The Purest Love is Detached Love and This is How It Works
The idea of detached love comes from the Buddhist practice of unattachment, which is to be with any thought, feeling, or experience without getting hooked. It’s different than attachment theory, which explains the psychological experience of how we learned to bond with others beginning in infancy, and then how that learned style of attachment plays out in relationships.
One example of the Buddhist concept of attachment is this: If we feel anger, we can experience that feeling and allow it to pass through our experience. No biggie. But, if we’re angry and then we come to think and then believe that we’re an angry person, or we become prideful of being angry, or we feel badly about ourselves for being angry, then we’ve become attached to the emotion.
Here’s another example: Say we have a high-profile job from which we derive an identity. We’re not simply ourselves, we are this person who does a job and has a title, and so if something happens to that job — say the company is bought out and our job is eliminated — then we lose not just an income but we also lose our sense of self.
This can go on and on and on with anything and everything that one can attach themselves to. It could be the identity of being a parent. We can become so attached to parenthood and our kids that our sense of self is…
