The Yoga of Loving

I

N ENGLISH THE WORD

DETACHMENT

SOUNDS

PASSIVE

,

callous, unfeeling.

Yet it is just the opposite, and

the best way to see this is

to look at its application

in personal relationships. In

Sanskrit, we have two words that are often translated as

“love” – two words with a world of difference between

them, and the difference is detachment.

Prema

is pure

love, in which I want nothing but your happiness. Your

joy is my joy.

Kama

, on the other hand, is self-centered

personal attachment, generally with romantic overtones.

In the language of kama, “I love you” means “you please

me.” Most of us need no formal introduction to kama.

Selfish attachment is what holds most novels together,

what most popular songs are based on, what most films

depict in graphic detail.

It is discouragingly easy to mistake selfish attachment for

love if we do not really know what love is. If you want to

see some of the greatest lovers of all time, don’t look to

Romeo or Juliet; look at Saint Francis of Assisi, or lovely

Saint Teresa of Avila. All you need do is read Teresa’s

autobiographical accounts to know that she lived in the

empyrean of love. What a wonderful paradox: to know

what love means, we have to turn to men and women

who we say have “renounced the world”!

Listen to Jacob Boehme, the “cosmic cobbler” of medieval

Germany, as he tells us how he knew when he was in

love – eternal love:

“No life can express, nor tongue so much as name, what

this enflaming, all-consuming love of God is. It is brighter

than the sun, it is sweeter than anything called sweet; it is

stronger than all strength; it is more nutrimental than

food, more cheering to the heart than wine, and more pleasant

than all the joy and pleasantness of the world. Whoever

obtaineth it is richer than any monarch on earth; and he

who getteth it is nobler than any emperor can be, and more

potent and absolute than all power and authority.”

Boehme is talking about love in the truest sense. The

mark of true love is as simple as it is rare: it is detachment

from the tangle of personal motives that makes us seek

happiness in making others conform to our desires.

Detachment and love go hand in hand. When all selfish

attachments are gone, what is left is pure love. The other

person is so dear to you that you never have to ask yourself

the question, “What is she going to give me?” – in the

way of respect, of affection, of loyalty. Once you efface

that question from your vocabulary completely, you and

that person are no longer separate; both of you are one.

That is what love means.

The Secret to Transforming Relationships

All of us begin the quest for love with a great deal of

selfish attachment. That is human nature. But with the

help of meditation and the allied disciplines we can

diminish this selfish element day by day, by putting the

welfare of those around us first and our own personal

predilections last.

But practicing detachment in personal relationships does

not come easily. No other arena of life is more challenging.

Disrupted relationships are endemic today, and not

because people are immoral or because they don’t care

about one another; they just don’t know how to develop

detachment. If you cannot stand back from your own

pleasure and profit, you cannot help manipulating other

people. Naturally, this kind of manipulation corrodes loyal

relationships of any kind. It leads to their speedy end, as

we can see in the lives of millions of lonely people today.

When you practice detachment continuously – at home,

at work, among friends, and especially with difficult

people – you will find how much security it brings you in

your relationships. A spiritually detached person, which

to me means a very loving person, will never allow

relationships to degenerate to stimulus and response. The

test is simple: Even if you are angry with me, can I stay

calm and loving with you and help you overcome your

anger? If you persist in disliking me, can I continue to

like you? For it is when you dislike me that I have all the

more reason to be loyal to you, to show you what loyalty

really means.

This problem of disliking people, which is a very common

one today, is essentially a problem of disliking the images

we have formed of them. It is a reflection on us rather

than on those we do not like. For in almost all human

relationships, we see others not as they really are but as

we are. To a suspicious person, everybody seems suspect;

to a resentful person, every action is worthy of resentment.

Similarly, to a loving person, everybody is worthy of love;

every occasion is an opportunity to practice love. It is not

that situations never get difficult when you are detached,

or that people are never unpleasant. But the choice of

response is in your hands. All of us can develop the

detachment not to react to the way we are treated. This

is the easiest, most effective way to solve problems in

human relationships.

I once read a good aphorism from Buckminster Fuller.

“We are not nouns,” he says pointedly; “we are verbs.”

