Semi-detached

They are popping up everywhere, as a panacea to the ills of our high-speed lifestyles; as a secular means to reducing anxiety and reducing stress… Too busy for a class? Download an app! 

I’m talking about meditation and mindfulness.

They have enabled me to experience welcome relief from a prolonged period of depression. My practice helps me to believe that through nurturing my family and friendship bonds with loving kindness I can appreciate the value and pleasure of life, learn to be present, and experience happiness in this chaotic and brutal world. 

But the more meetings I attend and the more practitioners I listen to, the more questions I have. 

While the intention may be to take the ‘middle way’ through regular meditation and mindfulness,  one also has to ask if such a potent tool for tinkering with our minds holds any dangers. 

Finding the most suitable meditation practice is crucial, but so is a skilful teacher. The meta bhavana meditation which focuses on cultivating loving kindness towards all beings has the potential to promote a compassionate attitude to the people that we encounter on a daily basis and appears to be the antithesis of Zen detachment. But even this technique can take for granted a level of self regulation when it comes to choosing suitable subjects to meditate upon (e.g. deciding to send positive wishes to your grumpy postman rather than your childhood abuser).

The apparent paradox of being ‘present’ through mindfulness, yet being detached from the forces that bend and bow our emotions, is not easy to navigate. Just where does one end and the other begin? Good teachers don’t pretend to know all the answers, but they should be able to support and guide you. Above all they should listen and honour your individual experience.

However, while spiritual teachers can be wise, insightful, inspiring and compassionate, they are not professionals. They aren’t necessarily counsellors or psychologists, yet they have the power to impart disturbing ideas about the nature of our existence, or insist that in order to dispel unhappiness you should learn to accept things as they are. 

It deeply concerns me that people turn up to such meetings to sort out their shit, yet without a skilled teacher alert to the nuances of the teachings being espoused, or in tune to the kind of vulnerabilities people carry around, some serious damage could be sustained. 

Through the millennia, it has never been everybody’s calling to detach themselves from life and meditate, to be a ‘renunciate’. Lorin Roche, a scholar of meditation and its social and psychological implications, argues that most people are ‘householders’, i.e. the majority of people who “live in the world and evolve through working and playing with it.” 

The renunciate detaches from the world, the householder engages. But what if a householder is encouraged to detach themselves? To weaken their desires, instincts and emotional intelligence? According to Roche, this can have serious implications.

I perceive a dangerously blurred line between accepting what is - in order to dissipate unnecessary drama and discontent -  and accepting what is morally and ethically … unacceptable. And how are people struggling with past trauma, or living with abuse, given their vulnerable, warped realities, supposed to perceive the difference?

It’s the concept of detachment that both intrigues and disturbs me too. Ultimate detachment from the material world might bring enlightenment, but Buddha was only able to do this after a prolonged and profound journey through his own and others’ experiences. 

Meditation is a powerful tool that can enable us to glimpse our deeper, higher self and sense our human potential. But we need to find the right approach and a skilful teacher to show us how to use it - for ourselves, not against ourselves. As Roche says, “it’s easier to destroy than to create.”

I find an unlikely parallel in Jonathan Glazer’s film Under The Skin where an alien life force, in the process of navigating human existence, finds itself moving from the dispassionate observation of human suffering and emotions to being overwhelmed by wonder, love, mercy and fear through its experience of wearing a human body. 

Detachment is what makes it alien. And, though the human condition encompasses joy and tenderness as much as savagery and pain, we can’t escape this. But like Glazer’s alien, it’s possible to make our own tentative steps towards cultivating compassion - for our own wondrous bodies and the embattled spirits they contain -  as well as for other people we encounter. 

We are householders of our own bodies, our own relationships, our own lives, and I agree with Roche: to detach from these aspects risks destroying our own humanity. What are we then? Perhaps a distant, detached alienated force of existence that simply observes life instead of living it. 

N.B. I'd like to credit Heidi Hanson's superb blog on trauma and healing for inspiring this post.