Isn't that the truth, Janet? Yes. It's all about the journey...

Christa, you Da Girl! And yes, isn't that what it's all about, honey? Walking off the range calm and collected, even if the balls all went a'flyin... Hmmm. Thank you for the visual. Yes, I guess that's really what it boils down to. Living in the moment when the club hits the ball...

[...] read this post on Owning Pink tonight and it helped me gather my thoughts to finish writing about surrender, [...]

Ah, Jason! Look at that! The little photo comes up. Thanks for helping out this techno-phobe. So appreciate it, brother!

I would love to share my thoughts on this. I went through a glorious period in my life that lasted about three years where I was completely in the moment. I was present. I wasn't grasping for a future yet to be and I wasn't clinging to a past that had slipped through my fingers like so much sand. I had been shocked into this space through a life crisis. It was then that I realized the impermanence of things. I was blindsided by the truth that there are no safe spaces and no guarantees. That very much as Don Juan once cautioned Carlos Casteneda, "Death is always at your left side waiting to tap your shoulder, so you must live each moment as if it were your last."

I came to realize that love is not attachment. Love is the ultimate truth. In fact love is the All. It is the energy to which everything is connected and everything is returned. You can never lose love. It is the truth of your being.

During this time I was the most peaceful and content as I ever was at any point in my life. I belonged and I could feel it deep in my bones. Did it mean that my life was free of challenges and difficulties? No... but my experience of these things was different. They seemed to be passers-by on my path rather than influences taking up permanent residence. I didn't become emotionally engaged and entangled in struggle.

Did I also experience joys? Yes... but I had no attachment to outcomes. I had no expectations. I was centered in the moment and life had become this free-flowing experience. Neither good... nor bad. The labels come from the grasping. The labels come from the expectation and our definitions of what we perceive as the way our life should look to have meaning, but when we let all of that go... when we surrender into the moment and say "YES" to whatever shows up, even the unfathomable, we remove all obstruction and become centered in the reality that is love... the truth of our beings.

I am witnessing this now in my dear friend who lost her only son earlier this year. He was only 23. The experience was like an earthquake, consuming everything in its path. It shook her to the core of her being into the present moment. She calls it the wicked blessing because for the first time in her life, she is there... in the present. No agendas. No attachments to outcomes. She is in the flow. In moments, she is in grief. In other moments, she is in joy and wonder at the compassion of life. She has not lost her son but has realized that he is always with him in love. She has been called to surrender her idea of experiencing him and she now has a deeply profound spiritual connection with her son.

Yet this temporal body, trapped in time and space with its limitations... oh how it suffers in those moments when dealt life's blows.

My friend is grace in action. She feels she is messy and awkward as she walks through this insurmountable loss and yet,realizes in a sense of cosmic irony that through this loss, she has been found. Never in her life has she felt so authentic... so whole. It is because she was forced to surrender the very thing she was more attached to than anything in the whole wide world... being a mother as she has known that experience, to her beautiful son Roy.She had to surrender control (attachment) in recognizing that there are no safe spaces. Now she is the embodiment of truth and a wicked blessing it is, that her and Roy are never apart because Roy is love and she too is that.

I lost my connection to the present. I returned to the land of attachment... to clinging and grasping... to the realm where true suffering lies. I am now making my way back to that place where I can be in the moment and experience the depth and beauty of the magical mystery tour.

I probably waxed philosophical here, but it is one of those intangible states of being that is near impossible to define with concepts or words.It is a state lived. Attachment is a distortion because there is no separation. It is All One. How can we ever really possess anything all to ourselves that is already part of us and the limitless All?

Mary Oliver has a beautiful poem about this (via Patti Digh http://www.37days.com/2009/10/poetry-wednesday-.html):

In Blackwater Woods

... To live in this world

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Dear Lissa (the non-technolady)

Sign up for a gravatar at http://en.gravatar.com/ with the same email address that your blog's user account is using.

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Wow, Joy and Jason- and all the rest of you Pinkies out there reading without joining in- THANK YOU for holding the space for me to process all of this. I feel much greater peace about it here tonight. I love you all!

Amazing post, and incredible question.

One of the most freeing moments of my life was when I realized — REALLY realized — that nothing is permanent. Neither pain nor joy. I forget exactly how it came about, but I know it had to do with a deeper understanding of a phrase I’d heard a million times: “this too shall pass.” And now, in moments of joy, believe it or not, it feels GOOD to say, “this too shall pass.” (Of course it feels wonderful in the down times.) Perhaps the attachment, then, is our connection to the feelings themselves — labeling them as good or bad and being so controlled by them that we forget they are simply part of the human experience. The alternative? Watching them. Noticing yourself in their midst. Despair and elation are very much the same when you look at it that way. And it’s all the experience of this trip called life. So of course we can love – we can enjoy love and revel in it and live it with all our hearts. We can accept that pain can be part of that — loss hurts. Really, they’re inextricably linked, and it’s all just life. In between those two there’s boredom and irritation and amusement and jealousy and empathy and aaaaaall the others we are lucky enough to feel every day. And here’s the kicker – there’s no getting around any of them, if you’re a human bean. So I suppose my idea of non attachment is to surrender to the fact that what is, is. Try to have some spaciousness around experiences and emotions. Try not to let thoughts think me, or feelings feel me, but recognize them for what they are — part of the delicious dance on this planet. Thank you for sparking this all my dearest Lissa. xoxox Joy

Mimi- thank you. I think I need to go out and buy Byron Katie's book. I've read her work before, but not this one. Thank you for shining the light on my spiritual path for me. Blessings...

