DESIRE WITHOUT ATTACHMENT
Coming back to love
Oh the conundrum of desiring without attachment. The wanting, the hunger, the joyful moving towards the heart’s desire without any supposition or assurance for the fruits of your labor to be experienced or made manifest. A seeming almost impossible feat, to stay desirous and unattached, and yet the possibility is ripe inside each and every moment. In fact, if the ripeness of possibility of unattached desire is chosen, the experience is unconditional love, or just actual love as love has no conditions.
Why do we make conditional or bind that which is free and unbound at its very nature? Because we want certainty. We want safety in knowing that something will be, look, feel or show up in a particular way. That image we have of what we want seems to be linked to us getting it, as without the getting of it we feel unfulfilled or empty of it. However as soon as we try to get the thing or experience, we become laden with agenda and utilize tactics of manipulation to get or keep what we want. Now there is no problem in getting what you want, of receiving the fruits of your heart’s desire, it’s simply that it must not be required in order for you to be fulfilled, joyful and feel complete. There must be no need to have it inside of your desire for it. The completion is in the desiring not in the getting.
To have your focus on the desiring rather than the getting often leaves you with feelings of vulnerability, uncertainty and exposure. There is the wide open mystery in front of you, in which you have no idea what it holds, and yet you continue to keep your heart open in desire, in love. You let the mystery give you whatever it does without you insisting or holding onto a single way in which its supposed to look or feel. Inside of this is the death of your insistences, of your limited perspectives of righteousness and thinking you know what is best from your egocentric mind. It is you saying “I love, I want, I desire and I’m yours” to the mystery “do to me, with me, through me what you will”. This is surrender. It is rapture with the divine. It is where my will and thy will merge into one.
COMMITTED TO LOVE
The way to surrender
In order to get to the point of surrender you must have one hell of a commitment to love and loving. Even though surrender is glorified in spiritual communities and people loosely use the term like its some walk in the park, it is not easy. It is not easy for your mind to give up getting what it wants or trying to figure out how to get what it wants, truly. For a moment activate feelings of deep want and desire in your current most intimate relationship while simultaneously not needing to have the experience of being with that person. Feel deeply wanting all the nice things that you surround yourself with without needing them to be in your surroundings. Try feeling your passion for all the causes you feel passionate about without needing any of them to change from their current state. You can see now that without your full on devotion to loving, the lure of getting the objects or outcomes of your desires will sweep you in, captivate you and you will be powerless to it. The only thing that will pull you out of your self-indulgence is your steadfast, ruthless, total and complete devotion to loving no matter what.
Loving no matter what is a muscle worth building. I’m not sure why there aren’t more gyms that cultivate this type of workout, but I suppose its because life just naturally gives us plenty of times in a single day to stretch, firm and bulk up this muscle. Any time you notice tension, resistance, non-acceptance, holding your breath, or turning away from something or someone you have an opportunity to build your love muscle. If you start a practice of coming back to love over and over and over again then you will begin to know what surrender is rather than just talking about it. Once you taste surrender you realize that none, and I mean none, of the objects and outcomes of your desires are “supposed to happen.” You realize how little you see and know, and that you have no freaking idea what is supposed to happen from and through your desire. This may sound a little depressing at first. I get it. But what it actually is and feels like is a true, sincere humility. All of your pride, arrogance and needing to know or get, goes out the window.
Yet the wanting, the loving, the desiring that you feel continues if you let it. That desiring is the creative impulse of the creator moving through you. That impulse is love. Your mind tries to distort or condition that impulse (i.e. condition love) by making images, stories, and ideas about what that creative impulse is supposed to create and look like in the manifest. It then attaches the impulse to the picture it created and insists that the two go together when in fact they may or may not. Your job, if you so choose, is only to remain open to what your desires want to look like rather than insisting that they fit into your original image.
Feeling, following and acting on your desires is key to you expressing the gift of the creator through you, but it is not for you to determine the fruits of that desiring. This is desire without attachment. This is what it is to love. The art of loving is an expressive adventure indeed. It is a full playing of the game of life. A welcoming invitation to what is in every single moment. The willingness to prioritize, commit, and devote your life to loving opens you into a life of ecstatic surprise and mystery, filled with a richness that you could never fit into any image you could imagine.
Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado