sound silly, reducing their emotional impact and stripping them of their power. This cognitive reframing technique has worked its way into some psychological literature. It works by changing how you experience a thought, stripping it of its emotional weight, rather than changing the thought itself. The way it's done can feel a little artificial sometimes, but I can see how it might generate the naughty defiant feeling I seek.
Philosophy
In the field of philosophy, perhaps Nietzsche comes closest to the mood I'm describing. He didn't exactly advocate Buddhist detachment. But he deeply distrusted resentment. His ideal person doesn't overcome ego by self-denial. They overcome it by becoming so inwardly free that they can laugh at what once enslaved them. There is a kind of amusement in not suppressing desire, or angrily rebelling against it, but becoming larger than it.
But it’s not exactly what I’m talking about. If I were to try to put my idea into philosophical language, I might describe it as playful non-cooperation with egoic impulses. So... The ego says "I must achieve results to be admired! I must make them understand me! I must be humble and good!", and I smile and refuse to comply, enjoying how naughty that feels. Denying the ego does not need to feel high and mighty or saintly. It's mischievous—a kind of internal civil disobedience.
Mainstream
So, this specific emotional tone is not something that has been identified very clearly in mainstream thought, as far as I know. Exploring why this might be is for another time—for example, how certain kinds of compliance fuel capitalism. I’m just saying that the gleeful act of refusing the ego's demands seems less discussed than the broader state of freedom that we seek as a result.
I'd go further and say that freedom is not really detachment from ego at all, but learning to relate to these thoughts, urges and impulses as funny or slightly absurd characters in the psyche, whose presence we welcome specifically for us to disobey their instructions, with delight. Many traditions have considered inner darkness, non-attachment, the idea of the inner child. But playfulness in the face of darkness is encountered less often. It's therefore a challenging idea to explain.
The usual positions are to fight, heal, understand, accept or transcend the darkness. What if we can outwit the agents of darkness, not by invoking adult thinking, philosophy or therapy, but with childlike feeling? Perhaps this is like an adult returning to the innocence of a child, which many authors and schools of thought have explored: a kind of heroic child who recognises that there are monsters but refuses to submit to their authority.
My problem with the word "ego"
"Ego" is really such a cumbersome word. Its current use makes ego become like a thing, an entity, an organ of the psyche. It has entered the popular self-help vernacular and is bandied about with clumsiness. Eckhart Tolle even talks of a “pain body”! This feels very odd to me.
My conception is more process-oriented: I feel an urge or a command and I see it as a gremlin saying I need to be good, perfect, normal, cool or special and not be their opposites; that I should control outcomes for satisfaction, seek more comfort and safety and generally garner approval. These gremlins never stop appearing with their cajoling, reprimanding, cheer-leading, commentary and instructing.
I do sense some similar movement in contemporary psychology towards increasingly thinking in terms of processes rather than homunculi. The mind generates thoughts, urges, narratives, predictions, self-images and threat responses, and none of them necessarily constitute a singular "ego" entity.
Darkness and light. Good and bad.
The idea of inner darkness is not so fashionable these days. I suspect that a century or so ago, the existence of inner darkness would have been far more accepted, even obvious. Older traditions assumed that human beings were divided against themselves: Greek hubris, Christian temptation, Buddhist delusion, unconscious conflict in early psychoanalysis. Then later, in object relations theory, especially early on Klein's work, envy, greed, dependency and aggression were assumed, along with the splitting of the self-image into two versions – good and bad. But it looks to me that prevailing modern therapeutic culture acknowledges these things rather differently, frequently framing them as injury, pathology or dysfunction.
Evil, delusion or something else?
And all that making good seems congruent enough in today's positivist, materialist culture. We don't like concepts like evil. It sounds too melodramatic. And I would certainly avoid that word myself. But I would also avoid the word “good” if that were at all possible.
What I do think, is that within the human mind are cunning, self-serving, image-protecting, deceptive trickster thoughts – or gremlins. And perhaps the best response to a trickster is not always therapy, it's becoming a better trickster.
