The Falling Away of Attachment
I came back to Canada on March 16.
People keep asking me how the trip was.
The truth is, it hasn’t ended.
And I don’t think it will. What Thailand and a month of devotion taught me was that there is no end to this journey. You can rest, sleep, eat, play, attend to the things that require care - family, friends, work, plants (just spent a week repotting all my plants!!! There is a whole new level of excitement for the dawning of spring as a plant parent lol) and yet ultimately, the pursuit for peace, learning, and self-knowledge is continuous. In fact, it’s unnegotiable.
I think the most pronounced difference I’ve noticed since returning to a place I’ve resided most my life is how my interactions with everything has changed. Being away made me realize I no longer feel attached to one place to call, or feel, home. Ending my relationship with alcohol was like a snake finally breaking the layer of skin that’s been itching to slough off - once it’d been torn open, everything else fell away easily. My attachment to approval. My attachment to anxiety. Even my attachment to my own identity.
The attachment to approval was a big one. I’ve spent most of my life trying to prove myself to my father (and then every other person who came into my life that reminded me of him). And from my earliest childhood memory everything that I’ve done has been attached to his approval - and avoidance of his wrath. There was a definite period of rebellion during which I found all the ways to do things I wasn’t supposed to, the things I hadn’t been allowed to, as a big middle finger to the patriarchy. But the truth was underneath all that were the bonds of guilt I could never untie. And so came the use of more substances to numb all of this, causing a never-ending cycle of anxiety and ultimately confusion and conflict over who I was and what I wanted.
The release of this attachment has taken years. And my decision to work with him was the catalyst for it. Every day I was faced with my greatest fear - failing in front of him in the area of his life that mattered most - the pride of his life’s work. And at the beginning the dynamic was very much how it was when I was a child. But neither of us are good at hiding our anger, and neither of us love the work more than each other. And so over many instances of trial and error, uncomfortable and sometimes even heart-wrenching conversations, our relationship, both with each other and with ourselves, improved. The final piece was letting go of the codependency that kept feeding the pain. And a month of meditation helped me see that. When I came home, I told him the boundaries I had to put in place to maintain my peace and sobriety. He lovingly, unquestioningly accepted. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done - so hard that it took me six years to have the courage to realize it and say it, and the easiest - because it was the most honest and loving resolution for the both of us. It’s the greatest gift my father’s ever given me.
My attachment to anxiety is what I always thought was my “drive”. It was the motivation behind most of my actions. My anxiety of other people suffering drove the codependent tendencies in me. My anxiety of not being perfect drove me to never allow rest, or silence in my life. And the only way to detach from anxiety, I’ve learned, is to allow it. Every emotion only exists in us for 90 seconds. How it stays is our resistance to it. We draw up stories as to why we’re feeling what we’re feeling, and the mind loves concocting the most fantastical narratives as to the motives of other people and the part we play in all of it. The truth is anxiety is just our amygdala trying to keep us safe. When we allow all the thoughts to come they’ll eventually tire of visiting and leave. The boundary that I’ve set with myself is to not act in these moments, but to do less. To have the courage to sit with it, without reacting to or judging it.
Since I’ve been home I’ve had two middle of the night anxiety attacks. This is nothing new. I’ve lived with these attacks most of my life and they used to be nightly, so two in a month is really a marked improvement. My past practice would be to silence these attacks with a lot of weed lol. Or years before, a couple shots of bourbon. I’d wake up groggy and in a mood, the anxiety still seething in the corner of my mind, angry at not being acknowledged, growing stronger with the substances I fed it, biding its time until it got so big and strong nothing could hold it back anymore and it unleashed all its full power onto me causing a complete breakdown/outburst (usually at the most inopportune time, around people who had nothing to do with it, causing even more havoc in my life eg. “What’s wrong with me? Wtf was that about? Where did that come from? Am I crazy?!”)
On these two recent nights, I decided to get up and listen to the anxiety. Sleep wasn’t going to come back, and I wasn’t going to fight it. I sat beside the night, everything glimmering with rain. I sat beside my thoughts, while they stormed and raged for an hour. And then I wrote down my worst fears. My loudest frustrations. Everything that was possible in worst-case scenario land. Looking back at the page made me realize how every part of us is trying to protect us, no matter how misguided. And that these parts deserve love, maybe the most, because they’ve been hurt and forgotten and stifled and cast aside the most. And then I wrote a response that undid a knot that had been sitting in me for years. The resolution that we so often seek with others starts with ourselves. The conflict was never with them anyway. And sometimes, these realizations only come to us when everything else is silent and asleep, when all the noise is pacified. I think that’s what these nighttime messages have always been about. I was so attached to “getting my eight hours” I’d drown them out to force myself back to sleep. Not knowing that once acknowledged, sleep came easily. I went back to bed and slept through the night.
My attachment to my identity is probably the trippiest realization yet. That my real self is not who I think it is. I think too often I fall into this trap of thinking how things, including myself, should be, instead of seeing the truth of how they are. I get caught in the melodrama of how I should have acted or said something, how someone else should have behaved, how things would be better if etc, etc. For what though? Why does it matter? It’s exactly as Ram Dass says, “we can only tell the truth when we cease to identify with the part of ourselves we think we have to protect.” The part of ourselves we think we have to protect. And isn’t that true? We have this idea of who we are, we think we really know ourselves, we tell everyone with certainty “this is how I am,” but it’s all kinda bullshit. Why is it so important to keep acting so that we can be seen a certain way? Holding on to these attachments, these thoughts, these “should's”, is like holding onto that giant overpacked bag we know we really don’t need. The climb is challenging enough without it. The more we try to control how others perceive us, and refuse to see that there are so many things outside of our control, the heavier that weight and burden becomes.
I think spirituality is just reverence for this moment in time. We are not what came before this moment, and we are not what’s to come. The roots we grow are our devotion to the truth of right now, not some history we need to cling to. And keeping ourselves rooted in reality takes time and intention. I’m learning that by not being attached to one way of being, or one way of doing things, it opens up so many new paths worth traversing and exploring. The road doesn’t seem as clear anymore and that’s okay. The detours make the best stories sometimes.
Ultimately the human in us will always be attached to something. All we can do is examine what helps our experience and what doesn’t. What gives us energy and what doesn’t. When we’re working towards something that truly feels aligned with our purpose, the energy will get recycled, rather than spent. I think that’s the question I’m having to constantly ask myself - is what I’m doing/feeling/saying from a place of attachment, or a place of love? And if it is fear-based, what do I need to give myself in order to let it go? We can’t expect to “give up everything at once; we can give things up as we come to not need them quite so badly anymore…knowing all that makes us feel very vulnerable: there’s no authority we can turn to, nobody to tell us what to do. We can only keep turning to our hearts, listening for what feels like that right next move. We have nothing to hold on to.” (Ram Dass) We don’t necessarily get to choose what happens next. But we get to choose who we are when it happens.
The trip continues, and I’m learning to travel lighter.
