On attachment
One day when I was sitting with Ram Dass he asked me, "Molly, do you teach your students about attachment?"
"I do, Ram Dass," I responded, feeling content with myself for having made that particular teaching - one that is so fundamental and found in many places in yoga and related scriptures - something I had always worked with and contemplated for myself, and something I had always encouraged and inspired in my students.Ram Dass replied, "I'm working with that one now."It is always a relief when I talk with Ram Dass and he tells me something he is working on, I mean, if Ram Dass is still working on it, it must be hard. I thought about all the ways that I impress (push?) the idea of non-attachment - referenced many places in the Upanishads, in the Yoga Sutras and in the Bhagavad Gita - onto my own life and onto the process of my students.Anyone who has been with me on Samarya Yoga Teacher Training has worked with "conscious eating day," but has also heard me talk about other ways we can explore, and maybe let go of, all that we think we need - this tea, that protein bar, this pillow, that prop, this break, that ritual. On our pilgrimages to India we are pressed into places where the only option is to let go - or to suffer greatly from something we really do not have to suffer from.
You have heard me talk about yoga as "the life of leisure" where, when we learn to let go, we get to be in more places, in more situations, in a place of relative ease, not pushing back against something we have little or no ability to change.
We get scrappier. We get easier, on the inside and the outside. It seems worth the work.But then, with Ram Dass, feeling so deeply loved and valued in my own process, I get to be in a completely different and profoundly humble role. I get to do even more of the deep inside looking that I already demand of myself and ignite in my students, but it's different with him. With my beloved Ram Dass, I feel like a little kid. There is no pressure, only opportunity.And I started to wonder: How attached am I to being not attached? How much suffering do I cause myself or my students by wanting, "needing," something from us that we are not yet ready to give up? How much am I dishonoring my own or someone else's unique developmental process by pushing them to let go, and if they (or I) don't let go, or let go easily enough, holding on to judgement of them, or worse, failing to respond sweetly to their suffering because I see that they are the one causing it?
"Into a blind darkness they enter who are devoted to ignorance (rituals); but into a greater darkness they enter who engage in knowledge of a deity alone." Isha Upanishad
I will always be working with non-attachment. I will keep inspiring it in my students. But I will add in more explicitly a focused contemplation on when the teaching is just that, a teaching, and that I can offer it to my students with the unwavering love, patience and grace afforded to me by Ram Dass. I will further my own commitment to discerning when I am pushing non-attachment out of a perceived need to change myself or someone else. And I know, when I come back to this viveka - this discerment - I will know better when to push and when to let up, so I truly honor process. Which, really, is what yoga is all about.Thank you, my friends and students, for being in process with me. And thank you, my most adored babaji, for the love you give me - it's the gas in my tank, the light in my lamp, the explosion of joy in my heart. From this place, I know I can do anything. In my own sweet time.