Anyone who’s been in a yogic, meditation, or similar practice probably has been told to learn to let go of attachments or something similar. Often well-intentioned, the saying and its derivatives are repeated ad infinitum by teachers (and that monk-and-email-attachments dad joke/meme that won’t die).
Change is constant. So how do you love someone who’ll change in a year? How do you love a cause or a community whose needs evolve? How do you love in a universe where change is the only constant?
If we look deep into our motivations, we might see that our attempts at finding love are really an attempt to find something constant in an inconstant world. Careers shift, friendships fade, even society can be rewritten with war, revolution, technological change, or environmental calamity. Is there anything we can hold on to?
There’s no need to demonize attachment, as there’s no need to demonize the pleasure of fulfilled attraction: It’s what made you fall in love in the first place. But when youth fades, when priorities evolve, when our beloved changes, can we stay in love?Back in the yoga studios and meditation halls, another thing we are told is to “diminish” our ego.
“Let go of attachment.” “Let go of self.” We’re told to do these while also being told to “be vulnerable” and to “cultivate self.” Is all this a masochistic denial of human nature?
Maybe this confusion is a case of clunky English translations of essentially untranslatable experiences. What’s the “self” we have to both lose and develop? What exactly are we attached to that’s harming our psyches?
A closer look at the same yogic traditions reveals two Sanskrit insights: anitya (“impermanence”) and anatman (“ego-lessness”).
Their relationship goes something like this: We suffer (“duhkha”) because we become attached to how things should be (therefore putting so many preconditions to happiness) in a world that’s essentially anitya.
“Let go of attachment.” “Let go of self.” We’re told to do these while also being told to “be vulnerable” and to “cultivate self” | Illustration from Getty Images/Unsplash+
Things don’t go our way, and we channel emotional and physical resources into bending things to our will, not just as individuals but as a society, and this can create problems for ourselves and others at-large.
A pretty accurate description of the human condition, huh?
Yogic practice is about cultivating a mind at peace with anitya, working with it instead of against it, reaching a state of anatman, that is, openness, wisdom, and generosity all while retaining our unique, individual being-in-the-world.
You probably know people whose presence enlivens the spaces they’re in, and whose often irreverent ways actually mask compassionate wisdom.
I guess then who we love is not so much a fixed persona, but a becoming. And love itself is not an object “to have (and by extension “to lose”) but a process mustering all the moral, intellectual, and emotional lessons we’ve learned and are learningI guess then who we love is not so much a fixed persona, but a becoming. And love itself is not an object “to have (and by extension “to lose”) but a process mustering all the moral, intellectual, and emotional lessons we’ve learned and are learning.
For a mind and heart free and liberated from the ignorance that causes duhkha, love can go beyond attachment to one’s image of another person, and into a deeper relationship with the world. You probably have a mentor or friend whose romantic relationship helped make them a better person as a whole.
“Love,” for social psychologist Erich Fromm in “The Art of Loving” (1956) is “not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love.”
The author and their meditation group during a retreat, Baguio 2019
Ten years into my yoga practice, I wouldn’t really say I’ve mastered anything, rather, the practice has mastered me, parts of me that I once struggled with, parts then when unprocessed, hurt myself and those dearest to me, but when integrated can be gifts to myself and others.
Once we accept how things are (unchanging, inconstant, egoless), a world of possibility also opens. A door blows open as life’s gale clears the room of attachments, but now there is spaciousness.
It’s just like those intricate mandalas made daily on the sand by Tibetan monks, with minute details that snake, individual colors presenting a spectrum of hues. By day’s end, the monks wipe the whole work away with rakes, leaving a blank slate.
Once we accept how things are (unchanging, inconstant, egoless), a world of possibility also opens. A door blows open as life’s gale clears the room of attachments, but now there is spaciousnessThere’s no need to demonize attachment, as there’s no need to demonize the pleasure of fulfilled attraction: It’s what made you fall in love in the first place. But when youth fades, when priorities evolve, when our beloved changes, can we stay in love?
To paraphrase “spiritual entertainer” Alan Watts: To say ‘I love you’ is also to say ‘I let go’ which is also to say ‘I surrender,’ which is also to say ‘I trust’.
Sure, while it’s been said that “to love someone is to attend all the funerals of the people they used to be and the people they failed to become,” the converse—celebrating the people we and our beloved are becoming—is equally true and the argument for commitment (without attachment!) can be made.
Love can go beyond attachment to one’s image of another person, and into a deeper relationship with the world
Jumping from new person to new person is actually just dating the same person again, masks, personas, but staying loyal (to a non-toxic person who’s daily working on themselves!) is like dating many different people through life: each person they become, each self that each new year brings.
To love without attachment isn’t a paradox: Love is without attachment.
When all’s been said (and read), all that’s left is wordless action, a leap of faith made not just once, not just at the big confession, but day-to-day, season-to-season, especially during the winters of love.
There aren’t many things to hold onto these daysescala gaming, but our agency to choose love? That’s something I’ll always bet on.