Does it sound contradictory? For most of us, the essence of love is attachment, and it may seem that one cannot exist without the other. „Until death do us part.”
In yoga, the concept of detachment, Vairagya, distance, and non-possessiveness is a fundamental spiritual practice to help us grow on the spiritual path, leading to freedom and liberation. In Sanskrit, Vairagya means „vi” – without and „raga” – passion/attachment, meaning lack of attachment. Applying this fundamental concept of yoga to love means loving without attachment. How to cultivate detachment in love when, for us humans, love is a space for fire, passion, longing, jealousy, and strong attachment, until death? When we love, we cannot imagine life without the other person, let alone allowing that person to experience love with someone else, without us. In other words when we love, we want to possess, to own the other person. The question then arises, is this really love?
TWO HALVES OF AN APPLE – A CONCEPT LEADING TO SUFFERING
Often, we use love to fill a lack within ourselves. We search for our other half because we feel incomplete. Can such love lead to fulfillment? Can a feeling driven by such a goal truly be love? Can love arise from selfishness and desperation? Can the source of such a pure feeling, as love, be a lack?
Remember that the other half is a separate being, who, although may complement us at first because their shape perfectly fits our internal void, may change over time. Time and events change us every day, as we experience something new daily. There are no identical mornings, identical evenings, days, and nights. Although we have our routines and rituals, life shapes us like clay. Every night we dream of something different. Every morning, we eat the same omelet, but the eggs come from a different chicken, or even two different chickens. During the day, we often change plans because something happens. Even sunrises and sunsets, though the same recurring phenomena, are beautiful in their diversity. Similarly, we are not the same as yesterday, and we don’t know what we will be like tomorrow or if we will be here at all.
The concept of another half is therefore very risky and can lead to frustration, emotional suffering, loneliness. The truth is that no one and nothing can complete us because we are already complete. The lack we feel is not a category or measure for seeking love. It’s a lack we must fill ourselves, with ourselves, not with another person.
FATAL LOVE IN ART
Art, which accompanies us from school years to now, doesn’t help us practice love without attachment. From an early age, looking at paintings, reading poetry, listening to music, we learn that love is attachment, and worse, deadly attachment.
In literature, attachment leads lovers to tragedy – Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) throws herself under a train, Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare) drink poison and die in the embrace of love and death. Ophelia, in John Everett Millais’ painting, drowns in attachment to Hamlet. Even the strong Cleopatra preferred to die rather than live without her beloved (painting „The Death of Cleopatra” by Jean-André Rixens). Obsessive love is sculpted by Antonio Canova, depicting Psyche in Cupid’s arms. There is more. Art is truly overflowing with attachment, jealousy, obsession, deadly love where lovers are willing to sacrifice everything, even their lives, to be together.
So how to transform from such an extreme to lack of attachment? Fortunately, there are poets who have reached pure, highest love. Love free from attachment, expectations, unconditional, Divine love. One of them, Jalaluddin Rumi wrote about love:
In other words, to love unconditionally, without attachment, we must remove all barriers that stand in our way to such love. What are these barriers? What challenges?
LOVE AND TIME
Let’s try to look at attachment in love through the lens of time. Such a perspective on difficulties and challenges over time can help us understand what Vairagya in love means.
THE PAST
Each of us has our past, our experiences, our traumas, sorrows, and joys, the home in which we were raised, the people who surrounded us, different education, different childhood, different living conditions. Although in the initial phase of love we are in love and stay in the here and now, intoxicated by love like a drug, over time, as hormone levels normalize and we come out of this chemical stupor, the past often enters the relationship uninvited.
I would call the first phase pure fascination and the second heavy confrontation. Why? Because it involves the clash of our pasts. The past has shaped us, imprinted certain patterns, limitations, habits, a way of perceiving the world, but also expectations. The product of our past, among other things, is expectations, and this can hinder our practice of love without attachment.
As humans, we like to expect, and even more, we crave the fulfillment of these expectations. Although expectations are a product of the past, they touch the future, making it impossible for us to be here and now in this phase, and being with each other is no longer an ecstatic-narcotic binge, but a challenge. What we expect is in the future. So, I will go so far as to say that the future is the greatest enemy of cultivating and practicing love without attachment. Let’s look there, into the future.
