Renunciation, not usually a very favorite topic for many people, especially Westerners.
First of all, we have to be careful about what renunciation means to us and see how genuine renunciation can come about, because if we get too caught up in renunciation just for the sake of renunciation, then we may develop a rather idealistic type of practice. This can lead to self hatred and grief, when we can't live up to the ideals that we create for ourselves.
So how does renunciation come about? The steps to renunciation include developing more compassion, wisdom and understanding the benefits of letting go. Because if we just create a lot of rules for ourselves, with the idea that if we do let go of these things, then we'll be a better person and like ourselves better, then we'll get into a lot of problems. So we have to make sure that when we attempt renunciation, it is based in compassion for ourselves. Then it comes about because we see the benefits of letting go and the benefits of not having a complicated life with a lot of desires and cravings.
How to practice it in our daily life? It depends on what type of renunciation we're talking about.
First we like to encourage people to renounce some of their difficult hindrances in the mind and you may find that the other types of renunciation tend to follow. So the most important thing to renounce is a sense of selfishness that creates a lot of our desires. So how do we do this? We try to practice being aware of the hindrances in our lives, understanding when we're having a lot of desires, cravings in our lives and the result of this being Dukkha. So the basic practice works in our daily life.
In order to bring about renunciation, we have to understand the importance of our development and the causes of happiness. Because if we continue to hold the view that our happiness lies in getting this and getting that, and that if I get this, I'll be nice and secure, then we can't let go of some of these desires. We have to understand happiness and the true cause of it, the benefits of letting go and the benefits of having a more simple life. In order to do this we have to strengthen our contemplation of what is important or not.
The most important reflection that helps us to let go is Reflection on Death. Understanding how we can't depend totally on material or external things because we will lose it all eventually. The importance of these things tends to fade, as we understand the importance of our mind and mind development. We can start out by trying to understand the importance of our practice and as we understand the importance of our practice, we may understand some of the activities that we often get caught in aren't important. A reflection that helps to bring about renunciation of certain things is to combine your Dedication of Intention with Death and with the reflection To Care and Not To Care.
Go through your life and look at what you spend a lot of your time on. Refer it to your dedications as to how it develops the Paramis and ask yourself how important this is if I was to die tomorrow, and how does it apply to my direction in life? Many of the activities that we do in our life are not that important when we refer to the fact that we may die tomorrow and that it may not help with our deeper direction in life. It helps us to let go of some of these activities, we bring up a sense of determination to have more Equanimity towards these desires through compassion to ourselves, to not care so much about them, and then we see perhaps with our formal practice that we're not spending as much time on it. We actually see how our practice does help in my deeper direction in life and the fact that I may die tomorrow.
Then it helps to make a resolution to ourselves to care more about the things that actually help us to develop in our life, through compassion to ourselves. So practicing renunciation in our lives depends a great deal on understanding what is important, remembering our deeper direction in life and having compassion for ourselves. Making resolutions to examine our lives and see where we can let go. So renunciation depends a great deal on learning how to care about things that are important and to not care about things that are not so important.