People who are content with rigid images of others are

thinking of themselves and others as nouns, as things.

Those who keep trying to get closer to others, to

understand and appreciate them more all the time, are

verbs: active, creative, dynamic, able to change themselves

and to make changes in the world they live in.

Here is the practical difference. When we don’t like

somebody, we say, “He upsets me. I’m not going to go

near him.” That relationship is static; it has no chance of

improving. On the other hand, when we can go against

our dislikes, we can actually enjoy the opportunity such

a person presents us. Just imagine the freedom! We enjoy

being with people who like us, of course, but we can also

enjoy being with people who don’t like us. Sometimes I

think Gandhiji used to look forward to this kind of

opportunity, because he knew it would draw up from

within him the deeper creative resources he needed for

his work.

Without this kind of freedom, “love” is more an

inclination that comes and goes like the wind. When

your girlfriend is catering to you, doing all the things you

like, you say you love her. But when she turns around

and does something that irritates you, you blurt out,

“Get lost!” Doesn’t this happen all too often?

To love truly, you must be able to love when things are

going your way and equally well when things are not

going your way. This is the test of detachment. After all,

when your partner is being especially nice to you, it’s easy

to be pleasant in return. It is when she goes out of her

way to offend you that you should not walk out. That is

just the time to sit by her side and for every unkind word

she utters, as Jesus says, give her seven words that are kind.

For every shove she gives you, try to move that much closer.

To do this at home in the morning, at work throughout

the day, and then in the evening among family and

friends, you have to have a good measure of detachment

from yourself. These are challenges that can appeal to us

deeply: the “acts of will” that Saint Teresa of Avila says

the Lord wants of us. They are difficult, but they can be

practiced, and to great effect. To grow to our full potential

in love, we need to try every day to develop a little

more detachment from ourselves. Those who get angry

and walk out, who get resentful and won’t sit at the same

table with others, are refusing to try to grow. Their

problem can be solved very simply, to the benefit of

everyone around them: they need to practice detachment

every day in every situation, in every relationship.

This reminds me of a beautiful incident from the life of

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a young woman of our own century

of whom I am very fond. In her convent was a certain

nun who had a knack for alienating others. She seemed

always to be waiting for someone to upset. Naturally her

sisters tended to avoid her – even Thérèse, the Little Flower,

as she is sweetly called. No one meant to be unkind; it

was just that avoiding the unpleasant is so natural.

Then, with a shock, Thérèse realized what she had been

doing. With her, as with Saint Francis – here is the mark

of a saint! – to understand was to act. Immediately she

began to make a point of giving her irritating sister a

smile, answering her with kind words, doing little things

to help her: although inside, she confesses, she used to

wince with the effort.

One day, in a moment of marvelous simplicity, that nun

stopped Thérèse and surprised her with a question.

“Sister, whenever we meet, you always give me such a

sweet smile. Will you please tell me what attracts you so

much to me?”

“Ah!” Thérèse confides to us. “How could I tell her that

what attracts me is Jesus, hidden in the depths of her

soul – Jesus who makes sweet that which is most bitter!”

Jesus had taught her, “Bless them that curse you. Do good

to them that hate you.” That is love at its greatest. In

order to love like this, we cannot be attached to ourselves.

It is because we think so much about ourselves that we

strike back, show resentment, speak harshly, move away.

Jesus’ words do not mean agreeing with everything

people say or supporting whatever they do. In my role as

a spiritual teacher, I sometimes have to oppose people I

love. Yet I do it tenderly, and I haven’t lost a single friend.

On the contrary, my friends say, “Here is somebody who

will stand by me through thick and thin. If I make a

mistake, he’ll support me, but he’ll do his best not to let

me make that mistake again. If I’m going astray, he’ll bar

my way with loving arms.”

As Shakespeare says, “Love bears it out even to the edge

of doom.” This is the secret of loving. Let me repeat, for

a long, long time everybody finds it difficult. Everybody

finds it distressing. But when you go to bed after a day of

practicing this kind of love, you know that you have

grown. You can stand against the wall and see that you

have grown a full inch in spiritual stature. Inch by inch,

day by day, you can grow until your head is crowned with

the stars. That is our human destiny – the destiny for

which all of us have been born.