CHAPTER
13

Letting Go of Attachment

In This Chapter

One way of applying Zen methods and teachings to your life is to examine and let go of your attachments, which results in a decrease in your self-centeredness. I’ve written quite a lot in this book so far about various aspects of self-centeredness and why it’s a problem.

In Chapter 6 I discussed how selfish behavior always results in some kind of negative effect, and how a moral code can help you avoid causing harm and difficulty for yourself and others. In Chapter 10 I introduced the Buddhist teaching on how grasping—trying to force the world to conform to your preferences—leads to stress, dissatisfaction, and suffering. In Chapter 11 I explained how your self-concept causes you great worry about your well-being, but in reality it’s this self-concept that is an illusion. If you recognize it as an illusion, you’re much better off.

In this chapter I’ll talk in greater depth about how you become attached to things (your body, objects, people, roles, ideas, etc.), what happens because of those attachments, and how to loosen your grip on your attachments.

The Nature of Attachment

To attach means to connect. In Zen, being attached to something in a way that’s going to cause trouble means you have connected it to your self-concept. You have either identified yourself with it (identify can mean “think of as being united”) or made it a possession of self. Subsequently, you feel motivated to protect and hold on to the things you are attached to in this way. When they’re lost, are negatively impacted, or even just change, you are threatened. At least you think you are. In any case, you’re probably going to respond by trying to make the world conform to your preferences, and cause yourself problems anywhere from stress to suffering.

CONSIDER THIS

Albert Einstein wrote, “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.”

From The World As I See It

Good Versus Problematic Attachment

Unfortunately, in English the word attachment can also mean “affectionate regard.” If you interpret the word this way, and you hear Zen encouraging you to “give up your attachments,” it can seem like Zen is asking you give up emotional warmth and caring. Nothing can be further from the truth. Caring is good, and can be experienced without any concern for self. As a matter of fact, if you try to avoid caring in order to avoid suffering, you’re actually being quite selfish.

Try to think of affectionate regard as “good attachment” and commandeering things for the self as “problematic attachment.” In most Zen discussions you will only hear the word attachment, but just translate it for yourself and add the modifier “problematic.”

You started forming problematic attachments in childhood, as soon as you started forming the idea that you have an unchanging self-essence that persists through time, as discussed in Chapter 11. Because you believed in your inherent, enduring self-nature, you felt the need to take care of that self’s existence—to protect it, watch out for its interests, maintain its boundaries, even expand its territory.

About certain things you came to think, “This is me,” and about other things, “This is mine.” Your self identified with, or saw itself in possession of, all kinds of things: physical manifestations like your body or your house; people such as your partner or children; relational things like your job; ideas or points of view; or attributes like strength or beauty. These were generally things you liked or that served you in some way, but not always.

For example, perhaps you ended up (probably with the help of others) identifying yourself as lazy. This isn’t a flattering part of your self-image, but if you see it as part of who you are, there’s a strange way in which at least part of you will be invested in the persistence of the idea, “I am lazy.” At the very least it will become a familiar excuse or explanation.

Holding On

You know you are attached to something when you feel dukkha as it is going away or changing. Dukkha, again, is the sense that things are not right. You think, “This shouldn’t be happening,” or you just feel like yelling, “Nooooooo!” What follows feels like an imperative to resist the way things are going.

For example, you may be attached to being able to drive, but you are elderly and your ability to do so safely is coming into question. The disappointment and anxiety you probably feel as you contemplate giving up such an important aspect of your independence are not so much of a problem. What will be more painful is if you’ve identified as part of your self the freedom and self-reliance that driving provides. Then the loss of the ability to drive will not just be an inconvenience, it will be a threat to who you are, and you’re likely to feel angry and bewildered on top of everything else. Subsequently, you may resist giving up your driver’s license, discussing the possibility, or even thinking about it—until you get in an accident that forces the issue.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Beware of giving other people advice about their attachments. Letting go is a challenging process, and even thinking about letting go can be scary. Pointing out when someone is holding on to something, before they’re ready to face that fact, is almost never helpful. Also, it’s generally a whole lot easier to see other people’s attachments than it is to see your own.

