Practicing Radical Detachment

     

      I had a wonderful, soul feeding conversation with my friend Lise last week. We hadn’t talked in a while. When I shared with her where I’ve been this year she responded with “radical detachment.” Oooh, yes! Thank you Lise Goet for giving me words to describe an aspect of where I am.

       The concept of detachment is a central tenant of Buddhism and of twelve step programs, specifically Alanon. Buddhism also emphasizes compassion. While compassion and detachment may seem like mutually exclusive concepts, they aren’t.

       Buddhist detachment is related to renunciation. Many Westerners associate “renunciation” with having to give up something. In Buddhism the word that’s often translated as “detachment” or “renunciation” actually means “the determination to be free.”

      Detachment is not disconnection or disassociation. Detachment is not about shutting down, being cold or having no emotions. Detachment speaks to recognizing the constantly changing nature of our emotions. No matter what I’m feeling in this moment, it will change. That’s the nature of feelings. My emotions will shift regardless of whether or not I react to them, act on them or feed them. There is enormous freedom in that awareness. It allows me to feel whatever I’m feeling and not be bound to acting from those emotions. For me, with a Pieces moon, that’s big chunk of freedom.

     Compassion, in the purest sense, is unconditional. I have to let go of my attachment to outcome, what things look like or how someone reacts. Far from being opposites, compassion and detachment are interdependent.

     In Alanon and other twelve step programs detachment is associated with acceptance. Acceptance relates to our relationship with the things we can’t change. Acceptance is not agreement or liking something. It’s simply acknowledging both what is and my powerlessness to change it. That awareness gives me the opportunity to respond from a conscious choice rather than reacting. It allows me recognize and resonate with where someone is without succumbing to my own need to fix, change or alter. Ultimately this is a shift from being responsible for into being responsible to.

    Like so many other things in my life, I didn’t wake up one morning deciding to practice radial detachment. This year I’ve been presented with numerous opportunities to panic, worry and spin around in my own head or deepen my trust in the Universe…or at least act as if I trusted the Universe.

    Often I chose both trust and flailing. I worried. I expended a lot of energy trying to figure out how I could make things work out. That one kinda cracks me up. No matter how many times I hit the realization that trying to figure it out doesn’t work, I keep going back there. I’m much better at catching myself when I do than I used to be. This year I caught myself going there more times than I can count. I caught myself, redirected my attention, dealt with my monkey mind and reminded myself repeatedly that I am not in charge of squat. Stay in the moment. Do what’s in front of me. Move on.

    Somewhere in the dance I was doing things got different. I noticed under the storm of emotions inside me was something deeper; an unchanging sense of things being okay no matter what. That okay isn’t about me getting what I want or even liking the way things come out. It’s a larger knowing that regardless of what happens there is a bigger picture at work and I will be given what I need.

     I first recognized the new sense of okay back in February. It surprised me. I didn’t know if it was a moment of grace, a fluke or the seed of something bigger. At that point I was only a few weeks into living as a vagabond. The gypsy thing was drastically different from the way I’d be living for years. My ego via my inner critic had endless things to say about my lack of security, what the hell was I doing, how was I going to survive, how was I going to fix this, etc., etc.

      I didn’t go with the fragile new sense of okay because I trusted it. At that time it was simply a better alternative than giving all my attention to the critic. So I chose to feed my sense of okay by redirecting my focus to it. What I chose to feed grows…and it did.

      I began to notice other changes. Little things that normally bother me didn’t. When things did bother me, the frustration didn’t grip me the same way. It seemed to move through me rather than taking up residence.

      Even in tough situations where I couldn’t get past what I wanted to happen, once I stepped out of the situation the emotions and thought loops stuck around for hours or days rather than weeks. Several times the emotional tornado passed so quickly I questioned whether it was really gone or was I stuffing feelings.

      At first when intense emotions came up, I’d lose track of that quiet sense of okay. When the emotions abated I could find it again.  I decide to add spending a little time with that sense of okay to my daily practices. Give it my time and attention first thing in the morning and see what happens.

     The change wasn’t drastic, but over a period of months more shifted inside me. By early October I realized that sense of okay stayed with me even in the midst of intense emotions. That experience is still new and bit strange. Often, even when I’m immersed in a storm of feeling part of me remains with the okay, observing what I’m feeling rather than being taken over by it.

     It didn’t hit me till a few weeks ago that this is detachment. I’ve had fleeting glimpses of this over the years. Having detachment as choice I can make in the moment is not something I expected to have as an option. I first learned about detachment in my twenties when I read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by T.D. Suzuki. Detachment seemed like an ideal; the rarified spiritual ground of lama’s and people like Mother Teresa or Gandhi…but it’s not. Humans like you and I can get there too. What an incredible gift.

    The radical part comes in my awareness that while this has allowed me to be different in the world, it started in me. It really began with shifting my relationship to my own emotions, wants and the stories my brain/ego tells me. When I am able to detach from those internal bits practicing the same detachment from the external just happens. Right now I’m excited about where I’ll be in another few months of continuing this practice.