Fairy tales
In folklore and fairy tales, the child hero often defeats giants, witches, devils and goblins through audacious courage, cheek, wit, irreverence and resourceful cunning rather than force, virtue or sophisticated insight. In this view of how our inner life works, we wouldn’t deny that the monster exists, try to transform it, integrate it, or diagnose it; we’d laugh at it and steal its lunch.
This trickster figure appears across cultures as an archetypal character who doesn't overcome the monster’s power with greater power, but by sidestepping it with delicious panache. So clearly, the adult's inner child is innocent enough but not totally innocent—not naïve, being far too clever for that description.
The danger of feeling pious or angry
Empowerment, or even just plain competence, can so easily be underscored by a kind of latent anger or earnest self-regard. But in the famous Serenity Prayer used in the 12 Steps program, the emphasis falls on a line that is often underexplored: "the courage to change the things I can". I quite like that this clearly shows that it’s not all about humility, acceptance and surrender but also agency, and clearly, in this instance, agency is not all about personal control or achievement.
But it's impossible not to detect a pious note here that sits at odds with my mischievous feeling. The kind of agency I find through letting go with mischief is neither angry nor pious. I'm assuming a position of agency not because I'm stronger, more virtuous or more competent. My kind of agency comes from disobeying thoughts of status-seeking not because I feel pious but simply because I choose to regard those pressurising thoughts as a bit ridiculous, because they kill my joy. And this creates the very particular emotional energy I always seek.
Practical magic
And it's very practical—more in the body and soul than the head. I don't aspire to become a therapist, monk or philosopher. I just want to feel like a child walking through a magical forest full of monsters, grinning mischievously, because I've realised that the monsters, whilst real enough, are not as clever as they think they are.
My letting go is a clever spell of dispelling darkness through the agency of mischief. I'm seeking the explicit celebration of cheerful disobedience toward the mind's deluded urges. And I really do think that many people will recognise the feeling: a smile that appears when a thought says, "You must do this!" and something gently rebellious inside replies, "Oh, watch me not do it. Watch me do the opposite."
Gremlins are part of the game’s design
Those gremlins may be persistent and irritating but the game of life would be boring without them. In today's rather cotton-wool-wrapping therapeutic culture, my dark forest would be seen as a bug in the software of the human brain and the objective would be to reduce symptoms, eliminate anomalies, process the underlying trauma, increase wellbeing etc. This seems all very worthwhile, but I take a very different view. The dark forest is an essential and inevitable part of the inner world, as are the monsters that this landscape contains.
I love how fairy tales, myths in many old traditions grasped the human condition more in this way. My monsters or gremlins are not merely adversaries, they're game mechanics. Without them there would be no possibility of courage, forgiveness, humility, equanimity, humour or freedom. The game demands that we acquire skill precisely because there is opposition. The important thing is to choose the right opponent!
Play rather than remedy
So my approach seems perhaps closer to a psychology of play than a psychology of repair. The delight comes not from the gremlins' absence or bannishment but from their presence with the discovery that their show of authority can be met with disobedience. And the very specific emotional flavour of this non-compliance is naughtiness.
Conventional ideas of letting go often have us seeking serenity, confidence, happiness or ease. But the irrepressible feeling of mischief could be what we really want, if we recognise it as the opposite of helplessness. Learned helplessness arises when we come to believe that the forces acting upon us are stronger than our agency, even if in reality, we are stronger than them. If we try to fight them with rage, or despair with hopeless surrender, usually the helplessness persists. But if we roll our eyes, shrug and mischievously respond with playful resistance, the outcome is better. By attempting neither domination nor submission, we remain in a flowing, graceful state.
The work involved mentally in constant image-management, in tending to the split self-image of good and bad, is exhausting. The gremlins uphold both these images and advocate for their existence, paradoxically. Importantly, they want to stop the inner child from having agency, because the child doesn't care about being good or bad and just wants to play—to explore the forest full of silly, noisy gremlins, those fun, cartoon-like characters who exist to be defied and outsmarted. And that feels delightfully mischievous.
