Attachment

Attachment is the source of all suffering.
Buddha

Try not to confuse attachment with love. Attachment is about fear and dependency and has more to do with `love of self´ than `love of another´. Love without attachment is the purest love because it isn’t about what others can give you because you’re empty. It is about what you can give others because you’re already full.
Yasmin Mogahed

How to recognize emotional attachment; if your happiness rests upon what you expect from something or someone.
Anonymous

With lots of initial suffering, self-sabotage, grace, hard work, courage, and the help of others, my life has gradually been unfolding as a life of `engaged non-attachment´. It is a very purposeful, peaceful way to live, generally without pressure, internal or external.

It was not always so. I grew up in a bustling, chaotic, loving household in the Ireland of the sixties and seventies where the pressure for me was almost unbearable. The sheer noise, the domestic bedlam, the unspoken fears and anxieties of our parents and other adults, coupled with the absence of a vocabulary to process the world of emotion in a solution-oriented, constructive fashion; these amounted to an environment where I felt the only viable response was escape. So that’s what happened.

In my earliest years, the drug of choice was daydreaming; a very potent and pleasant solution for any child, especially one who, like me, could master the academic challenges of school without much effort. In mid teens, other even more potent, and intoxicating solutions presented themselves. My focus was drawn to the duo of alcohol and weed. This is not surprising, given the times and the sixties counterculture fuelled in part, though I did not know this at the time, by the US veterans of the Vietnam war.

`In an oriental village with civilians left to rot, he was hanging out with soldiers trading heroin for pot, and he was smiling.´ Words of a Dory Previn song I picked up on in the mid seventies. With the first bruising experiences of love and loss, the recognition of the banality of most peoples thinking and actions, and a hedonism appropriate for my age group, I figured that the best way to get out of my frenzied, troubled mind was to get wasted, and I took countless opportunities that presented themselves in the next two decades and more.

It was a life on the run. From pain, from life, from my self; I might even still be on the run but for a crafty built-in survival trick of evolution. The solution begins to lose its potency as a solution, and simply becomes yet another problem on the pile of those unresolved issues which had been festering while it was being applied; Why am I here? What is my purpose? What am I going to do with my life? How is this riddle of life to be solved? What if those feelings come to the surface?

Better just soldier on, increase the dosage, and apply even more effort and will power in the pursuit of what I believe needs to happen for me, to move beyond my constant restlessness, irritability, and discontentedness, on to the greener pastures of eternal happiness. The pressure rises in the cauldron and the pain becomes unbearable. Some actually kill themselves with what are ironically referred to as their `drugs of choice´. We lucky ones simply begin to get sick and tired of being sick and tired until we admit that we are beaten, and then ask for help.

When that happens, there is cause for hope. Then, and only then, are we open to questioning our modus operandi, our `old ideas´ which up to that point were beyond challenge. We become open for the possibility that what we see in not necessarily real, and for the further possibility that we may be seeing only a fraction of what is going on, both in our minds and in our lives. I recognised that my exertions to achieve my goals were driven by a host of fears; `what if I don’t get what I want?´, and, `what if I lose what is so precious to me?´ among them. Always chasing the thing, which, when attained, would make me happy. My best thinking and all the will power in the world had gotten me to this point of crash and burn. Only upon realising this, was I open to considering other approaches.

Attachment is the source of all suffering. When those words of the Buddha first crossed my path, it was difficult to fathom what he could have meant. In the rooms of addiction recovery, a very wise Vietnam veteran taught me never to approach any wish or endeavour in terms of outcomes. `Get clarity on what you wish to achieve´, Ron would say, `give the footwork your best effort, and leave the outcomes to the Universe, where they belong. Then accept and be grateful for the outcome, whatever that may be.´

Having nothing to lose, I decided to give it a go. Slowly letting go of all ideas of how life should have been in the past (this takes forgiveness) and any attachment to the outcomes of today’s efforts and beyond (this takes humility), the energy began to shift; from pushing hard, to going with the flow of the script of the Universe, – a script, the author of which resided outside my ego. This is where a light went on.

`Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one.´ Thus reads a lesson in `A Course In Miracles´ this week. When my day-to-day activities are performed in this consciousness, work becomes play, challenges become gifts, connection becomes prayer. I find myself (Self) in this energy most of the time, so my fuel tank automatically keeps filling up as I go about my business, doing one `next right thing´ after another. The pressure is gone, its place taken by peace of mind.

Traps abound right and left of the path, of course. People pursuing their own gaols in the state of attachment will try to enmesh others in their endeavours, unaware or unwilling to admit that this is the dimension in which they are operating. The loving response is to maintain empathic connection while clearly drawing healthy boundaries, operating from a place of deep calm, an inner garden tended by none other than me. This is my responsibility. This challenges me greatly, especially when dealing with friends and family, with those emotionally closest to me.

Our society manifests collective attachment in the frenzied spirit of `I’m right´, `You are what you have´, and the highly prized so-called `pursuit of happiness´. The trouble with `I’ll be happy when…´ is that `when´ never comes, and the target keeps moving further and further away. It is only from the inside that the hamster wheel looks like a ladder.

Nothing in this world is more precious to me now than peace of mind. This precious gift needs daily nurturing, in whatever form is appropriate. It is never static; one moment here, then lost, and then back once again. Growing and maintaining this peace of mind as much as humanly possible, together with carrying the message to others who need and really want this; these are top of my list of priorities for the remaining years of my life.

My heartfelt thanks go to everybody who has helped me to see and embrace this so clearly, over the years.