How to release emotional attachments forever

by Martijn
How to release emotional attachments forever

What you will find in this article

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This morning I woke up and I started thinking about my progress in the last few months and how I have been able to release a lot of emotional attachments and find inner peace in most circumstances of my life. Here’s how I did it.

Releasing attachment is not the elimination of desire. It’s the practice of non-judgmental observation, allowance, and acceptance. All attachments are emotional. So it is only logical that releasing attachments is done by gaining control over your emotions and understanding where they come from.

Letting go of emotional attachments through true love

One of the deepest needs and desires of any human being is to be and feel loved. What many people do, and I have done that a lot in the past as well, is to cling to this need and desire to be loved. It’s pretty simple, you attach to that what you believe you do not deserve. Let that sink in for a moment and realize that this is true.

If you believed you were worthy of being loved and feeling loved you would not be afraid to lose it. Because you know you are loved and that you can obtain love simply by being who you are. But because you do not believe you deserve to be loved, and deep down within you don’t have faith in who you are, you have converted this deep human desire of love into an unhealthy need for love. You have converted something natural in every human being into something that you believe depends on you and you need to work for to accomplish your desire.

This makes you incompatible with unconditionally loving someone else. Because your love is now based on your personal needs and insecurities. If you truly love someone or something you don’t need it. If you need it, it’s not love.

I always use the example of water. When you try to hold water in your hands, the best thing you can do is to have both hands wide open and simply sustain the water. The more you tighten your grip and try to hold on to the water it will escape. The same thing happens with love, it goes where there are no boundaries, it goes where it is allowed to flow. So your job is not to keep the love, it is to allow the love to be wherever it can reach.

Sometimes it feels so contradictory, right? To have what you want, you need to let it go and simply allow it to be together with you but not for you. Your power is in non-attachment to all things you love. And understanding that non-attachment is not the elimination of desire. It’s more understanding that your well-being does not depend on fulfilling that desire. And that you are worthy, regardless of the fulfillment of your needs and desires.

Your power comes with non-attachment. Attach to anything and you will lose your power because you have given it away to that thing or that someone you attached your happiness to.

Releasing attachment from the fear of death

Another thing that all human beings desire besides love is to live and to do it as long and as healthy as we can. Very often this causes situations in which we attach too much to our health or even our survival. This causes stress and many different types of mental health issues. In life nothing is certain. But one thing is, we will all die. Yet, what we try to do is to survive. But most of us live purely to stay alive. But that’s not living.

We’re preoccupied with thinking about the future, our health, and worry about dying. We don’t do this consciously most days, but it is something that we carry within. Most of us truly have an unconscious fear of death and for many, it’s even conscious. I suffered two long years from anxiety myself and in those two years, there was not one day that I was not worried about dying. And funny enough those worries took my life away.

What helped me to overcome the fear of death almost entirely is the practice of nondualism. Combined with the belief that death is not the end, that our body is just a vessel of who we really are. And that who we really are lives on even after a body dies.

Letting go of your investment in your identity

In short, nondualism says that the only thing that is real is God and that everything else is an illusion. And that we are all united as one in Spirit, which in this case equals God and love. In future videos, I will speak more in-depth about how to practice nondualism but by practicing nondualism you learn over time to identify less with the body and at some point even to identify less with the soul and more and more with the Spirit that we can find in everyone.

This does two things to you. On the one hand, it helps you to automatically become more empathic with other human beings because you recognize that the same Spirit resides in everyone. And you start to recognize yourself in the people around you, not as who you believed to be as an individual identity but more so as Spirit. And on the other hand, you identify less and less with yourself as a human being, your personality, and your character.

This is extremely beneficial for your inner peace and to help you to release the emotional attachment to the life you believe you have in your body. This has another very cool side effect and it will cause you to feel that you never really have to defend yourself anymore. You don’t have to defend yourself nor have to prove yourself, because you know who you are and you do not need any validation from your external world.

Imagine what this could do to you in the world we live in today. Where external validation has become the norm to define who you are. Through social media and other ways that today’s society almost obliges you to identify as a member of a certain group, race, or sexuality or any other classification that puts you in a box, together with people of the same color, sexual orientation, or simply by being classified as a man or a woman.

In today’s world that has gone completely mad and where extreme feminism and the fight for the liberation of races and people with different sexual orientation has now become a means to separate, instead of to unite this is the way to have inner peace, respect all people, and all living beings including the planet itself. Without being dragged into the madness of this world where identity has taken such an important place in society.

Letting go and releasing attachments by understanding the value

So now you know who you are and you know you are always loved and worthy of love, you have lost the fear of death and shook off your attachment to your human identity, personality, and character there are just a few more things that you can do that will help you to release and let go of emotional attachments forever.

When you’ve come this far and you still catch yourself attaching emotionally to someone or something you can stop yourself for a moment and ask yourself what will it bring you, what value does that what you are attaching to have for you in comparison to your inner peace and your total freedom in your mind. By asking yourself this question you allow yourself to choose. You can choose between freedom or imprisonment in your mind. You can choose between power and powerlessness. The choice is yours, you can decide either way. But the more you practice, the more experience you gain. And you will come to see that there is only actually one choice that will fulfill you.

As I said before releasing emotional attachment and letting go is not letting go of your desires. It is simply choosing what is more valuable to you and letting life happen so you are open to receive everything that comes to you. Not only that what you desire actively in your mind. And that is true freedom. It allows you to receive the most unexpected and beautiful gifts that life can give you and you did not even think of.

Releasing emotional attachments and letting go by setting priorities

This then leads you to set clear priorities for yourself and to understand what is more valuable to you. You now have your body in the dualistic world, in the material world, you have your character and your identity. But you know who you are inside. Your focus is inward and never outward. It’s never in the external world. Your happiness, peace, and satisfaction come from within and you lose the need for anything external to satisfy you and your needs.

And this opens up an entirely new space for you to enjoy to the fullest everything you like in the material world. When a desire you have is fulfilled you now have the freedom to enjoy it without any second thoughts, without fear of losing what you are now enjoying. Exactly because you don’t need it to continue to feel happy, satisfied, and at peace.

Many people fear that non-attachment takes away pleasure, takes away passion, and takes away all of those things that we consider to be good in life. Not realizing that non-attachment does not take away anything. It only opens up more possibilities to have more pleasure, to enjoy life even more without boundaries and restrictions that you have set for yourself in your mind by continuing to be attached to a certain outcome, a certain thing, or person.

It might not be a quick and easy path but non-attachment is beautiful once you realize what it does for you. It does not take anything away from what makes you happy. So, I encourage you to try it out for yourself. Practice these things, learn about nondualism, let go of the need for love, so you can truly love. Release the fear of death and don’t attach to who you believed to be in this world and identify much more with who we are together as Spirit. If you do this well, I can guarantee that inner peace is just around the corner for you.

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Find more articles about mental health here and personal development here.

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