a process for letting go of attachments

This is part two in a series. If you haven’t read Part One, or if it’s been a while, I hope you’ll go here to read it now before going further.

As a coach, a leader of personal growth experiences, a friend, and a human being, I’ve found that almost everyone is from time to time battered about by their attachments - their fixations and desires for those things of the world that that they either can’t quite get, or get enough of, or manage to keep. Sound familiar?

In Part One I quoted “you can never get enough of what you don’t really need,” because attachments are typically to outer things such as possessions, approval, image, money, power, success, special treatment, acknowledgement, competitive wins, opinions, beliefs, and emotional highs and lows - things which are usually just shallow stand-ins for the deeper experiences that your heart has available to you, that you haven’t yet fully recognized or allowed - such as acceptance, worthiness, enoughness, loving.

The ego, of course, doesn’t encourage getting to the heart of the matter. It encourages the superficialities - of which you can never get enough, because they are not a lasting source of goodness and wholeness, no matter how strongly the ego insists. For that, you need to go directly to the heart (or the soul, or spirit, or higher power, or inner guide, or however you characterize that inner source of unconditional love, strength, and wisdom).

If you don’t, you’ll likely put your energy into longing for and perhaps pursuing or maintaining that outer stand-in thing you’re attached to, instead of the heart-based experience you really want. Like the old song says, you’ll be “Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places.”

Giving up an attachment to an outer stand-in can can feel a bit like letting go of a life line. That’s not surprising given the outer thing’s false promise to bring you love, acceptance, worthiness - even if you’re not consciously aware that that’s what you’re after - and even though it’s failed you repeatedly. It has likely given you a taste or a hint, but that taste or hint is flimsy and fleeting. Like any addiction, it sends you out in search of more. It may take a long time and a great deal of pain (stress, anxiety, fear, pain, suffering, loss, hurt, etc.) before you recognize that not only is the attachment to the outer not delivering on its promise, it itself is also causing pain.  That you’ve read thus far suggests maybe you’ve had that recognition.

So perhaps you’ve said “Enough! I’m done! I give it up, I’m walking away.”  And perhaps you’ve begun to feel a sense of freedom and ease … at least until the next time your attachment is triggered - perhaps someone once again doesn’t treat you the way you want, and you find yourself feeling hurt because it triggers a sense of rejection, being not good enough, being misunderstood, unappreciated. And then the cycle continues.

Often this is because we’ve identified only the outermost attachment (e.g., “I’m attached to trendy clothes”) and tried to let that go without also unpacking and identifying the stack of underlying beliefs that glue that attachment in place (e.g., “I need trendy clothes to get attention, and I need attention to feel special, and I need to be special to be valuable.”). Obviously, just letting go of the clothes themselves won’t set you free.  Rather, you must let go of the attachment to the clothes and to the underlying beliefs … and to do that, you need to make conscious that which is likely unconscious.

I have found that if I invite my heart to lead me as I described in Part One, and then set to work on unpacking those beliefs, I’m quite likely to bump into a blinding flash of the obvious, in which I recognize with certainty (and no doubt humility) the nature of the beliefs I was holding onto, as well as their fallibility, the futility of my attachment to them, and the pain they were causing me.

At that point, I ask my heart “who would I be without this attachment?” In my response I will begin to recognize the qualities I experience at the level of my heart.  The fact that I recognize the “me” that’s free of attachment says that that “me” is already in place.  At the level of the heart, the me that I want to be is in fact the me that I already am. Now it’s time to allow that knowing to be, and to allow it to reframe how I think, feel, talk, and act. It’s time to reclaim the heart-centric me, free of egocentric attachment.

This process of walking away can require a lot of courage, and I’ve found that courage (literally, from Old French, “action of the heart”) is easier to come by when my heart is leading the way. Otherwise, the examination of attachments and beliefs may become a mental exercise in judgment and recrimination, which is certain not to get you where you want to go. So if you find this process becoming a struggle, just step back and invite your heart to take the drivers seat. It’s likely not going to be once-and-done, so have patience if you find you need to repeat the process several times.  That’s not failure, that’s just peeling the onion. Your heart is a great peeler if you let it be.

Ready to give it a shot?  Here’s a walk-through of my approach, some of which is inspired by Byron Katie, whose work I highly recommend.

The Process

1. Start with your heart, asking the deepest, clearest, most loving levels of you consciousness (whatever you call that) to show you and steer you toward what is for your highest good.

2. Acknowledge what it is you’re attached to, and unpack the underlying ideas, beliefs, promises that you’ve been hanging onto. Keep looking for a deeper belief under each one until you feel you’ve hit the bottom line. (See the “trendy clothes” example above.) Notice the effect of the attachment and underlying beliefs on you - how you experience your thoughts, emotions, body sensations, words, actions, imagination when you’re attached. (“I feel insecure and scared. I worry people think I’m not worth their attention. I tell myself I’m going to be rejected. My shoulders & stomach are tight. I push myself to act confident but really I’m a nobody.”) This might be considered the price of holding on.

3. Ask yourself “who would I be without this belief I’m attached to?”. In other words, if I were free of this, what different kinds of thoughts would I have? What emotional qualities would I experience? What would I experience in my body? What kinds of things would I be imagining? What words might I use? What actions might I take? (“I’d feel secure and easy-going. My body would relax. I’d have fun getting dressed without regard to how others might see me. I’d be tender and loving toward myself. I’d be genuinely confident.”)

4. What you have just described is probably how you might also describe some manifestations of your heart. So take a moment to just be with this nonattached heart of yours. Breathe it in, and relax into it, let it spread into all of you, so that you know it as you.

5. Now, from this place of heart, what thoughts and words best support you? What actions might you take to keep yourself centered in your heart, living free and clear? Make note of these, and make a plan to use them.

6. Forgive any judgments toward yourself and your attachments, and experience gratitude for your willingness to become more conscious and free.

To summarize, you start with your heart, unpack the nature of the attachment and the beliefs that hold it in place, then return to your heart and let it lead.

If you’ve truly walked away, initially you’ll probably feel relief in some form. As you continue letting your heart lead, you’ll begin to notice it no longer matters if you have what you were attached to or not. You can have those trendy clothes, but you won’t feel you need them. You’ll be free inside with or without them. Your inner sense of well-being will expand as you let go of what you don’t need.

Godspeed your inner journey, as you walk away from your attachments by walking toward your heart.