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YOGA READING BLOG

Detachment leads to Freedom

by Raili Maripuu

Worker wellbeing - Arms up yoga at work

Let go of what no longer serves you.

A staple in any yoga room and bloody brilliant advice if you are not the one who needs to go through with the actual letting go part.

For me letting go has always been difficult. I’m far from being a hoarder but I do struggle throwing away old socks, let alone letting go of major commitments and relationships. I truly admire my teen daughter and her regular spring clean cycles where both material stuff and relationships get chucked out from her personal space with ease. From constellation perspective not all shit gets carried forward through generations.

I have been wanting to write about detachment for a while but never found a personal story to angle into it. There are plenty of yoga articles about detachment but as most of them are descriptive and philosophical, they have remained theoretical and unrelatable. “Detachment leads to freedom.” You understand the words, but the words don’t stick.

As I’m going through a major and a very difficult detachment exercise in my life involving years of narcissistic abuse in business, this blog is coming together quite naturally, and the meaning of the yogic ‘Vairagya’ or non-attachment to outcomes is starting to make a huge sense. I guess Universe really does deliver what’s bubbling up inside you. The energy in the world knows when you are ready.

Detachment takes practise and we should develop this every day in small increments. There are five major stages in letting go of anything and approaching this mindfully with open heart will help you to navigate a healthy detachment whilst keeping your sanity.

  1. Acknowledgment – This is recognising that some things or people should no longer be part of your life. It sounds simple but in reality, a very difficult phase to get to, especially where trust and love are involved. Getting there can take years (in my case 20) and a huge toll in your health (in my case increasingly frequent migraines and heart palpitations).
  2. Self-Reflection – Also a super challenging phase that can lead to depression (not in my case) and anxiety attacks (yes in my case). Basically, acknowledging that something is seriously off in your life is followed by a huge shock, disbelief and denial (still). In this phase, you get to experience embarrassment, lack of energy and feeling very small. But on a positive – you also start to explore the energy in those feelings.
  3. Processing – The connection here came recently when a friend said, look I’m very sorry that this happened to you but what have you learned from all this? This is the phase where you need to be aware for what has been useful for your future development.
  4. Creative Action – This is where the feeling of spring comes in. The early stages of loss or desire or letting go can paralyse us, so it’s often better to do minimum for basic survival. There is simply no energy for anything new. You know when you have reached to this wonderful phase, as new ideas start bubbling up inside you.
  5. Freedom – I’m not there yet but this is a phase of true liberation! It’s the phase where you think of your loss or desire, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal well-being or feelings. According to the people who-have-been-there, the Freedom phase will feel like you have put down a heavy burden.

The basic yogic text for practising detachment is Bhagavad Gita. A great Book of Life. Gita teaches us to do the right thing, because it needs to be done, no matter what the outcome is. This is detachment in its purest form – you do things without worrying about success of failure. When you understand that all outcomes are out of our control, you start focusing on a present moment without being concerned with future results. Controversially, we are trained and driven to behave in an exactly opposite way – only get involved in things that bring us success and avoid failure like a plague. As an entrepreneur, this was my mantra for many years leading me to the biggest disappointment in my life.

I think the biggest detachment lesson for me has been how to act with maximum grace while under maximum pressure. In my case, the pressure was fully on, my grace part maybe halfway. The biggest realisation for me was very simple – if you lack space, you can’t grow or create anything new.

In the words of T.S. Eliot: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”