Musings: The Dance Between Desire and Detachment

One of the chapters in my book The Secret of the Bulletproof Spirit is titled “The Dance Between Desire and Detachment.” This chapter was inspired by my meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 2004.

If you want to begin this spring really acting from the wisdom of your bulletproof spirit, you must learn to embrace one of life’s most profound paradoxes. You must figure out how to combine passionate desire with dispassionate detachment. The dance of desire and detachment requires grace and practice, but will reward you with a tremendous boost to turbocharge your spiritual journey and resiliency.

So how do you reconcile desire with detachment? Several years before I met his HH – I was always working hard to learn how to be present. I read on this subject voraciously, including Eckhart Tolle’s masterpiece The Power of Now. Being present is an extremely difficult task for most of us except for the likes of HH. In one of my meditations long before I met HH, I got the download: “don’t try to work on being present work instead on not being in your past or in your future.”

I was so excited to get this wisdom because I saw that if I am in the past, I am stewing over something that is unresolved or if I am in the future, I am in anxiety of some outcome. I journal regularly but once I got this download – I was religious in journaling every day when I found myself not being present. A month later, I visited my journal and I was pleasantly surprised that I was never in the past – my challenge was I was always in the future.

I explained to his HH, that I have no ax to grind with any of my past – I get along with my family, friends, exes (OK, well except for one – haha) and even Tony who took Tariq’s life and his family. I had essentially resolved my past through forgiveness. So I asked, “How do I not be in the future?”

His response was, “Mr. Khamisa, you are very fortunate because most people come to me heavily burdened by their past and yes, forgiveness is the best way to resolve your past. There is a lot of wisdom in the Buddhist teachings about detachment. While it is important to have a passionate desire to create a worthy goal or outcome, it is important to be detached from the outcome. The lessons of the spiritual path are in the journey, not its destination. Some journey’s do NOT have a destination and life is one of them. The meaning of life will always be a mystery – but that is a good thing – because without that truth there would be no growth.”

So his sage advice was basically that if you do get a different outcome than the one you passionately desired – you have to build an unwavering faith that the outcome you received was BETTER than the one you desired because the Universe does not make mistakes and always creates outcomes that are in the highest good for you, the other person(s) and the Universe. Absolutely Brilliant! I found that to be so freeing and hopefully you will too.

As you prepare for the newness of spring and are inspired by the resurrection of Easter, be passionate about your worthy goals to turbocharge your spiritual journey. Commit to creating a more inclusive, compassionate, forgiving and peaceful world. Leave the outcomes to the Higher Power.

In Mother Teresa’s Words: “Help as many as you can, and start with the closest one to you.”

Peace and many blessings! Wishing all a blossoming spring externally and internally and a very happy Easter.