Excerpt from the eBook

This is perhaps the place where most of us will get stumped. We are being asked to discern our dharma, to declare our future, then to commit to it day in and day out no matter how challenging life gets, and to do this over and over again during the course of our lifetime without holding on to results. Say what? What kind of mumbo jumbo is this ancient wisdom trying to teach us?

From our very young age we are taught that results matter. We are measured by our grades in school; strive to convert leads into sales; focus on the number we want our weight to be on the scale; aim to be married, make senior partner, or C-Suite by a certain age; assess athletes’ worth by their statistics; take those 10 000 daily steps; apply to become a top 40 under 40; collect shiny objects to display on a shelf; attribute so much value in being number 1, in winning, in being the best. Always chasing that proverbial carrot dangling on a stick in front of our nose. Heck, we even put ‘results-driven individual’ in job descriptions and in our résumés. Quite frankly, our culture is obsessed with results.

It is particularly this obsession with wanting visible (and sometimes quick) results that is at the root of our suffering. There is nothing wrong with results or setting results. Where things go awry are when our happiness is tied to outcomes that don’t go as planned and we get disempowered by them as a result. Our attachment to results keeps us from fully experiencing the learning and the process and leads us down a path of entitlement and deception that is anything but smooth. Let’s unpack this.

WHAT IS ATTACHMENT?

Attachment, in the way the Bhagavad Gita teaches, is our obsessive attempts to control our experience, to focus on worldly desires, sense objects and pleasures and to fixate on achieving a certain outcome, usually through clinging to what we like and feel entitled to (anything we assess as success) and pushing away what we don’t like and don’t want to be associated with (anything we assess as failure). Can you recall a time when you experienced disappointment? My guess is that there was probably some kind of attachment. An attachment to something you didn’t get or didn’t want. Much in the same way, can you recall a time when you experienced anger, envy, greed? There too, an attachment to how things should have been or happened might be at the root.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna is explicit on this point as he tells Arjuna that acting with detachment means doing the right thing for its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about success or failure. Doing the work for the sake of the work. For the sake of the process. For the sake of our dharma.

Easier said than done, yet there is so much wisdom in this. Are we even aware of our attachments? Our attachments can be external to us such as our relationships, our work, our title, our goals, our appearance, our image, our belongings, others’ opinions of us; and internal like our thoughts, beliefs, desires, feelings, moods, habits, opinions, race, gender, language, history, fears, ego, etc.

We tend to attach to things that represent us, that make up our identity – holding on these as if our very happiness and existence depended upon them. The mere word ‘attachment’ evokes images of invisible strings tied from us to something else. These strings are in fact mental bonds tied to what we believe is important for us and our happiness.

Unless we make the invisible strings visible, they bind us to the sensory world and limit our freedom and awareness. They impact our actions, reactions and inactions, our moods and our successes and failures. As soon as we attach to things, they take control of our mind, body and senses and shape our future. They also steal from our present. Ask the golfer who, instead of focusing on the process of his swing in the moment, was concentrated on his score and sinking the ball to win the grand prize. He missed. Ask the stage actress who, instead of focusing on the line she had to deliver in that moment, was more concerned with her performance and what the critics would write about her in the next day’s paper. She forgot her line. Ask the super ambitious salesperson, who is just focused on meeting sales targets and not on paying attention to what the customer really needs. The client went elsewhere.

Our attachments prevent us from fully being ourselves and experiencing reality as it is. They color our experiences, our perceptions and understanding. They may cause us to be self-centered and may bring to surface some of our worst sides where we lie, manipulate, judge, pretend to be who we are not, wear masks, dabble in unethical behaviors, and seek relationships that will only advance our interests. Our attachments are responsible for our desires and the compulsive need to acquire and accumulate in order to feel worthy, fulfilled, secure. They have us live in the hope of gains and excitements and the fear of loss and anxieties. They fill our minds with doubts and conflicting emotions. They lead us.