From Yoga Journal, by Sally Kempton

Just Let Go

Sometimes the simplest advice can be the hardest to take. Here’s
how to practice detachment without giving up on life.

I’ll never forget the first time I seriously considered the
relationship between detachment and freedom. I was in my 20s,
staying with a friend in Vermont, trying to recover some
equilibrium in the midst of a difficult breakup. One evening, bored
with my moping, my friend tuned in the local alternative radio
station, which happened to be broadcasting Ram Dass. He was telling
a famous anecdote about the way you catch a monkey in India. You
drop a handful of nuts into a jar with a small opening, he
explained. The monkey puts his hand into the jar, grabs the nuts,
and then finds that he can’t get his fist out through the opening.
If the monkey would just let go of the nuts, he could escape. But
he won’t.

Attachment leads to suffering, Ram Dass concluded. It’s as simple
as that: Detachment leads to freedom.

I knew he was talking directly to me. Between my two-pack-a-day
cigarette habit and my painful relationship, I was definitely
attached-and definitely suffering. But letting go of my fistful of
nuts seemed unthinkable. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like
without the drama of a love affair, without cigarettes and
coffee-not to mention other, subtler addictions, like worry,
resentment, and judgment. Still, the story of the monkey and the
jar stayed with me, a depth charge waiting to go off.

A year later, I had become a fledgling yogi. I no longer hung
around with girlfriends who would listen to my latest troubles.
Instead, my time was spent with people whose answer to any
expression of discontentment was, “Let it go.” Pursuing simplicity,
I had blithely flung away my career, my apartment, and my
boyfriend. What I hadn’t managed to get rid of were the worry, the
resentment, and the tendency to criticize. In short, I had simply
moved from one behavioral pole to the other, and as a result, I was
still suffering.

Only the Trying

It took me a few years of throwing out the baby instead of the
bathwater to figure out that detachment is not about external
things. In fact, as is so often the case with the big issues of
spiritual life, detachment involves a deep paradox. It’s true that
those without a lot of clutter in their lives have more time for
inner practice. But in the long run, disengaging ourselves from
family, possessions, political activism, friendships, and career
pursuits can actually impoverish our inner lives. Engagement with
people and places, skills and ideas, money and possessions is what
grounds inner practice in reality. Without these external
relationships, and the pressure they create, it’s hard to learn
compassion; to whittle away at anger, pride, and hardness of heart;
to put spiritual insights into action.
So we can’t use detachment as an excuse not to deal with
fundamental issues such as livelihood, power, self-esteem, and
relationships with other people. (Well, we can, but eventually
those issues will rise up and smack us in the face, like an
insulted ingenue in a 1950s movie.) Nor can we make detachment a
synonym for indifference, or carelessness, or passivity. Instead,
we can practice detachment as a skill-perhaps the essential skill
for infusing our lives with integrity and grace.

The Bhagavad Gita, which is surely the basic text on the practice
of detachment, is wonderfully explicit on this point. Krishna tells
Arjuna that acting with detachment means doing the right thing for
its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about
success or failure. (T.S. Eliot paraphrased Krishna’s advice when
he wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our
business.”)

At the same time, Krishna repeatedly reminds Arjuna not to cop out
of doing his best in the role his destiny demands of him. In a
sense, the Bhagavad Gita is one long teaching on how to act with
maximum grace while under maximum pressure. The Gita actually
addresses many of the questions that we have about
detachment-pointing out, for instance, that we are really supposed
to give up not our families or our capacity for enjoyment but our
tendency to identify with our bodies and personalities instead of
with pure, deathless Awareness. Questions, Questions

Yet the Bhagavad Gita doesn’t deal with all of our questions.
That’s just as well; the real juice of the inner life is
discovering, step by step, how to find these answers for ourselves.
For instance, how do we fall in love and remain detached? Where do
we find the motivation to start a business, write a novel, get
ourselves through law school, or work in the emergency room of a
city hospital unless we care deeply about the outcome of what we’re
doing? What is the relationship between desire and detachment?
What’s the difference between real detachment and the indifference
that comes with burnout?

What about social activism? Is it possible, for example, to fight
for justice without getting caught up in anger or a sense of
unfairness? And then there’s the relationship between detachment
and excellence. It’s nearly impossible to excel at
anything-including spiritual practice-if we aren’t prepared to
throw ourselves in 100 percent. Can we do that and still be
detached?

Then there are the really knotty issues, the situations that seem
literally defined by attachment, like our relationship to our
children or to our own bodies. How do we work with attachments so
visceral that to let go of them feels like letting go of life
itself?

