Move Gracefully Among Enmeshment Attachment Detachment Non-Attachment

Love is a tough thing to write about. Romantic love, in my experience, is tough, period!

It seems that most of us conflate romantic love with Enmeshment and Attachment for a variety of reasons; upbringing, social media, entertainment, peers, etc. We tend to swim in a Sea of clinging behavior.

People who practice Detachment or Non-Attachment are viewed as cold or unloving in general. It takes a certain perspective to appreciate the finer points.

I am not a scholar, or a counselor, or, God forbid, a zealot. It is the practical that interests me. Also, I tend towards spiritual language and not psychological language. Check out these two takes on what seems to be similar human tendencies:

1. Psychological/biological - Addiction refers to the lack of control and inability to resist urges and cravings to use alcohol or drugs or people despite adverse consequences. Dependence on a refers to the biological effects that occur when a substance or relationship is used for weeks, months, or years.
2. In Hinduism, attachment (pratiksha) leads to suffering, while non-attachment (vairagya) leads to inner peace and spiritual freedom. Attachment involves a strong emotional dependence on external people or material things, hindering true happiness and creating fear and anxiety. Non-attachment, a key concept in many Yoga and Vedanta texts, encourages performing one's duties without clinging to the results of actions, fostering inner balance and a connection with one's eternal, unattached spiritual nature.

* Definitions from Google Search

Monks and Mortality

A monk I met recently gave me a book to read that was on the NYT best sellers list. Doesn't sound like much right? The meeting of this man, our conversation and th implications definitely are a big deal for me. He is caretaker and former monk at a once active Buddhist Temple where I go to often. 

I met him one day when he and a couple friends were drinking in a corner of the yard behind the ordination hall. They had the standard Thai street set up; small bottle of moonshine, large bottle of water and bowl of limes. Somewhere in the conversation about why he isn't a monk anymore he told me that he wants to be in paradise. I heard the longing and frustration in that and the implication for daily drinking. Definitely lost his way. 

The book he gave me, Being Mortal, is about mortality and how modern medicine transformed many dangers in life but when it comes to aging and death what medicine can do often runs contrary to what it should do. My career in healthcare taught me that as well.

I want to find out how these threads connect for this intelligent being who has moved away from a life of faith to one of addiction. Of course the threads are his alone and made of the same fear and hopelessness that drives so many into addiction. Finding a way out of that pit is nearly impossible alone.