Megan, I totally agree with you on not attaching to outcomes. Big believer in that. My thought is- Set goals, but release attachment to outcome.

So with Siena, I'm fine with that (at least in theory!) If she wants to skip college, let her freak flag fly, be gay, oppose my political beliefs, never give me grandkids, or be a stripper- well, it's her life. I can love her and not attach to the outcome- at least, I hope I can. My mother always taught me "The relationship is more important than being right." I would love her anyway.

It's the attaching to her life part that gets me. Can I practice non-attachment when it comes to her life? That's the part that gets me.

And I hear you Simone. But how much of not attaching to another animal is based on fear? Are you so afraid that you will once again experience 3 years of suffering that you would prefer not to love as much? Or is there some other intangible difference that can let you love as deeply while not attaching? That's the part I can't figure out.

I know many who once they lose someone they love, whether to death, divorce, or heartbreak, choose never to open themselves fully to love. I refuse to do that. I told my husband when we first met that i give him permission to break my heart. Otherwise, would I be fully giving my heart to him, fully loving? That's where I'm stuck. I don't want to encourage you Pinkies to live in fear of what you might lose. And yet, yes, the Buddhist teaching on non-attachment resonates with me in almost every other way.

Still working on it, Lissa

Oops, that last bit was meant to read, "...still love it when its physical form is absent..." Just clarifying.

I have always felt that learning the lesson of impermanence means to learn the lesson of our very nature. I have been called The Consummate People Person, but boy do I love animals and can whisper to them Doolittle-style. When I lost my girl Jessie, it cut like a knife, deeply and sharply. It took me three years to even be able to hear the word 'Jessie' without bursting out in tears! Something inside me clicked and just knew that the next animal I would be guardian of, I would be able to love that deeply yet not be as attached to. I didn't bother to intellectualize this truth, I just knew it. All that was well over a decade ago. In reading your post, Lissa, it hit me for the *first time* that my Jessie-dha had come to me to teach me a lesson in impermanence. That you can love so truly, madly, deeply and yet still love it in its physical (or otherwise familiar) form. THAT part doesn't change...at all, and in fact, may deepen. Thanks for another great share, L!

I love how timely your posts are! Impermanence is something I've been thinking about lately in my career (something far less deep than other areas of life, but interesting nonetheless) and your post really helped me look at it from a new angle. I think I spent most of my life resisting change, craving change, inviting change into my life, then being all WHAT HAVE I DONE? Sheesh, talk about causing myself a lot of stress.

I don't have any insights to add here seeing as my thoughts on the topic are really muddled, but this post was awesome! Thanks for putting your thoughts out there, I suspect I'll be thinking about this for the rest of the day. :)

P.S. Kate - what you said about loving without attachment resonated with me right down to the tips of my toes. Wow.

Wow. Thank you all for helping me sort this out. I'm sitting here, nodding, at what all three of you wrote.

Yes, I agree that we cannot attach to what a person DOES. If my child wants to be or do something that I would not prefer, that is her choice and I hope I never try to attach so hard that I make efforts to force my will up on her. My mother was always a great model for this- raising us with values but letting go her attachment to whether we abided by them.

But yes, as you say, Colleen, can I take non-attachment so far as to say I won't feel loss if I lose someone I love? No. I don't think so. I love passionately and let go reluctantly when someone's time has come. My father asked me if he could die. He wanted my permission. I was only one week postpartum when he asked and I didn't want to let him go. I wanted him to at least stick around until my C-section wound healed so I could focus more on him. But I had to let go and give him my blessing. Damn, it wasn't easy. If I attached less, would it hurt less? Would I have avoided suffering? This is where I get confused.

Kate, what you say resonates with me. Yes, I think you can love and practice non-attachment in your relationships on the level of what you speak. I have long ago detached from trying assert my will on my sister, who has made many choices I would not prefer. And yet, I love her desperately in spite of these choices. I recognize that I do not own her, just as I don't own my 3 year old daughter or my husband or my mother, who I love desperately. But it took me a long time to get to this point.

And Debbie, you know how I so appreciate your wisdom. After many years of feeling judged by the church in which I was raised, every word you write is a healing and reconnection with my roots. Thank you for that. And yes, Jesus is still my favorite.

Wow, Lissa, what a great topic for me at this time. I'm with you on the struggle to understand how love and attachment can co-exist.

I believe it has to do with preferences but that's a bit of a fuzzy concept for me, as yet. The way it makes the most sense for me is that we remain unattached to what our loved ones do. As in, their actions don't affect our sense of self-worth and don't trigger a judgment from us.

That sounds pretty easy when you think about someone you love choosing to wear mismatching socks or even to chew with their mouths open, for example. But what if they choose something bigger that is dischordant with our preferences? Something like... oh, I don't know... wanting to work so much that you never see them or choosing to put accountability for their lives on things outside themselves?

To me, this is where attachment vs preferences comes in. I can absolutely detach from even these choices and not let it affect my inner self. I can tell myself that this is where they are at with their life and not judge them but do I prefer to live with that?? In other words, I can but do I want to?

That's my take on attachment as it pertains to my life in the moment. I'm not sure how that applies to losing someone by a seeminly random happening like an accident... That I will have to ponder more once I'm clearer on this aspect!

Thanks again for a great read, Lissa. :)

now it is my turn to say: you make me smile. I think it is good to find ourself in the place where we are still learning and becoming more open. This sounds like what you are expressing and challenging your readers too. I like it. It's too early for me to write more in this day and with it's schedule but I will curiously check back to see where we are with this. In the mean time I'm thinking the whole "don't worry for the marrow" and "I surrender all" are the the way we are going in the "Jesus Fav" context.