I have a friend whose 18-year-old son dropped out of school and now
lives on the streets, choosing not to get a job. My friend and her
ex-husband did everything they could to keep their son in school,
including promising to support him financially through any form of
educational training he chose. When none of their efforts worked,
they acted on professional advice and withdrew financial support.
Now, when they want to see him, they drive six hours north and go
to the park where he hangs out and look for him. Their son seems
fine with the whole situation, but they still wake up in the middle
of the night, imagining him cold and hungry or seriously injured,
and they move daily through different stages of worry, fear, and
anger.

“This is the choice he’s making about the way he wants to live his
life,” they tell themselves, drawing on the spiritual teachings
that have nurtured them. “It’s part of his journey. He has his own
karma.” But how do you stop being attached to your son’s
well-being? Can you just cut the cord that binds you to that
long-cultivated feeling of concern and responsibility? During times
like this-usually times of loss, since loss is notoriously more
difficult to detach from than success-we face the hard truth about
detachment practice: Detachment is rarely something we achieve once
and for all. It’s a moment-by-moment, day-by-day process of
accepting reality as it presents itself, doing our best to align
our actions with what we think is right, and surrendering the
outcome.

On one of the homeless son’s birthdays, his mother found him, took
him to dinner, and bought him new clothes. He didn’t like the
pants, so he left them and went off in his old ones. “At least I
saw him. At least I could tell him that I loved him,” my friend
said later. “I could remind him that anytime he wants to make other
choices, we’re here to help him.”

I admire the way this woman holds the complexity of her feelings
about her son, doing what she can while still recognizing what she
has no power to do, looking for a way to find the best in the
situation without glossing over its difficulties. There’s nothing
Pollyanna-ish about her detachment; it’s hard-won. Life demands
this of all of us-all of us-sooner or later, because if this world
is a school meant to teach us how to love, it’s also a school for
teaching us how to deal with loss. Detachment, Step by Step

When things are going well for us, when we feel strong and
positive, when we’re healthy and full of inspiration, when we’re in
love, it’s easy to wonder why the yogic texts carry on so much
about detachment. When we’re faced with loss, grief, or failure, it
looks much more appealing-our practice in detachment becomes a
lifeline that can move us out of acute suffering into something
close to peace.

Yet we can’t leapfrog into detachment. That’s why the Bhagavad Gita
recommends developing our detachment muscles by working them day by
day, starting with the small stuff. Detachment takes practice, and
it reveals itself in stages.

Stage One: Acknowledgment

Rather than pushing away the anxiety and fear of losing what you
care about, let it come up and breathe into it. And when you’re
experiencing the hopelessness of actual loss, allow it in. Let
yourself cry.

Stage Two: Self-Inquiry

Once you’ve felt your feelings, you’ll need to process them through
self-inquiry. To do this, start by probing the feeling space that
the desire or grief or hopelessness brings up in your
consciousness, perhaps naming it to yourself, and gradually
breathing out the content, the story line. (It sometimes helps to
talk to yourself for a while beforehand, to take care of the part
of you that needs comforting. Remind yourself that you do have
resources, recall helpful teachings, pray for help and guidance, or
simply say, “May I be healed,” with each exhalation.)

To begin the self-inquiry part of the process, bring yourself into
contact with your inner witness. Then explore the energy in the
feelings. As you go deeper into this energy, its knotty, sticky
quality will start to dissolve-for the time being. In any process
for working with feelings, it’s important to find a way to explore
your feelings that allows you both to be present with them and to
stand a little aside from them.

Stage Three: Processing

In the third stage of detachment, you begin to become aware of what
has been useful in the journey you’ve just taken, in the task or
relationship or life stage you’re working with, regardless of how
it all turned out. The mother who came back after her son’s
birthday and thought, “At least I saw him,” was experiencing one
version of that recognition. Many of us reach the third stage of
detachment when we realize that we have actually gained something,
even if it’s just a lesson in what not to do.

A young scientist I know spent two years on a career-defining study
and was nearing a breakthrough when he picked up a journal one day
and found that someone else had gotten there before him. He was
devastated and lost his enthusiasm for his work. “My mind kept
coming up with hopeless thoughts,” he told me. “I’d find myself
thinking, ‘You’re just unlucky; the gods of science won’t ever let
you succeed.’ I didn’t even want to go to the lab.”

