Feelings

When thinking about non-attachment, it’s easy to think first about not being attached to something external, such as material possessions or the title that comes with a career. A more difficult type of non-attachment seems to me a non-attachment to feelings. Not in refusing to feel but in not dwelling on the feelings.

Regardless of whether my feelings are painful or pleasant or a mixed bag, they tumble around inside me and bruise and tear up the walls of my heart. But when I let them tumble around, they at some point calm down. Then they get fed somehow by my thoughts, doubts, expectations, excitement, or fear, and they start tumbling around again. Then they once again settle back down to the ground. 

Meanwhile I breathe every second of the day, my body moves, feels hungry, gets cold. The daily undergoing of my life asks for my attention. I keep on doing. Those days make up a life and that life is one of the millions of lives that keep on breathing and moving. The feelings move around but they are only inside me. They are too small to hold the largeness of everything else.