Another meaning of the word attachment is “a supplementary piece added to the main body of something,” like the attachment on a vacuum cleaner or the attachment to an email. In a way, because the true nature of the self is empty and ungraspable, everything you identify as self or a possession of self is actually an attachment—an extra piece appended to the real thing. As discussed in Chapter 11, everything you think about as “I, me, and mine” will inevitably change, requiring you to constantly worry about yourself and the stuff of your life. The more you’re holding on to, the more you have to worry about.

Non-attachment

What is non-attachment? Assuming that you maintain your good attachment (affection and regard) and take care of your life, what does it mean to be unattached to your body, attributes, relationships, and so on? Basically, you refrain from identifying things as part of your self, or from making them a possession of self. You can appreciate them and even try to keep them, but you feel grateful for their presence in your life rather than entitled to them.

When things change or go, you may feel sad or temporarily lost as you learn to live without them, but you don’t feel angry, bitter, or resentful. It isn’t at all that you don’t care about things or about yourself, or that you’re unaffected by loss or change. In fact, when you’re not attached to things, you can be even more deeply touched and affected by them, because you are not so worried about yourself. A life lived with a minimum of the bad kind of attachment is full and rich, just not so self-centered.

Non-attachment allows you to experience real intimacy with people and experiences, while problematic attachment gets in the way of intimacy. Looking at people and things as part of your self-concept, or as a possession of self, results in a sense that you should be able to control them, at least to some extent. At the very least your attachments owe you consideration, because your well-being depends on them. You interpret any change in an object of your attachment in terms of how it affects you.

All of these ways of relating—the effort to control, a sense of being owed, and seeing everything in terms of self-interest—are obvious barriers to real intimacy. What person is going to want to respond to you with sincere openness and consideration when they sense you expect them to do so, or else? Intimacy is about a deep experience of contact with an other—a person or experience that exists and moves independently of your self, but is very close. When you let go of attaching things to your self, you give things the freedom to respond to you in a way that tells you that you aren’t alone in the world.

ZEN WISDOM

“Ordinary sentient beings identify the five skandhas as their ‘self’ and strongly cling to it. Not only do they cling to this as an ‘I,’ they also attach to the five skandhas as belonging to the ‘I,’ and because of this, all kinds of clinging, grasping, vexation, opposition, and finally anguish flourish. Buddhas refer to themselves as ‘I’ … but the ‘I’ they refer to is only a conventional name, an expedient means to relate to sentient beings. Buddhas do not identify with the body and mind as self; they just manifest in the world to deliver sentient beings.”

—Chan Master Sheng Yen (1930–2009), from The Method of No-Method: The Chan Practice of Silent Illumination

Letting Go

Moving from attached to unattached requires diligent practice and involves all of your Zen tools. However, keep in mind that the very intention to even try letting go of something is significant. Many of your attachments are so near and dear, it has never even occurred to you that they are not actually part of you, or that you could survive without them. Arriving at a realization that you’d be better off in a non-attached relationship to someone or something is precious, so pat yourself on the back if you’ve even gotten that far.

Getting to Know Your Attachments

You start the process of letting go like you start anything else in practice: by trying to see things clearly. After all, if you don’t realize you’re attached or experiencing dukkha, you can’t do anything about it. The tools of zazen and mindfulness are useful for noticing your thoughts and feelings about the things in your life and identifying where you might be experiencing attachment. Paying attention to the precepts is also extremely helpful, because generally speaking, every time you are inclined to break a precept it’s because of an attachment!

Once you’ve recognized an attachment, you engage it as karma work and try to unravel what amounts to a mental habit. You examine your attachment carefully, noticing anything you can about it. When and where do you feel attached to this thing? What thoughts, emotions, and fears are associated with the attachment? What do you imagine will happen if you lose the thing in question?