Jung – the shadow and archetypes
Perhaps Jung came very close to describing this. We focus on his archetypes, dreams, synchronicity, the collective unconscious and so on. Beneath all that, one of the things about Jung that I find reassuring is that he rejects the modern fantasy that mental health means becoming pure, consistent or free of contradiction. Instead, with his archetypes, he saw the mind as a kingdom populated by strange figures.
Three of his archetypes seem relevant in this context: the Trickster, the Divine Child and the Hero. He wrote extensively about all three, but tended to discuss them separately. My forest-walking child seems to combine all three. Perhaps the closest to embodying mischievous defiance is the Trickster, who occupies a strange position. They are neither good nor evil, neither wise nor foolish. They expose pretension and reveal hidden assumptions to disrupt rigid systems. And most importantly perhaps, they do not fight power head-on. They prefer to embarrass it or make it look silly.
Where I think I diverge from Jung's position is that he would emphasise integration. I'm more interested in sovereignty. That might appear to be a subtle distinction, but it's important. The modern Jungian take is to try to integrate the shadow. I'm trying to stop letting the shadow run the kingdom. I don't deny dark forces, or exile them, but I don't exactly merge with them either. I'm just refusing to hand over the keys. A gremlin remains just as greedy, vain, resentful or insecure as it was before letting go. The transformation happens because I no longer obey it, delighting in my snub. This way, I make the darkness conscious, then laugh at it!
I love how Jung re-enchanted the psyche and was unwilling to portray it as a malfunctioning machine, possibly with faulty parts. He portrayed it as something far more plastic—a mythological landscape. So the dark forest is the perfect terrain for an adventure. Life this way unfolds like a myth or legend. And let's face it, a fairy tale without wolves, witches, dragons, temptations and wrong turns would be more like a travel brochure and I fear that modern culture sometimes mistakes the glossy brochure it creates for the actual journey.
Lila
In Hindu legend, Brahman created Lila – the dance of life – full of all kinds of colourful characters, many quite disturbingly chaotic. I think Lila would appear to carry this playful, impish quality of letting go. This is not a universe functioning as an efficient puzzle, with errors that need to be corrected, nor is it just a impassive backdrop, this is a universe that plays actively by design.
Many spiritual traditions become serious precisely at the point where Lila becomes mischievous. They accept suffering, illusion, ego, temptation and darkness, but often with a rather solemn expression. Lila permits or even insists on the existence of gremlins. Who would want to play a boring game without gremlins anyway?
This is not to trivialise suffering or to see cruelty as acceptable. It is to understand that a world containing challenge, confusion, temptation, vanity, fear and uncertainty is the kind of world that demands courage, forgiveness, creativity – including music, dancing and humour. There needs to be friction for there to be frisson, thrill, delight.
The perfect opponent
Viewed like this, our gremlins are outrageously well designed. The status gremlin can make someone with food, shelter, friends and meaningful work miserable because a parent or teacher whom they barely respected didn't approve of them once. Now that's an astonishing bit of engineering! And the arrogant gremlin keeps whispering, "Your skills and achievements are unparalleled," and that causes our skills to degrade as we stop working on them. The certainty gremlin may be the cleverest of all, convincing us that our current story about reality is reality itself. Then we become fools.
There’s no doubt that gremlins are good players. They are sneaky and conniving. They often succeed in convincing us to buy into their schemes. Whether they talk big, always claiming to know exactly what the game is all about, or talk us down with belittling snipes, they're just gremlins. We should never underestimate them. But thankfully, they are a little delusional.
Conclusion
The positivity of modern thought can remove the adventure of life. If every dark impulse is seen as a pathology to eliminate, every uncomfortable emotion as a symptom to regulate, every flaw as a diagnosis, and every uncomfortable event as a trauma, then the landscape becomes increasingly flat. It might feel safer, or more comfortable, but as we learn in The Princess and the Pea, it might not. And it definitely feels less alive. The old stories would never assume that the hero is free of envy, fear, greed, resentment or self-deception, because those gremlins are the adversaries that make the story epic.