I Don’t Care! A First Glimpse at Letting Go Of Attachment

I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I am not in a relationship right now and this has been quite a big concern for me. It seems to be one of those areas that I hold a lot of attachment around and seems to bother me more than anything else, but last night I got a glimpse that perhaps that attachment is breaking…

I’ve been working far too hard lately - working through the evening until I go to bed and I figured that I really shouldn’t just work all the time so I decided to make time for some recreation and I dug out a computer game to play on my PC.

Games are a resource hog (well the kinds of games I play are!) and so is Firefox so I had to close that down and just as I was about to shut it down I had a thought: I’m registered with an Internet dating site (yeah you can laugh!) and if I leave a browser tab open it leaves me logged in so I appear ‘online’ when other people login to the site. I noticed that I get a lot more messages if I leave myself logged in so I tend to just leave it open all the time.

So just as I was about to shut down Firefox it occurred to me that I’d be logged out of the site and as it was the evening, that is the time when people generally log on and browse the other people online so of course I thought, “oh no, if I’m not logged on my soulmate might not find me today!” Before I had even finished thinking it, my mind responded with “ugh whatever, I don’t care anymore”, and I shut down the browser.

Just then I noticed what happened - I didn’t care! I thought about it, was that true? Yes it was! I actually didn’t care. I know I’ll meet somebody at some point and at that moment I just wanted to play my game. I held that feeling for a while and I could feel the relief. The attachment was gone, I was no longer feeling desperate.

This morning is the same so I know a shift has happened which is great news but unfortunately I’m not really sure why. It could just be a matter of time. My last relationship ended four months ago which really isn’t very long and most of that time I have still been pining over my ex and I was not in a position to get into a new relationship anyway but I can see that as the time as passed I have gradually felt better and better about the situation.

However I’m not sure that it is as simple as that because I have been using time in a negative way. I’ve had thoughts run through my head such as, I don’t want to be single at Christmas, or even worse - on Valentine’s day and thinking that if I’m still single when I buy a home I’m going to be living all on my own and will be lonely. If a lot of time passed I’m sure my mind would start saying stuff like - why are you still single after all these months / years?

So, I doubt that it is not just time which has resulted in my shift. There are two other things that it might be. A couple of weeks ago I started reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Now I have to say that after A New Earth, I have found this book to be quite hard going. The truth hurts. Eckhart talks a lot about attachment and in particular, being attached to the idea that we need another person to be fulfilled and I could sense the resistance rising within myself when I read it but the more I have read the more I have felt at ease to perhaps Eckhart’s message is getting through.

Secondly, at the same time I also started experimenting with meditation. I haven’t been particularly good at it as I find my mind keeps wandering all over the place but I’ve done around 15 minutes most days and I have felt quite peaceful when doing it so that could also be a contributing factor.

Really though, I think its a combination of all these things. I have always known that being attached to the idea of finding the ‘perfect’ relationship was not particularly healthy and wanted to lose that attachment so every day I read, watch and listen to material that moves me towards this. My favourite authors right now are Wayne Dyer, Esther Hicks, Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie. All these people have different things to teach but one thing they all have in common in their teachings is that everything we need is inside of us - nothing ‘out there’ can make us happy and that is the concept I have been living and breathing over the last four months.

It’s been a struggle sometimes and I would get very frustrated with myself that I hadn’t reached this ‘enlightened’ state that so many people talk about. I even posted about how I had decided to accept my non-acceptance! What I can see now is that back in May I started on a new path (I’m almost at that point in my weekly story series so I’ll explain all that later) but this is such a different state of mind to what I have ever been in before that it was unreasonable to expect to just radically change all my thinking in just a week or so after 36 years of conditioning.

It takes a while, its a gradual progression but as I have just seen, these little shifts are possible and sometimes a thought pops in your head which shows you the evidence of that shift taking place. So if you’re in a place of frustration right now, just keep at it and try not to be so hard on yourself.

Stumble it!