For example, let’s say you’re a woman who is very attached to her hair. You have long, beautiful hair that is a large part of your attractiveness. Everywhere you have gone, as far back as you can remember, you have brought your hair with you as part of the package you present to the world. It seems like a part of you, or at least a vital possession.

When illness or old age brings the loss of, or substantial change to, your beautiful hair, you find yourself struggling with the thought, “Who am I without my hair?” You stay with this thought, examining further, and realize the question is actually, “Who am I without my physical attractiveness?” Still further down you may notice a fear of rejection, or a sense that without your physical attractiveness you are inadequate or unlovable. At some point, you can watch the entire unfolding of this mental habit.

Loosening Your Grip

Each of the thoughts, fears, or assumptions you discover underlying an object of attachment are like threads connecting you to that object. Imagine yourself holding on to these threads in a tightly balled fist. Questioning or letting go of any one of your underlying thoughts, fears, and assumptions is like cutting or releasing one of these threads. Eventually you might release the last thread that keeps something attached to you!

Questioning your reasons for holding on to something requires humility and being honest with yourself, because you’d probably rather not know some of the things you think. However, it’s good practice to test and question everything in your mind, because lots of erroneous or outdated ideas have ended up in there.

Earlier I mentioned the example of being attached to the idea, “I am lazy.” With some Zen study you will probably start questioning this idea—not because you suddenly become diligent and energetic, but because you realize no adjective applies to a person’s entire being. With mindfulness you notice that sometimes you are lazy and sometimes you are not. Voilà! You have just loosened your grip on an idea that you’re attached to.

CONSIDER THIS

The kinds of things you can be attached to might surprise you! Think of what you might say if someone asked you to thoroughly describe yourself. You’d obviously describe your appearance, your job, and your relationships. You’d probably also mention some of the things that happened to you in the past and how they affected you, as well as your personality and worldview. Any of these things can be attachments—even narratives and character quirks—when you have a personal investment in maintaining them the way they are because they’re part of your self-identity.

Letting go, in comparison, does not challenge the content of your mind so much as the function of your mind. For example, you come up against a thought like the one mentioned earlier, “I am inadequate,” and at some point you wonder what life would be like without that thought. You’ve spent hours in zazen letting go of thoughts, so you’ve built up the ability to let go of this one (maybe not permanently, but for a moment at least).

It may take quite a while to convince yourself to try letting go, but when you do you experience the benefits of non-attachment: gratitude, greater intimacy, and relief of worry. This is rewarding, and begs the next question: why would you want to pick your attachment back up? You probably will, because you’re in the habit of doing so and habits have momentum, but your relationship to the object of your attachment will be forever changed.

Favorite Attachments

It can be very tricky dealing with the small self and the way it has appropriated the things around it into your self-concept. It may be helpful to go into some more detail about typical human attachments and how to work with them. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible attachments, but it includes things that almost every person ends up identifying as self or as a possession of self.

Your Body

Your body is probably the most obvious thing in the world to get attached to. It’s been there from your beginning, and will be there until your end. You are never said to be somewhere else than where your body is. It’s your vehicle in this world, allowing you to perceive, think, and act. Changes to your body affect your abilities, your thinking, and your experience of pleasure versus pain. You-ness and your body seem just about impossible to separate. The best you can usually do is think of your self as being carried around by your body, making your body the only absolutely essential possession of self.

Attachment to your body manifests as excessive pride, shame, or concern about your physical state. Notice I said excessive. It’s not always obvious what is excessive and what is reasonable, which means you have to keep examining your thoughts and behavior. Also, what’s excessive for one person may not be excessive for another. Generally speaking, it’s reasonable to take care of your body, aim for health and fitness, enjoy physicality, and address or prevent illness. What’s less useful is when concerns about your physical appearance, abilities, or health become so pervasive and strong that they start causing problems in your life, or in the lives of those around you.

