Attach, Detach, Ease, Release

A reflection on awareness, desire, and attachment

7 min readSep 5, 2022

Pack your things!

Ahhh.. Autumn is coming. Leaves are falling, the wind is getting colder, and the smell of fall is already here. For many children, the 1st of September marks the beginning of a new academic year. For me and my girlfriend — it marked the process of packing and moving away from a town where we stayed for over 2 years. The time we spent in Trakai (a small, yet beautiful city just 20 kilometers from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius) was wonderful. For those who love nature, nothing is better than living in a place full of wildlife, forests, and lakes. An occasional fox, deer, or beaver spotting made our time there all the more amazing, but now — it is time to go!

Leaving a place to which you have grown accustomed isn’t always easy. Memories, attachments, and associations bind you to the location where you carefully observed and experienced every aspect of its day-to-day life, but too much attachment, as most of you know, is never a good thing.

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.” — says Lao Tzu

Attachments, taken to their extremes, cloud our vision and delude us away from our real circumstances. What is an attachment, if not a memory charged by emotion? A desire for something to be repeated again, and again, and again. Unfortunately, things that have passed are not repeatable. And they shouldn’t be! Instead, what is always available is the new and the fresh. Until we fall dead, the present is always here. Every condition, every sound, taste, touch, and sight is vibrant with life, here and now. So what is better? To cling to what has already passed (a memory), or meet the present as it is, with open arms, excitement, and embrace? In his book The Freedom From The Known, the great XX century public speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti answered:

“To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this, a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.”

You cannot always change the circumstance in which you are situated, but your perceptions are always in your hands and yours to manage. According to the stoics, all thoughts, opinions, impressions, and reactions are dependent on the person’s psyche, and not on one’s external circumstances. The story we tell ourselves can be either good or bad, interesting or boring, thrilling or frightening. Nonetheless, a story is simply a story, and it depends on you how you will tell it. Neither thinking nor reacting are bad in themselves per se, but there may be a lot of turmoil if these assets are not regulated carefully.

Attention, just like awareness is always in a state of flux. It goes both outward and inward. It wavers, remains steady, appears, and disappears. If we pay careful attention to what we are experiencing inwardly, all excess experiences will vanish instantly. Then, only attention remains. Only an awareness of what is.

Attach, detach, and reattach. The Strange Situation Task.

Not all attachments are the same. From time to time all of us get attached to something, be it things, thoughts, emotions, places, or experiences, but probably the strongest attachments that we harbor are toward other people. To my mind, the most obvious example comes when thinking about children. Small kids are extremely reliant on their parents and no wonder! Without them, they wouldn’t survive. Compared to other animals, people develop slowly. If 9 months of pregnancy is not enough, the first 3 to 5 years are full of clinginess and dependency. Heck, some people remain like that even when they reach their 40s or 50s! Is that healthy? I doubt. Does it really happen? No doubt.

According to modern studies in psychology, the attachment-based brain circuitry that develops in our early childhood tends to get used and reused, again and again, later in life. In other words, the way we relate to our caregivers when we are toddlers is strongly predictive of how we will attach to other people (friends, romantic partners, etc.) when we will become teenagers or even adults. This has been proven and modeled through a series of experiments conducted by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth and her team back in the 1970s. Later the experiment became known as “The Strange Situation Task.”

The Strange Situation Task applied to children between the age of nine and 18 months. The procedure involved eight episodes lasting approximately 3 minutes each, whereby a mother, child, and stranger were introduced in a controlled setting, separated, and later reunited. During the experiments, the researchers measured how toddlers react to the separation from their primary caregiver, and how they behave after he or she comes back. The findings concluded, that most of the children can be grouped into 1 of 4 categories, depending on how they behaved during the experiment. Therefore, Mary Ainsworth and her team concluded that there are 4 primary, unique attachments styles:

1) Securely attached
2) Insecurely attached (anxious-avoidant)
3) Resistant-insecure (anxious-ambivalent)
4) Disorganized (disoriented)

To learn more about these 4 attachments styles, you can view Med Circle’s video on the same

Why should one understand or at least become familiar with the aforementioned attachment styles? Well, as mentioned before, the categorization of children in one of these categories as toddlers is strongly predictive of their attachment style long after they will have grown up. Secondly, as mentioned by the neurobiologist Andrew Huberman in Huberman Lab Podcast’s episode 59:

“The strange situation task has been studied over and over again in different cultures and in different locations throughout the world. (…) If ever there was a literature in psychology that is absolutely tamped down and has a firm basis in both data and real-world principles and real-world examples — it’s this notion of attachment styles.”

The nature of attachment

Knowing about attachment styles is valuable and important, but what can be even better is to know how to touch upon the nature of attachment itself. Attachment breeds suffering, or so the Buddhists say. As everything is in flux, coming and going, arising and passing, getting attached to any one aspect of being is futile. Coming empty-handed we leave life with our hands empty. Why clutch to what you cannot hold? Why not, instead, observe it like the changing seasons? Every season is beautiful, if you know how to look at them. There is nothing wrong with autumn, there is nothing wrong with spring. Summer is beautiful, and so is winter. We just have to know how to adapt to them without wishing for them to stay.

Psychologists might have another view and say that because attachment is unavoidable we should strive toward having “secure attachments”, which is probably the best option for people born and raised in the XXI age modern society, but let me ask you a few question to deepen our understanding of the topic. What do we look for in attaching ourselves to various memories? Is it familiarity? Security? Safety? Is it a fulfillment of long held desires? Desire arises from memory. Can it be satiated by that which gave it birth? Can we gain what we are thirsting for by looking back instead of being aware of what is right in front of us? The great XII century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart might answers all of these questions with a one line answer:

“For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way.”

Also, as mentioned by the late Alan Watts, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced, when one is grasping them. To enjoy life and to experience its delights, we have to learn to enjoy them while they’re here, and to let go of them when they are not. Maybe then life will not appear as a branch to which we have to try and hold on to, but rather like a stream which goes its own way without even thinking about it. Rocks are not bothered by the sounds of the waves, and maybe we should not be bothered by changing events. Sometimes the waves are large and rocking, other times they are small and playful. Nonetheless, waves are only waves. They come and go, but underneath the rough surface there is a calm depth. It is not bothered by the drama of the exterior. It just rests within itself, acts when necessary, and dissipates all that is unimportant or inessential. I hope all of us will be able to go to the bottom of the ocean and find those depths. Then, nothing will appear as frightening. It’s just the play of the Fates. Just the passing of winds.