Just Let Go

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

By Sally Kempton

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

When we're dealing with a major loss or strong attachment, we always need to begin by acknowledging and working with our feelings. These feelings are the stickiest aspects of attachment: the excited desire we feel when we want something, the anxiety we feel about losing it, and the sense of hopelessness that can arise when we fail to achieve it.

Acknowledgment doesn't just mean recognizing that you want something badly or that you're feeling loss. When you want something, feel how you want it—find the wanting feeling in your body. When you're feeling cocky about a victory, be with the part of yourself that wants to beat your chest and say, "Me, me, me!" 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.

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