For example, if you’re so concerned about your weight that you spend many of your waking hours obsessing about calories and food, you’re probably missing or neglecting other areas of your life. If you’re thrown into a depression because an injury keeps you from your favorite athletic activity, you’re probably attached to your physical abilities. If you worry about every ache and pain you feel and spend hours on the internet looking for the terrible disease you probably have, you may have incorporated self into your self-concept.

CONSIDER THIS

This may seem a bit extreme to you, but Buddhist monks used to work on their attachment to the body by deliberately contemplating illness, old age, and death, sometimes even in graveyards. They would call to mind thoughts like this: I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot avoid it. I am of the nature to become ill, I cannot avoid it. I am of the nature to die, I cannot avoid it. The point was to get comfortable with these thoughts, so they no longer caused distress.

Appreciating the body without attachment is challenging because it’s intimately tied to your literal survival (your relationship to life and death is something I’ll discuss in a later chapter). However, the less attached you can be, the better. Remember that the true nature of the self is not inherent or enduring, but that doesn’t mean you don’t exist at all. Your emergentphenomenon, causal-flow self manifests through your body, so it will always be central to your life.

However, if you can recognize that who you are is not limited to your body, it can help you accept your body as it is. If you can loosen your attachment to your body, when it inevitably changes you will not be quite so devastated. This is, of course, much more easily said than done.

Your Relationships

When you have a problematic attachment to a relationship or to someone in your life, things start to feel frustrating. Even more significantly, the person’s actions start to trigger your sense of dukkha. “They shouldn’t be doing this,” you think, or, “Our relationship shouldn’t be like this.” It’s quite natural that you would prefer the people in your life to be respectful, generous, and responsible: to express their appreciation for you occasionally, help out with household tasks, make wise choices, or refrain from abusive speech.

It’s not a problem to acknowledge your desire for things to be different, or to recognize some behaviors as harmful, or at the very least unhelpful. There may be aspects of a relationship you simply cannot accept, and for good reasons. However, if you view the person or the relationship as part of your self, you have additional problems.

When you’ve attached someone to your self-concept, you’re personally invested in them acting a certain way: the way that suits you. For example, you may need your children to be successful in school. Wanting them to be successful for their own sake is one thing, but needing them to be successful because you are someone with successful children is quite another.

If you view a relationship as a possession of self, you see and interact with the other person only as relative to you. Someone becomes your friend, your partner, your parent. The world appears to you as a system of relationships with you at the center, and it will be frustrating and bewildering when people act like they have other priorities than you.

There’s a way you can actively engage with, argue with, guide, love, and depend on people without letting the small self get involved. You can look at other beings as full entities in and of themselves, each ultimately responsible for their own life. When you recognize someone is not part of the definition of who you are, you can release your desperate grasp on them and take a better look at who they really are, without the filter of your self-concern. You can give up the effort to control or hold on to the person or the relationship, and see what happens.

As the saying goes, if you love something, set it free; if it comes back to you, it is yours. If it doesn’t, it never was. It is unimaginably rewarding to have a living being freely and willingly in relationship with you. Sometimes they are even kind, generous, responsible, or wonderful, all of their own accord.

What You Do

Many people are heavily identified with what they do—their job, or the other roles they play in the world: parent, spouse, activist, artist, spiritual practitioner, and so on. After all, the activities you undertake to fulfill your various roles and responsibilities are what consume most of your time and energy. If you have one or more roles or pastimes that deeply inspire you, you will usually use them as an outlet for your inspiration, passion, and creativity.

Thinking you are what you do is very tempting, but it causes great distress when you can’t do what you want to. There are lots of reasons why this happens, and some of them are inevitable: you get sick and can’t go to work, you get laid off, things change (say, kids grow up) and your effort isn’t needed anymore, you lose your motivation or inspiration, or you get too old and frail to do what you used to do.

If you are attached to what you do and you can’t do it for an extended period of time, it can be devastating. If you were raised with a strong work ethic, not being able to be productive can be humiliating and depressing. Having a role taken from you that you have identified with can feel like part of you is dying. Once again, the medicine for attachment is getting used to and embracing impermanence. You won’t always be able to do what you do, but in the meantime you can do it wholeheartedly without attaching it to your self-concept.