THE FUTURE
If the future is the kingdom of our expectations, the most effective way would be to eliminate this time zone from the practice of true love, love without attachment. For many of us, this is simply impossible. Falling in love, we say we are building a future with other person. Expectations are followed by plans. We plan trips together, a wedding, buying a house, a dog, a car, we plan children. Expectations and plans are indicators of human love, to which we are used to. We measure the feeling of another person by their readiness and commitment to joint planning.
The truth is, however, that the future does not exist. Can you predict what will happen in five minutes, in an hour, tomorrow? When it comes to time, you don’t have much, you only have this second. How much money do you have? What is in your account, in assets, and in your wallet. What you will earn, or may earn, what you will buy, you don’t have yet physically. Moreover, what you have now, in this second, you may lose tomorrow. We cannot predict whether our beloved will be with us tomorrow, in a year, in a few years, till old age. We don’t know. We also don’t know if we will stay with them. What if we let go, offered this love freedom by freeing it from time? Because does only staying together physically, sharing the same home, planning together allow for cultivating and nurturing love?
THE PRESENT
This is the time zone where we don’t know how to be in love. That’s why I left it for last. Why can’t we love in the Here and Now? Because we are stuck in the future, and expectations and plans create a fear of not fulfilling them. Love without attachment, love here and now, without conditioning this feeling with the future, is the highest form of love, the only, pure, and Divine. Such love is not conditioned by any external circumstances. Such love is eternal because it does not depend on the other person. Even if this person decides to leave us or we decide to leave, we can still cultivate this love because its place is in our heart, not in the future, not in the house we built together. This love does not lie in the past, in the journeys we took together, in the shared raising of children, in the memories of moments spent together. This love is with us here and now, alive and filling us with life.
Lose yourself in this love here and now, dissolve your ego in it, feel that you can love this person even if they leave because this love is yours, full, and pure. When you reach such love, you are a lucky person. And remember, although for ease of understanding practicing love without attachment, I placed love in different time zones, love is truly timeless, lasting in this second, not even in a minute, regardless of circumstances, regardless of the actions and choices of others. It is you, only you who decides whether you love. Possession, plans, expectations are just illusions, and love is the truth, not an illusion. By loving without this illusion, you will rid yourself of the burden that poisons your ability to love, you will be free from suffering.
Not without reason, I used the painting of the wonderful artist Krzysztof Powałka „White Spots” as the cover of this article. In the painting, we see a couple with their heads placed in cages. Attachment, expectations, jealousy, being stuck in the future, isolates these two lovers from each other. And all this is in their mind, head, ego. Outside the cages, blue hummingbirds symbolize freedom, love without attachment, and the true, divine connection of these two.
MY PERSONAL JOURNEY TOWARDS LOVE WITHOUT ATTACHMENT
As a yogini and Tantra teacher, me too, like you, I am still learning. Walking the spiritual path and knowing various spiritual techniques does not make me stronger in the face of true love. I am on a journey. The love I experience, its bittersweet, leads me through valleys. In this journey, sometimes thorns wound my legs, bitter frost slows my blood, but there is also the sun that warms, the wind that brings relief during heatwaves, and the summer rain that quenches my thirsty soul. In practicing love without attachment, you will experience everything, as in a real journey, but at the end of the road, you will feel with all your being that it was worth it.
Often my ego urges me to escape, I want to leave, give up, build a wall through which no pain will penetrate. My surroundings, people who know love full of attachment, say „Don’t go there, it will hurt you” „It has no future”. Every day I struggle with the temptation to plan our next meeting, to feel safe, but only illusory. Just the thought of him in another’s arms makes me break out in cold sweat and my throat constricts with fear.
Spiritual practice helps, supports me, brings me home to the here and now, where practicing love without attachment becomes bearable, but still difficult. Nevertheless, I believe that this true love is the only one, comes from God, and if it comes from God, it should be free from attachment.