Neo-attachment

 In spiritual arenas, we hear quite a lot about “detachment” or “non-attachment.” Long understood as a spiritual goal, detachment represents ultimate freedom – a state in which our experience is not defined or limited by our ego’s desires. 

As an ideal, however, it has a powerful and hidden shadow side that can ultimately undermine genuine spiritual achievement – turning us not towards our true Self but away from it by supporting our fear of relationship, connection, responsibility, and our deep and real attachments to each other, to the earth and to all life.

Spiritually, we’ve been told that attachments are indicative of a life controlled by our desires and excessive needs. Emotional ups and downs and sexual desire reflect strong attachments. The need to be with other people – even to be loved – and our need to help others in order to feel OK are also attachments.

In contrast, detachment suggests a state in which we are free from all these ties that bind. This freedom has long been associated with a life of renunciation, as those in search of it often leave behind family and society sometimes for many, many years. Jesus left his family, the Buddha left his wife and children, and following in these footsteps yogis, monks and nuns have long associated detachment and spiritual freedom with isolation or turning from worldly life.

But there is something suspect in our emphasis on (or dare I say “attachment to”) the spiritual ideal of detachment.

“Detachment” sounds and seems quite a lot like the “autonomy” and “separation” that have been heralded as critical aspects of human psychological maturity, and which in the 1970s Carol Gilligan so astutely pointed out as male values in a patriarchal field. Women and girls develop differently, she argued, and this is relevant spiritually as well.

Emphasizing detachment – just as emphasizing separation or autonomy – means something quite different for men than for women. We can also say it has different impacts on the masculine and feminine aspects of ourselves, and on the masculine and feminine energies within life.

Through too much emphasis on detachment, we can easily activate subtle energies and attitudes that might look like spiritual discipline, but are actually harmful, not just to our spiritual awakening, but to life around us, which depends on our connection and yes, even attachment to it. Through an imbalanced emphasis on detachment, instead of freeing ourselves from our desires, we often solidify our psychological or spiritual prejudice against being fully involved in life. We turn from the vulnerabilities and responsibilities that come along with that involvement, we leave ourselves cut off from life’s nourishment, and we leave life cut off from powerful gifts inherent in human consciousness.

Through such imbalance, we are not as much detached as we are isolated and abandoned. We have abandoned life and we have abandoned our humanity.

Years ago in Germany, I met with Angela Fisher who works with women through combining ancient feminine wisdom with traditional Sufism. She told me a story of doing errands with her husband one day, discussing women’s difficulty becoming “detached” on the spiritual path. She asked her husband, a psychotherapist, “Why do you think women are so attached?” And he answered, “Well, someone has to be!”

Attachment to detachment

When we look around at the world, we can see many of the horrors of modern life as symptoms of too much detachment. The rich get richer as the poor get poorer, because they are separated in time and space without bridges to facilitate the flow of compassion or the easy exchange of economic or physical resources. The earth is suffering because we experience humankind as fundamentally detached – different and separate from animal and plant life. Community development is hindered because we focus so much mental and financial energy on supporting individualism and personal progress. Our individual and collective sense of meaning and wholeness is fractured by systems that largely rely on a competitive model in which one person, nation, or corporation wins at another’s expense.

Imbalances toward separateness, individualism, and detachment have plunged so many aspects of life into a state of fractured ill health. Wholeness, well-being, joyfulness and presence has been assaulted by behaviors that stem – not from genuine freedom – but attachment to detachment.

Women, particularly, who struggle to find their place in our worldly as well as spiritual systems often don’t realize that they are often struggling against their own nature – which is to value attachment, connection, and the primal instinct to hold others and life itself close.

Women are not just attached to caring, life is attached to women’s care.

In spiritual centers and in our own homes, our love, our longing, our needs, and our emotional awareness all can be labeled as symptomatic of our over-involvement, our weakness, or our co-dependence with the people and events around us. But this overlay of judgment that women so easily internalize is damaging to everyone. It’s time to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start again. Rather than trying to discern “real” detachment – which, if we are being honest, we would admit to being very, very rare – from its delusional counterpart of destructive isolation and refusal to participate, let’s just jump right into the benefits of attachment. Here, we discover a wellspring of energy, information, opportunities and challenges many of us have been waiting for.

Neo-attachment

If we need a word to signify this remembering and re-valuing  of attachment, we can try “neo-attachment.”

Free of the destructive baggage of spiritualized ideals, neo-attachment is thrillingly multidimensional. We are attached to life in so many ways and on so many levels, that it takes great attention and openness to be present. It can feel both deep and also light: light-footed as in how we should walk within the world, and as how a spider sits on her web, attuned to and sensing the slightest movements around her. Through neo-attachment we hone our listening skills and fine-tune our responsiveness.

It is the challenge many of us have been waiting for, as it gives us no choice but to participate fully. Accepting the depth and breadth of our attachments instantly dissolves the sense of alienation and meaninglessness that has grown through our commitment to detachment. It guides us as we give ourselves to life.

Through neo-attachment we receive information and can transmit energies for healing and for growth and development. Without it, we cannot give and receive. We aren’t sensitive to what’s needed; we can’t sense where to go and what to offer.

In the traditional Buddhist recognition that we treat all beings as though they have been our mothers, we find a hint that the wisdom of attachment has been with us for a very long time. Every mother knows the powers of attachment – how much information is exchanged through the threads of need and love, and how necessary attachment is for flourishing physically and emotionally and of course spiritually.

Now, more than ever, we need to do away with old spiritual concepts that have lost their relevance. Detachment is not always a problem, but its shadow side of coldness that easily transforms into disregard and cruelty has wreaked too much havoc on our world. For once and for all let’s value that women, particularly, are attached.  

Because someone has to be.