In this exchange with an online viewer, "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about a critical stage in the inner development of spiritual aspirants in which a necessary sense of emptiness appears after letting go of painful attachments.

Classroom Talk: 4/10/2022 - Part 1: The Unknowable Source of Peace in real life far exceeds our reach... because it can't be grasped, let alone taken by hand; it can only be received by a heart that has willingly emptied itself of hope in all things seen. Part 2: To see that our happiness is as the sand in an hourglass that never stops turning itself over sets the stage for realizing...

Classroom Talk: 3/13/2022 - Part 1: By wanting are all things not wanted... thus created; much as joy and sorrow, bound as one... are related. Part 2: If you build it, they will come; if you leave it empty... it will be filled.

Classroom Talk: 12/15/2021 - There are no shortcuts to stillness. There is no trying to be empty; with almost no exception, effort is ambition...and though it is full of becoming, it is empty of Being. The darkness of (spiritual) emptiness is inseparable from the Light of awareness by whose grace we are given to see the unthinkable: it is impossible to fill ourselves.

Classroom Talk: 8/25/2021 - Just as the wise captain of a sailboat knows that a dead calm often precedes a new set of winds to fill his sails, so can the aspirant who is patient in the face of a growing emptiness be assured that a whole new order of fullness is on its way.

Classroom Talk: 10/18/2020 -Part 1: We cannot "make" things whole any more than the moon makes itself full by its own light. Rather our work is to serve as a witness to life's ceaseless, concurrent appearance of fullness and emptiness and, by so doing, to unite (within us) the awareness of Timeless consciousness with the experience...

Classroom Talk: 4/22/2020 - Truth, like sunlight, radiates out, pouring down ceaselessly from the "emptiness" of The Great Unknown into the fullness of how we experience it... as something temporarily "known." But, don't miss the point: without emptiness, nothing flows. We mustn't allow the fear of empty space to deceive us into...

Classroom Talk: 4/19/2020 - Life will empty whatever you fill -- and whatever you empty, Life will fill. That's the code: it is the higher, still hidden understanding required to realize the timeless splendor of the soul, all wrapped in mystery and filled with bittersweet contradiction.

Classroom Talk: 3/22/2020 - A brief, but important glimpse into the truth behind the idea of "spiritual" poverty: only from nothing can God make us into something new.

Classroom Talk: 1/26/2020 - Never run from what feels like any empty moment. If you will wait in it, watch it unfold, you'll soon see it reveal its secret fullness... much in the same way as the dark of a new moon becomes, in time, a moon full of light as it catches and reflects the light of the sun.

Classroom Talk: 1/22/2020 - If our contentment - our joy in life - doesn't start somewhere deep and untouchable within us, as does the beauty of a rose begin before it flowers, then our happiness is "in and of this world": (it is) a creation of passing time that will - as must all things that live in time - wilt and wither away.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of February 5, 2018. Until we stop trying, in vain, to fill the empty moments of our lives with all of the distractions we pursue to quell that ache, we will never see, let alone realize this same sense of emptiness -- that we now resist -- is full of Light, a Living Awareness that neither fears nor wants for anything outside of its own Native Wholeness.