Detach

"What I am doing now, is detaching myself from the experience."

Detaching yourself?

"You know what the Buddhists say? Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent."

Aren't you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, and the bad ones? How can you do that if you're detached?

"Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it. Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You are afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You are afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. And only then can you say, "All right. I have experience that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."

I thought about how often this wass needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with fear of what those words might do to the relationship.

"Same for loneliness: you let go, you let the tears flow, feel it completely - but eventually be able to say, "All right, that was my moment of loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well."

Detach.

--- Taken from Tuesdays with Morrie