When I first stumbled upon the idea of detachment while reading some Buddhist literature in my early days of college, I found the idea repugnant. It sounded like emotional repression and the deadening of the self to the intense wonders of the emotional world.

This was a reasonable error on my part; the concept of detachment is not an easy one to grasp at first glance, for precisely the reason I tripped over it: why on Earth would you want to do that?

Detachment is not the practice of turning yourself into a Vulcan. It is not the process of preventing the uprising of emotional experience, or of stopping the flow of feelings.

What detachment is is ceasing to identify yourself with the flow of your emotions. It’s very easy to confuse “I feel anger” with “I am angry.” In fact, in normal speech, we don’t even differentiate the two. Note that the first assumes that “I” is an observer of sensations, and the second that “I” is, in some sense, the sensation of anger.

While it would be easy to argue that the point is just semantics, the distinction between the two types of “I” is really crucial. The thrust of a detachment practice (which is really a large part of what Buddhism is) is shifting the locus of the sense of Self from what is being felt to what is doing the feeling.

This sounds technical and abstract, so let me turn to an example:

I was watching television the other night, and the program I was watching was about a woman who had so many clothes that her entire apartment was full of bins, and she even had a storage unit full of bins of clothing. I won’t go into details about the show (it didn’t thrill me, overall, because it lacked an emphasis on shifting the participant’s self-perception), but suffice to say there came a point when the woman who had too many clothes had to watch her boyfriend, her good friend, and a fashion consultant throw away quite a lot of her favorite clothing.

She responded by crying and clutching her heart and face alternately, saying “Oh, God, no!” and generally being surprisingly involved with a bunch of textiles. Within the framework that I outlined above, I would describe her as being:

1. Attached (in the technical sense) to her wardrobe
2. (Mis)-identified with her feelings about the clothing

What I mean by the first is that she was so involved with her wardrobe, emotionally, that she clearly was feeling physical and emotional pain on witnessing (in some cases, torn, stained, and moth-eaten) garments thrown away. While I don’t in any sense wish to invalidate her experience by claiming that she shouldn’t have those feelings or that attachment, I do wish to suggest that she could enhance her experience of her life if she did not require that objects (by their nature temporary) never disappear.

What I mean about being misidentified with her feelings is that she was clearly confusing her emotions about the garments (relating, presumably, to how she was feeling when she bought or wore the garments) with the garments themselves.

The most striking moment in the show was when the host said to her “these aren’t your feelings. These are things,” and she looked somewhat surprised, as though she’d never considered such a thing before.

Detachment, then, is simply the practice of reminding yourself that your feelings about objects aren’t the objects, your feelings about events aren’t the events, that your thoughts aren’t you, and needn’t be given the same honor and attention that you habitually give them.

In Buddhism, detachment is about cultivating a sense of control over emotions. Detachment is performed, not to divorce totally from an emotion or not to feel, but to recognize that it is part of the game so that the ego can take a step back and watch the emotion, to feel it and to know it, and in so doing to learn and grow from it without being caught up in it and sucked into the harmful drama of it all.

If you’re attached to an idea that’s preventing you from taking action you want to take, spend some time deciding what perspectives and behaviors you need to change to remind yourself and reinforce the knowledge that you have the ability to choose to take action anyway.