Love, commitment, and non-attachment can seem almost contradictory.
Love asks us to care deeply. Commitment asks us to invest, remain present and invested. Non-attachment, meanwhile, is often misunderstood as distance, detachment, or keeping one foot out the door.
This talk explores how these three, when properly understood, can actually strengthen one another.
Let’s look at the difference between commitment and codependency, between staying and truly showing up, and between loving someone and needing to possess or control them.
At its healthiest, non-attachment does not mean caring less; it means releasing the demand that love conform to our expectations. The result is a different vision of commitment: not clinging, obligation, or passive longevity, but sustained participation in something we have chosen to energize.
This little gift is my last of 2020 and all about friendship - what really matters.
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Friendship is not just a relationship that we have with another person, but a way of life.
It is one of four qualities of true love found in the Yoga Sutras and other texts of Eastern philosophy. Wisdom traditions often proclaim
friendship to be the highest form of love because there is more care and less expectation.
There is some intersection with the birth of the self-help literary movement in the West, which is often attributed to writer and lecturer Dale Carnegie, whose wildly popular book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was published in 1936 and remains one of the bestselling books of all time.
Within, he advises to become genuinely interested in others and states, "you can make more friends in 2 months by being interested in them, than in 2 years by trying to make them interested in you."
In this time of unprecedented upheaval, political discord, class tension and economic disparity - an already dangerously lonely society finds itself facing even more psychological and physical distance.
The wise, in many times and places, have encouraged seekers not to ask, "who is a real friend?" but rather, "am I a real friend?"
Music “Divine Influence” by Bing Satellites and episode artwork on website by Emily Dawn.
This episode explores the basic brain science behind attraction, new research into the functions of hormones, and some meditative insight that will hopefully shed a little light on the great mystery of love.
(Music and editing by E. Fink, courtesy of Crooked Creek Records with episode artwork by Dove Dahlia)
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