In my dream, I'm cleaning a soulful, antique stand-up bass hanging in an exquisitely warm, inviting living room with a gorgeous natural stone hearth--the kind of room that exists in fantasies and pinterest pins. With incredible gentleness I begin to wipe clean the instrument of accumulated dust and insect debris, almost as if I'm discovering this home after a long period of neglect. The bass's wood is parched, thirsting for oil, and the frets and strings beg for more careful attention so I gingerly remove the instrument from its perch. I send the kids to fetch oil and dismiss the fleeting thought that I should ask my husband for help with this delicate piece of history and beauty. As he turns to leave the room, something snaps along the neck and the body splinters on the hearth. I stand helpless and heartbroken.Pop-psychology and dream analysis aside, at its most basic level this dream is a rehearsal of attachment and loss, of confronting head-on the passing of something worthy and beautiful, the loss of which I felt keenly upon waking. My subconscious was offering me the valuable lesson that the end is always contained in the beginning along with a chance to fully feel the emotions and release them instead of holding them in my body--my dreaming self offering practice of non-attachment.
The basic gist of non-attachment goes something like this: most of our suffering in this world arises from attachment--our intense desire to hold onto something combined with the illusion that anything can be fixed and unchanging enough to be held in such a way. Attachment is the attempt to gain some ground under our feet, to pretend there is certainty in an uncertain world. Perfectly understandable, right? Of course it is! Attachment with its yearning for security and certainty is a universal human dilemma, which is why spiritual traditions like Buddhism or the Yoga Sutras offer alternative tools for dealing with those very human needs.
Practicing non-attachment is not the same thing as indifference. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "Suffering is not enough." For me, it's more like loving something fully as it is from moment to moment--seeing it clearly there in front of you without the illusion that it will be the same forever or that it will even be there tomorrow--and loving it for all its fragility. It's a willful vulnerability of the heart that acknowledges and embraces loss in order to love anyway. It's a surrender and openness to what IS rather than kicking, screaming, and clinging to our illusion of safety and surety.
Most of us probably don't even realize that we're kicking and screaming and clinging our way through life, but the honest truth is that we probably have several of these mini-tantrums each day. They're often surrounded by notions of comfort and ease--attachment to things being easy and comfortable and going our way. We can practice leaning into the discomfort of attachment whenever someone cuts us off in traffic, when we seem to hit every red light in town, when the lid that's so impossible to open suddenly flies free and scatters the contents of the container to the winds.
We can learn to smile at these moments, greeting them for what they are: little glimpses into the broader illusion we create for ourselves that life should be stable in any certain way. "Hello life. I see you." After all, it's not the red light that causes our suffering, but our attachment to the idea that we shouldn't have to stop, our resistance to what is for the sake of preserving our illusion of how things ought to be.
When we live from a place of non-attachment, or acceptance of what is, we create the possibility of navigating life's inevitable changes more gracefully and therefore living life more fully. Practicing non-attachment doesn't mean that we don't suffer; more it means that we don't suffer needlessly or frivolously. It means that we love things with the awareness that they are ever-changing, allowing us to love them more fully and deeply in that moment. It means that we mourn the loss of things we care about with a consciousness that everything changes and each end is a new beginning. It means that we live in rhythm with the ebb and flow of life, releasing the suffering created by futile attempts to resist and control that flow.
*For those of you who don't know me, I used to own and love a small organic farm in Northern Maryland. My adventures there are recorded at Touch the Earth Farm. The silence in the space between that last post and this one speaks volumes of my letting go and coming to terms with this ever-changing life and being that I call Self.