Rather than thinking of what you do as a possession of self, you can view it as an opportunity to be generous with self. When you shift the emphasis to the giving, you will naturally be willing to change what it is you give (or do) when the situation changes and something else is needed. You will energetically give as long as you can, and when you can’t give as much, or can’t give what you’d like to, it’s not the end of the world because it’s not about you. Even if you can’t give or do anything at all, you know your heart is in the right place and you would give if you could.

Thinking and Feeling

Particular thoughts and feelings are usually too transient for you to get overly attached to them, but it’s typical to get attached to your ability to think and/or feel. This becomes, “I am my intelligence,” or “I am my feelings.” (You are usually attached more to one than the other.)

Attachment to thinking and feeling becomes obvious when you cannot loosen your grasp on the activity of thinking, or evaluation of your feelings, even when it would obviously be a very good idea to do so. You can be aware that you are overanalyzing something, running it through your mind over and over, building up anxiety and bringing on insomnia, but you just can’t stop. You can realize that the way you are dwelling on a feeling like betrayal or jealousy is making you morose, unpleasant to be around even to yourself, maybe even physically sick, but you can’t let go of the feelings.

In these cases you have identified so closely with your thinking mind or your emotions that letting go of your attachment to them can sound as impossible as letting go of your left arm.

CONSIDER THIS

Distraction is often an effective way to break yourself out of an unhelpful emotional or mental state. You may follow your breath, or take a walk, or read a book. These may seem like measures you take because you can’t handle the emotions or thoughts that are plaguing you. However, when you’re stuck in a fruitless, repetitive, troubling pattern of thinking or feeling, deliberately distracting yourself is letting go. By consciously doing something that will make you set aside your thoughts or feelings for a bit, you acknowledge they are not your entire reality.

When you are not attached to them, thoughts and emotions are just information about how your causal-flow self is reacting to its environment. You don’t devalue or try to suppress thinking or feeling; you get valuable information this way, and besides, such suppression is difficult and damaging. Instead, you look at your thoughts and feelings from a larger perspective—because they are not you, they are just a part of your unfolding experience.

As an example, imagine waking up in the middle of the night full of anxiety about something. Let’s say it’s your job. Your usual way of dealing with this anxiety is either to suppress it (probably not very successfully) or analyze it. You might try to talk yourself out of the anxiety, or make a plan to fix the situation that’s causing it. Chances are, these efforts just prolong the anxiety and you end up lying there, wide awake.

Stepping back from your thoughts and emotions is a different approach: you observe, “Hmmm. It’s the middle of the night and I am feeling anxiety about work. Is there anything I can fix right now? No. Am I really thinking clearly enough right now to make a good plan? No. This is a self-perpetuating emotional state that isn’t useful. I’ll try to get myself out of it by following my breath.” If you’re really worried, this may not make the anxiety go away for good, but it’s a whole lot less painful than identifying completely with the anxiety and being unable to see anything else.

Learning as You (Let) Go

Working with attachment presents many great opportunities for your Zen practice. You get a chance to notice and change thoughts and behaviors that cause dissatisfaction or suffering for yourself and others. You can learn to be more open-handed with the stuff of your life, so it doesn’t hurt so much when it goes away or changes.

You also have the opportunity to gain insight into the truth of no-self. One moment you’re holding on to something you believe is absolutely vital to your existence, and the next moment you let it go. Afterward, you still exist. Who are you now? If what you let go of wasn’t self (because you’re still here), what else are you holding on to that might not be self?

Letting go of attachments raises questions that are essential to Zen insight. Because of this, you can end up embracing difficulties that threaten your attachments with a certain kind of appreciation, because you know what a great learning opportunity is being presented. For a time you may not know what to do in your Zen practice, but when you experience a loud internal “Nooooo!” you think, “Oh, look—I’m attached to something. Now I’ve got some work to do.”

The Least You Need to Know