Attachments and Moving forward

This blog is not going to end with answers but rather just me expressing my thoughts on never ending cycle of our human behavior, brain, emotions and how we handle things when it comes to things we get used to. Please bear with me... I too am still looking for answers. With this said here it goes…..

They say human beings are creatures of habit. I have come to see this fact prove itself time after time again. Why is it that something that wasn't there before and suddenly is present in your life for a short period of time suddenly becomes your attachment, your sudden need to keep it in your life, your sudden habit of expecting it, using it, seeing it, feeling it..... what ever it is that it gives us or does for us.

If you are used to walking to work and suddenly you got a car, getting used to driving a car to work becomes very easy, even if it's just for a month. But going back to waking after you had driven a car for a month seems like a big change. You need to make new adjustments; you miss the ability and freedom to drive. Yet, before you had a car you didn't know anything else and you seemed to manage just fine by walking. This shows that we get used to things that are pleasant and convenient yet something that requires more work or feelings to deal with we suddenly find difficult to get used to as fast as we did to something we liked.

If you get used to a certain routine of your daily mornings lets say and suddenly someone moves in with you the routine is impossible to keep. You get frustrated, you need your balance, your routine and things you are used to. Yet if this person lives with you for a few months and then moves out, you suddenly miss the new routine you forcibly now adjusted to and had to create while they lived with you.

If before you felt happy being alone, having your own space and how you spend your free time and suddenly you have significant other or relative occupying your time and space- you feel a big shift. You may even feel annoyed, or like you are unable to enjoy the things you did when you were alone. Yet again, once this person moves out or even is gone just for a week or two, you notice the emptiness, like something is missing. This someone, who has broken up your normal routine, the things you were used, things you enjoyed - has brought with them new changes, new routines, taking away your free times, giving you less space and making you feel like now you had to learn to share and balance things not just for self....and yet you again got used to new routine. Then after all of this they left you back to it, to what you had before them. Here you go again finding yourself missing what you are used to, but this time it's the presence of this person, the togetherness, the lack of space you before fought for… now you feel too much space.. You miss the very things you first found yourself feeling annoyed about, the things that took you a while to adjust to. Here you are again now missing those things, finding yourself feeling confused as to why you feel like something is missing.

What is it that causes us be so attached to things, people, memories, things, experiences? Is it the emotions that drive us to feel what we feel, which in return makes us connect and attach to things that made us feel all this? Because when we don’t feel we don’t experience connection and we do not have those attachments.. and when I speak of feeling I don’t mean just romantically. I am talking about even a simple feeling of being in the presence of a friend can make us feel not alone, a simple thing as being understood can make us feel accepted… a simple thing as having ability to pay for our bills can give us a feeling of independence. Now take away these small things and we will feel the void, the things we suddenly miss or feel we want back because we have attached ourselves to all these things which are all connected to how we feel. But if you are emotionally detached… and it means nothing to you to have things/ people in your life or not… so when it’s gone there is no void and no attachments.

Can there be a balance to all this? How do we find ourselves avoid attachments… because as Buddha saying goes “The root of suffering is attachment”, which I can see and understand what it means, but not to attach means not to have any expectation of consistent results, which we humans consistently create…to which we get used to…and once it’s taken away we find ourselves feeling out of balance… hurt, lost, confused, missing it, and it’s all suffering due to all those attachments. To not attach we have to not feel, we have to not involve emotions, we have to not involve our analytical mind and ego that likes to interpret things and label things as to what it thinks it is… We basically have to be observers being in the present moment all the time rather than living it and applying it to our feelings, thoughts and expectations. However, if we are just observers and are not to feel how can we love back, sympathize, care, stand up for ourselves when we need to defend, speak out our mind when we feel we want to be heard…? We need to feel in order to feel alive… we need to experience things in order to feel alive… we need to know sadness to know happiness, we need to know what broken heart is to know what love is… what it’s like to be rejected to know what it’s like to feel accepted…. This is life… for our souls to experience all this, to understand the difference of it all. Otherwise what is the purpose to being here anyway? If we have nothing to learn or to feel why are we here? Ok, I don’t know it either but I can tell you for sure that people who have experienced a lot in their life are more compassionate, genuine, wiser and so on… so this life must have taught them something vs those whose soul chose not to learn and expend but rather stay in undeveloped stage of constant cycle due to not willing to understand the lessons life had offered to learn from experiences that were placed in front of us.

So what I am saying is, yes, we are creatures of habit and we do get used to things certain ways because we want certain results to make us feel the way we want to feel. It’s ok to feel all these things our body, heart and souls is capable of feeling. It’s ok to feel happy, sad, rejected, accepted. It’s all part of our soul experiencing things… what is not ok is for us to allow these feelings turn us into rocks, where we are stuck and are unable to learn things to move forward, where we hold on to pain, grudges or resentment, where we are not allowing our own selves to evolve from the experience but rather close ourselves due to the experience.

If we are happy we need to learn how to share this happiness with others. If we are heartbroken we need to learn how to move forward and not let it define us as that just a sad, heartbroken person. Our soul is meant to learn and expend forward so we need to learn how to understand that all these attachments are part of our feelings that connected us to something or someone in the first place. It was just experiences that gave us certain feeling, certain emotion to which we got attached. And just how we have created those attachments due to feelings we can remove them the moment we sit down and go through what we really feel, understand why we feel what we feel and then allow ourselves slowly detach what no longer serves us and those feeling and move forward. It’s easier said than done, I know and I am not saying it’s a fast process either. However, as we go through this very hard time of detaching, letting go and understanding what our soul needs or what we need to remove we learn to love ourselves back to who we always were… we learn to love ourselves without the need of someone’s approval, we learn to love ourselves without the need of having someone constantly be there to make us feel better..we learn to appreciate who we are… and when we feel complete we will start to see new things happening to us again because we are no longer stuck in the same cycle or rut… we have moved forwarder on our journey and our soul is preparing for new experiences.

Love and light, lovely souls

Namaste

Julia S