Emotional detachment helps you keep your balance and not take things in a very personal manner, says Rajyogi Brahmakumar Nikunj ji
Attachment is the source of all suffering said Gautam Buddha.. The concept of attachment became more widely known following a report of WHO, in 1951, when John Bowlby suggested: “What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother… The long period of helpless infancy of the human species entails serious risks, so it is of crucial importance to survival, that the child and its mother should become attached.” Though work of John Bowlby during the 1950s originally concentrated on the relationship between the child and the mother, but later he and others came to accept that significant others, extended family members and primary care givers could also be ‘attachment figures’.
To understand attachment simply, one can say that it’s an affectionate bond between two individuals which endures through space and time and serves to join them together emotionally. Attachment can be positive as well as negative, however experince shows that in most cases it has negative impact on individuals because it brings with it lot of emotional burden which eventually ends up making lives of people miserable who are under attachment with each other.
Majority of us do not recognize attachment as a vice, but we must understand that it subtly ties one in bondage to the object of one’s attachment, be it a person, thing or place. It makes us hold on to and identify ourselves with other people or things that give us some joy. Our happiness then becomes dependent on that object or person to whom we are attached. Hence, if that object or person suffers any harm or is taken away from us, we suffer pain. For example, suppose we start liking someone after meeting him/her for a couple of times, we end up imposing our emotions on them and start dictating or ruling their life. However, due to temporary blindness caused by attachment, what we fail to understand is that things remain as they are, but we suffer because we imagined them differently. So, while that person is not always in front of you, but his/her image is always on your mind and thus you are attaching yourself to that image on your mind. We need to understand that we are not our mind and we are certainly not what is on our mind. Yet one of our deepest habits is losing our 'self in what is on our mind and confusing our self with what is on our mind. To understand and realize this whole process of attachment, one requires constant self awareness. As one starts realizing that he/she is under attachment, one also begins to understand the origins of all fear, anger and sadness which are a natural result of attachment. Though it is possible to save ourself from these emotional disturbances, but so accustomed have we become to their arising in our consciousness that we call them normal and we even say they are aspects of human nature therefore natural. But we fail to realize that suffering means something is there that is unnatural & abnormal and that is why freedom from all mental-emotional suffering requires the practice of detachment. However the idea of detachment is often wrongly interpreted by most of us as the withdrawal of care. But in reality it is not so. However, need for detachment can be recognised unless the suffering of attachment is fully seen and understood, until then its impossible to even suggest someone to practise detachment. Only when one recognises that he/she is being crushed in attachment, does the real meaning of letting go become apparent. Because in reality it is not the object of attachment that is crushed, it is the self that is crushed.
Practice of meditation has proved to be a very helpful tool in helping oneself to come out of a deep attachment. It is the turning of attention inwards to ‘look’ through the inner eye of awareness. In doing so the inclination to attach is then clearly seen as ‘the cause’, and all suffering is seen as ‘the effect’. Freedom from suffering does not come from the desire to be free, which is only a form of grasping at a concept of freedom. Freedom comes with the ending of grasping which is the withdrawal of the self from the image of the object that is being grasped. When one grasps and attaches to no thing, including ideas and histories, possessions and personality traits, one finds oneself in open space, in an inner space that has no boundaries, is without limit, containing no objects. And in that space there is pure peace and an awareness of the connectedness of all things. This is the very ground on which stands love, the very ground out of which love grows. Remember! The less attached we are, the more peaceful we can become.