Attachment: Staying open to the present
We now arrive at the third of the five Kleshas: Raga, translated as attachment.
Throughout your life, you’ll have picked up attachments to emotional & mental states, ideas, to outcomes & objects. These attachments create desires & expectations, with these desires & expectations held you begin to search. You search for the object of your attachment in the hope (& with expectation) it will bring happiness.
Yet more often than not, the happiness you find is fleeting. It passes as quickly as it comes & we find ourselves once again searching for the object of our attachment.
How many times have you longed for a particular achievement, only to then immediately start longing for something else once you’d achieved it, rather than taking some time to sit with the present experience of arriving where you are?
This cycle of attachment, desire & expectation keeps you out of the present moment & placing your happiness externally.
It keeps you from cultivating an internal sense of stability that is able to find contentment within whatever arises.
This process leaves us with the idea of constantly needing to “get somewhere”. This mindset subtly degrades the present moment by enforcing the idea that where we are - here and now - is not good enough.
Our expectation of happiness later, blocks happiness now.
But if we can't cultivate a sense of happiness & freedom right now, in this present moment, how can we expect our mind to be in such a different state later?
Even if it were, we'd be basing our sense of happiness & freedom on external factors, rather than cultivating true inner happiness & freedom within each moment.
Lasting happiness is cultivated internally.
Similarly, our expectations block us from being completely present. Rather than being open to what arises in the present moment, we search for our expectation & block off everything else. Our minds project into the future, rather than staying grounded & open in the present.
So how do we break free of this pattern?
A yoga practice is a microcosm, through maintaining mindful awareness of the minds wanderings & emotions that arise, we can start to see where we're attaching.
We might notice our own attachment to achieving postures, to feeling a certain way rather than another.
Through practising yoga, we place ourselves into a unique position to start to shift this pattern, at first we simply gain insight into it, into the constant trail of desires & how the mind attaches to them. Then we can slowly start to release it's hold over us on the mat. You stop placing parts of your value on the achievement of poses and release your attachment to them, instead you begin to move from a deep stillness within, here is where you become open to whatever may arise & find contentment within that.
