How to Reduce Emotional Attachment and Liberate One's Own Mind from the Suffering of Afflictions?

If a person's emotional attachment is too deep and heavy, deep in their heart there will surely be endless entanglement and heavy affliction. How can emotional attachment be lightened? The best way is to observe the impermanence of the world, observe the impermanence of every family, observe the ending of every family; observe the impermanence of every person, observe the ending of every person; observe the impermanence and change of one's own and others' mental states, and carefully contemplate what in these worldly dharmas is worth clinging to. Then contemplate all the emotional bonds one has had life after life, and what their final endings all are; contemplate what results sentient beings have obtained from soaking in all kinds of emotions over countless kalpas; observe what each person brought from past lives, and what they can take away after dying in this life; what is the thing in oneself that never changes, what is the thing one can most rely upon, and what is the thing that forever belongs to oneself.

Furthermore, observe and contemplate one's parents, partners, children, relatives and friends, and all family members and kin from countless kalpas past—where are they all now, where have all those affections gone, and why have we transmigrated through birth and death, suffering endlessly, life after life? It is all because of clinging to one's own and others' emotions, thereby binding one's own mind, unable to escape the six paths of transmigration. No matter what it concerns, sentient beings greedily give rise to life and greedily cling to life; in the cycle of birth and death, emotion is the root, and love is the root. Knowing this, one should no longer pursue the root of the suffering of birth-and-death transmigration, but should gradually pull one's legs out of the mire of greedy defilement and gradually walk toward freedom and liberation.