A DISEMBODIED BUDDHA & THE PITFALLS of DETACHMENT
Mindfulness is often billed as a panacea for everything, from inner child wounds (Thich Nhat Hanh) to loneliness to heartbreak (Pema Chodron).
I wholeheartedly disagree.
Mindfulness is not enough to heal through these wounds and emerge a fuller, more integrated self.
If we don’t lean into and leverage emotion, especially difficult emotion, we are going to be ill-equipped to deal with most of life, especially trauma work and embodied intimacy.
Traditional Eastern spiritual traditions, while rich in many ways, have a fatal flaw. They largely deny and preach avoidance of difficult emotion, and emotion altogether. At best they give them lip service. Central to these traditions is the avoidance of “getting enmeshed” with anything emotional, even the joy of laughter.
In his article, “Things the Buddha Never Said,” author and teacher Bohdipaksa reveals that “In the Tuvataka Sutta (Sutta Nipata 4.14) the Buddha puts laughter in the same category as sloth, deception, and fornication: things to be abandoned.”
I think being lazy is pretty important, especially in our age of constant busyness. Damn, I was lazy today after a long work week. And I like laughing, sometimes even while having sex. The Buddha also denounced passion and mingling with emotion. Yet, without these, life is going to be pretty stale, boring, and yeah . . . lonely.
If you’re going to embrace your humanness do away with magical spiritual beliefs (Buddhism is full of them), and embrace the wholeness of a grounded life (including laughing while fornicating), it’s going to be messy. Yet, the price many often pay for trying to avoid the hot mess of being human is a detached, disengaged life of spiritual bypassing.
But there is a way through the mess without trying to avoid it all. It’s actually a beautiful challenge to grow intellectual and emotional intelligence this way. Critical thinking and connection to your own body’s wisdom are crucial allies on the embodied journey. Befriending grief — that great polisher of the soul — is particularly invaluable.
Grief in fact may be the crucial missing piece, the bridge between daily, human suffering and spiritual detachment. Grief has built-in spirituality. It’s the embodied guru. But you’d never know it standing a thousand miles away from it in comfy detachment.
Grief is the antidote to the pain of loss, and therefore an antidote to the escape of detachment. Practiced wholeheartedly, grief dissolves our pain. In our breaking open, it delivers an experience of personal wholeness and oneness, an embodied spiritual connection to life greater than just ourselves. And, if you’ve ever been through a good stint of fully grieving, you know how much bigger your heart is for it.
Through our hearts’ breaking open, grief fleshes out our humanness and compassionately bridges us to the earth and the rest of humanity via deep compassion. This seems like pretty helpful medicine for our tail-spinning humanity and planet.
Grief achieves this feat by liberating and fulfilling the dark side of loving: the pain of healthy, loving attachment. This pain of attachment is the suffering that Buddhists and many spiritual folks try to avoid. They deprecate and avoid it like the plague. That’s some pretty strong attachment to non-attachment! Ironically, this aversion, and the juicy life we lose out on, is its own form of suffering.
We lose out on the interpersonal neurobiological benefits of connection and love. Especially important in a world that, ironically, is dying for our participation, for our connection, for our care, for our cries of injustice and desperation — our healthy, life-affirming, passionate attachment.
Mindful detachment, or un-attachment, however, has its place. It’s often helpful to be mindful. But not to the point of retreating from life and engagement. Detachment is a slice of the pie, but a minor one at that. It’s valuable to stand back, to glean the whole picture, to notice our over-reactions and where they stem from. It can be helpful to retreat, or to go on retreat.
Beyond this, we need to dive back in and work through attachment, using detachment as a helpful tool on the embodied journey—not avoid wholesale the messiness of being human. We heal through the messiness with self-work and together-work. This yields wisely wild, engaged humans who can maximize the benefits and wholeness of deep interconnection.
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Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac. is a holistic medicine physician, award-winning author, somatic therapist, and long-time practitioner and teacher of integrative body-mind practices. He graduated top of his medical class and has been seeing patients for over two decades. Jack is passionately dedicated to psychological depth work and successfully passed through comprehensive, body-centered (somatic) emotional transformation work, which informs the personal growth and trauma work he passionately teaches and shares with others. Learn more at jackadamweber.com
