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

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.

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