Mindfulness Concept #4: Detachment and Acceptance

This is a hard concept for people in the Western world.  We are very attached to our things.  We are attached to our goals.  We want what we want.  To be detached might be seen as some as apathetic, or even lazy or against progress. 

Detachment need not be any of these things.  Instead, it can be an acceptance of what is, coupled with a deliberate use of our wills to change what is into something more acceptable.

One problem is that often we assume that anything that isn't the way we want it, it needs to be changed.  This creates a lot of "targets" for change. 

Another problem when we don't detach is that we become burdened by many negative feelings during the day.

Albert Ellis wrote about this issue from a cognitive therapy point of view in his book, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy:

Irrational Idea No. 5: The idea that human happiness is externally caused and that people have little or no ability to control their sorrows or disturbances. In contrast to this, Ellis argues the following:

• Unless we are being physically or economically assaulted, other people actually have little power over us unless we tell ourselves that they do.
• If we tell ourselves that we can't stand a situation, that is nonsense.  Unless we are being assaulted or deprivied of a necessity, then we can stand it.
• It is difficult in our society for people to believe that they can actually change their emotional reactions to situations mainly because they rarely choose to do so and thus have little practice at it.
• We may go from believing that something might reasonably be upsetting to believing that it should be upsetting, which would probably guarantee that it would be upsetting.

Detachment does not have to mean not caring.  It can mean instead an awareness that just because something is not the way we would very much want it to be, does not have to create a causal link, (imagine an iron chain of links, from the external event to our internal emotions).  We can choose to unlink the chain.  We can detach strong feelings from it.

The image of the teflon frying pan has been used by one teacher of mindfulness.  Someone can throw something at us, or life can throw something at us, and we can imagine holding up the teflon frying pan, almost like a suit of armor.  The messy substance being thrown hits the pan but does not stick to it.  It slides off.  In the same way, we can detach from unpleasant circumstances to a degree.  We can imagine holding up the frying pan and letting the "yuck" slide off onto the ground, leaving us unharmed.  It doesn't stick to us.  We are thus detached in a way, just like the teflon stays detached from the grime.  We can go on with the rest of the day with the same new feeling that hopefully we woke up with.  The ability to detach can give us some peace.


The opposite is to imagine an old worn out frying pan.  Everything sticks to it.  Perhaps overnight it was in the dishwasher, and it is clean.  But then each hour, or maybe even every minute, something gets thrown at us, and part of those situations stick to the frying pan, so that we quickly are carrying quite a bit of messy feelings with us throughout the day.