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At 2 a.m. last night, I awoke to the dark, and before I could find the light, I found myself in the middle of my own concert. The song “I Found My Way” was playing loudly in my head, and obsessive thoughts about the upcoming work week were flashing across my inner screen.
When I finally saw the time, the added worry of potentially not being able to fall back asleep slipped in. Then, the miracle happened. Somewhere between reheating my cup of tea and heading back to bed, “I let it all go.” I awoke in the morning rested.
“The root of all suffering is attachment.” — Buddha
In Buddhism, attachment is also known as Upādāna उपादान, a Sanskrit and Pali word that means “fuel.” It refers to the ways we grasp or cling to other people, objects, ideas or experiences.
Attachment is inevitable, but being aware of what we are fueling with our attention is key. We spend the majority of our lives trying to control the outcome of our experiences and define this as reality, whether it’s pining for great weather during a much-needed vacation, praying that our buyer’s offer gets accepted or needing our loved one or teammate to act differently for us to be happy.
Being attached to any outcome that we have little or no control over can lead to anxiety, insomnia and digestive issues when left unchecked.
Below are three ways to ante up your detachment skills and find more freedom amid the chaos.
1. Acknowledge It
Address the elephant in the room. When we’re dealing with a strong attachment, we always need to begin by acknowledging and working with our feelings. These feelings are the glue that attachments stick to — the excited desire we feel when we want that deal to come together, the anxiety we feel about losing a listing, and the sense of hopelessness that can arise when we fail to achieve our goals.
Expressing this acknowledgment can take many forms. For some, physically writing it out and then reading it to yourself or someone else can help us release our tight grip. Others use movement like exercise, dancing or even chopping wood to feel the experience and move through it.
Yell at the top of your lungs, if you need to. Beat your chest. Whatever it takes to truly feel what’s got ahold of you, acknowledgment lessens and can release the power of the hold.
2. Plan, and let it go
It’s a misunderstanding to think that detachment is a passive exercise. It is a dance between taking an active role by focusing on our goals, executing a plan to manifest a desired outcome and letting go of the outcome. Visualization can be an effective tool to practice this “both-and” mindset.
Visualization, also called mental imagery, is essentially seeing with the mind’s eye or hearing with the mind’s ear. That is, when visualizing, you are having a visual sensory experience without the use of your eyes. In fact, research has shown that visualization recruits the same brain areas that actual seeing does.
Let’s take visualization for a test drive:
- Find a comfortable seat in a place without distraction.
- Let yourself imagine the desired outcome of an experience.
- Take the time to see in detail the experience manifesting with all its colors and sounds.
- Inhale deeply.
- On the exhale, imagine letting go of the outcome — perhaps you see it floating down a river or evaporating like mist covering up a valley.
3. Practice being here now
Researchers at Harvard University found “about 47 percent of waking hours are spent thinking about what isn’t going on.” That means that for almost half of our day, we are either living in the past or the future and not the now.
That was certainly my experience when I woke distressed last night. The song was something I heard the other day (the past), and my week hadn’t even started yet (the future). The ritual of reheating my tea helped to bring me into the now. The practice of “being in the now” takes many forms.
Although meditation can seem daunting in our fast-paced society, the popularity of this traditional Buddhist practice is growing. Finding as little as 2-5 minutes each morning to sit and focus on your breathing can offer significant relief from expectations and outcomes.
For those of us who are in constant motion, a moving meditation where you focus on your steps is a great alternative to a seated practice.
Other powerful tools that can bring you into the present are exercise, spending time in nature and listening to a friend or loved one. Anything that invites us into the moment is potent detachment medicine.
We are all collectively feeling the strain of industry changes, natural disasters and world events, the election and much more. It’s an intense time that can leave us feeling like a rubber band stretched to capacity.
Regularly putting on our “detachment caps” by honing healthy practices doesn’t necessarily change the outward outcome of events but can dramatically alter our internal experience. In time, our external experience reflects our internal reality.