He learned to move through his hopelessness using a combination of
tactics: mindfulness (“It’s just a thought”), talking back to it
(“Things will get better!”), and prayer. He told me he knew he’d
begun to detach (the word he used, actually, was heal) when he
realized how much he’d learned from the research he’d done, and how
it would come in handy later.

Stage Four: Creative Action

The scientist will have reached the fourth stage of detachment when
he’s able to start something new with real enthusiasm for the doing
of it, rather than out of the need to prove something.

Loss or desire can paralyze us, so that we find ourselves without
the will to act or else acting in meaningless, ineffective ways.
One of the reasons we take time to process is so that when we do
act, we’re not paralyzed by fear or driven by the frantic need to
do something (anything!) to convince ourselves we have some degree
of control. In the early stages of loss, or in the grip of strong
desire, it is sometimes better just to do the minimum for basic
survival. As you move forward in the processing, however, ideas and
plans will start to bubble up inside you, and you’ll feel actual
interest in doing them. This is when you can take creative action.
Stage Five: Freedom

You’ve reached this stage when thinking about your loss (or the
thing you desire) doesn’t interfere with your normal feelings of
well-being. Desire, fear, and hopelessness are deeply embedded in
our psyches, and we feel their pull whenever any remnant of
attachment exists. We know that we’ve begun to achieve real
detachment in a situation when we can contemplate what’s occurring
without immediately getting blindsided by these feelings.

The fifth stage is a state of true liberation, which the sage
Abhinavagupta describes as the feeling of putting down a heavy
burden. It’s no small thing. Every time we free ourselves from one
of those sticky feelings, we unlock another link in what the yogic
texts call the chain of bondage.

Detachment as Offering

Whether we’re doing it daily or as a way of dealing with a big bump
in our road, practicing detachment is easier if we do it with a
soft attitude. I have a huge amount of respect for the Zen warrior
approach to the inner life, the one in which you heroically
renounce your weaknesses and tough out the hard stuff, perhaps
using your sense of humor to give you the power to move forward.
But when I try to detach in that way, it seems to lead to a kind of
emotional deep freeze.

So instead, the way I ease myself toward detachment is to practice
offering. I connect myself to the inner Presence (the Vedantic
texts call it Being/Awareness/Bliss), and then I offer up whatever
it is that I’m doing, whatever I’m intending or wanting, or
whatever I’m trying to get free of. That’s the time-honored method
set forth in the Bhagavad Gita: Offer the fruits of your labor to
God.

Every spiritual tradition includes some form of offering (and some
form of God), but for detachment practice, the two most powerful
ways to offer are to dedicate your actions and to turn over your
fears, desires, doubts, and obstructions to the one Consciousness.
Offering our actions helps train us to do things not for any
particular gain or personal purpose but simply as an act of praise
or gratitude, or as a way of joining our consciousness to the
greater Consciousness. Offering our desires, fears, and doubts
loosens the hold they have on us, reminding us to trust in the
Presence-the source of both our longings and their fulfillment.
Here is what the practice of offering might look like.

First, call to mind the largest and most benign level of reality
you can connect to-whether it is humanity, a particular teacher or
divine form, a sense of oneness, or simply the great collective of
the natural world: humans, animals, plants, the earth and air, the
stars and planets and space itself. Or simply become aware of your
own being, the Presence or energy that feels most essential to your
life.

Once you’ve done this, bring to mind the action you’re about to do
or the outcome you’re hoping to bring about. Mentally make an
offering of it to the Presence. You can say something like, “I
offer this to the source of all, asking that it be accomplished in
the best possible way.” If your issue is a strong attachment or
something that disturbs you about yourself, your life, or someone
else, bring it to mind and offer that. You might say, “May there be
balance and harmony in this situation,” or “May things work out for
the benefit of all,” or “May things work out according to the
highest good.”

If you care deeply about what you’re offering-your desire for a
particular relationship, or your wish for the well-being of
yourself or of someone you love-you may notice that you’re
reluctant to let go of it. If that’s the case, offer it again. Keep
offering it until you feel a loosening of your identification with
your hope, fear, desire, anger, or feeling of injustice. Whenever
you feel the clutch of attachment, offer it again.

Once you’ve made the offering, let yourself linger in the feeling
space you’ve created inside yourself. The nurturing force of the
Presence is the only power that really dissolves fears and
attachments. The more we get to know that vast, benign energy, the
more we realize it is the source of our power and love. And that’s
when our detachment becomes something greater-not detachment from
desire or fear but awareness that what we are is so large, it can
hold all of our smaller feelings inside itself and still be
completely free.