Understanding Detachment

To want or not to want, that is the question.

Earlier this morning, as usual, I went for an ocean swim followed by a cold shower and the blissful sensation of getting warm in the sun afterwards, wrapped up in my warm clothes.

This is one of the things in life that I most enjoy, and I cheerfully admit that I have developed an attachment to it. This experience sits alongside many other things I like and others I don’t like. Generally speaking, of course, I pursue the former and try to avoid the latter, and that makes me the same as just about everyone else.

In yoga, we begin with practice, and we tend to develop a kind of attachment to it, even though in practice – as in life – there may be things we like as well as things we don’t like. The importance of starting with practice was pointed out by Patañjali in the first chapter of the Yogasūtra, and it certainly is as relevant today as it was around 300 or 200 BCE. But, while Patañjali clearly made practice stand out, he said in the same breath that detachment is equally important.

So if practice is “doing”, are we to understand that detachment is the equivalent of “not doing”? How should we understand this?

And if we look at this in relation to everyday life, what does it mean? How far is it realistic to take detachment? Is detachment the same as renunciation? To put it more practically:

Do I have to give up my morning swims to become an “accomplished” yogin?

I do not pretend to answer these questions here now, or at any other time, as it would probably require reflecting on nearly two millennia of meditation and speculation by a number of wise men (and a few women).

The notion of detachment is perhaps epitomized in the coined expressions “let go” or “surrender” which are often used in yoga classes these days. I would argue that they are, after all, injunctions (“do this”), because we are never really told how to detach, we are simply encouraged to detach.

There is no doubt that such a subtle notion is hard to grasp. It is therefore wise to turn to the classic yoga tradition and to those who tried to point out the shades of this concept. To elucidate detachment, vairāgya – literally “that which relates to separation from wanting” – we will turn to Patañjali, the great exponent of  Yoga as a Vedic darśana (point of view), as well as the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Song of the Lord, the famous beautiful poem extracted from the Mahābhārata, which is in so many ways also a text of Yoga.

For now, I will continue to enjoy my cold swims in the Indian ocean.

Perth, May 2024.