Detachment Is Not "Not Feeling"

Feeling deeply, finding your balance, and letting go of the demand that life go your way

By Dr. Marie Feuer · Life Path Healings

Part One: You cannot skip the honesty

Detachment is a subject I am endlessly fascinated with and also reluctant to talk about. The reluctance comes from watching what people do with spiritual ideas. They hear about forgiveness, serenity, letting go, or detachment, and they begin mocking up the behavior. “I forgave my father.” “I'm not emotionally attached.” They know what a spiritually advanced person is supposed to look like, and they try to look like that. Meanwhile, what is actually going on inside them may be something else entirely.

I consider spiritual work a lifestyle. You don't eat well for a week, declare yourself finished, and never think about food again. This is ongoing work, and what people consider a long time can still be the beginning. You can spend years learning how to recognize what you are doing and tell yourself the truth about it. That isn't a failure. What concerns me is when we learn the vocabulary and assume we have had the experience.

My experience of detachment is that I do the footwork, and something shifts. I notice that I am no longer holding a grudge. I notice that something that used to run my life no longer has the same hold on me. I might describe that as something granted by spirit or my higher self. If that language doesn't work for you, you can recognize it as an emotional shift. Either way, I didn't get there by announcing that I had let go. I did my work, and eventually I noticed that I had.

One of the great confusions is the idea that if we are detached, things will go well. And what do we mean by “well”? We will get what we want, how we want it, when we want it. A situation becomes difficult and immediately we think, “I must not have been detached. I must not have been connected. Otherwise this wouldn't have happened.” We have turned spirituality into another way to try to control the outcome, and then another reason to beat ourselves up when we can't.

I was raised an atheist, and I am still a skeptic. I ask questions, including uncomfortable questions about what a spiritual connection actually offers when people are suffering. An answer that has stayed with me is that a connection does not necessarily allow us to bypass an experience. It may change how we go through it. In my own life, I have sometimes found a much shorter period of self-criticism and suffering, alongside a much deeper interest in what I was learning. That interest came naturally. I wasn't standing over myself insisting that I turn something painful into a spiritual lesson.

So what do I mean by detachment? First of all, the ability to feel deeply. Not “not feeling.”  Feeling deeply, while remaining connected to yourself and, in my experience, to something beyond yourself. That makes detachment a more advanced capacity than people sometimes realize, because many of us are still learning how to acknowledge our feelings at all. If you cannot admit that you are angry, frightened, jealous, or trying to get someone to like you, where exactly are you going to begin?

I begin with behavior because it gives us something concrete to look at. What am I doing? Am I lying? Hiding? Becoming whoever somebody wants me to be? Am I saying yes when I mean no? Am I trying to seduce someone into giving me what I want, whether that is affection, approval, or agreement? You can observe these things. You don't have to understand your entire childhood before noticing that you just agreed to something you don't want to do.

Then you begin acknowledging what you feel, including the feelings that go against your upbringing or your spiritual programming. You may be furious. You may be selfish in a particular situation. You may want something you think you shouldn't want. If your idea of being a good person requires you to deny all of that, you have a problem. You are trying to do inner work with information you won't allow yourself to have. Admitting a feeling does not mean you have to act on it. It means you can finally work with what is actually there.

This comes up frequently with people who describe themselves as empaths. “I feel everybody's feelings. I can't be around my family. I come home exhausted.” I don't mean to make fun of that. It is a horrible way to live. But I don't consider being overwhelmed the endpoint of developing sensitivity. What I look for is the capacity to feel what is happening around you while holding onto your own center. You are more like a buoy in the ocean. There is a lot going on, but you are not drowning, and you haven't lost access to your own needs and desires.

In a difficult situation, that steadiness may be very subtle. You might still feel scared, upset, angry, or unsure. You may not feel anything you would call spiritual. You are certainly not required to be floaty. Yet some part of you notices that you are anchored. A lot is moving around you and inside you, and another part is curiously still. That is much closer to what I am describing than looking serene or having the right thing to say.

I also remain suspicious of certainty. When someone tells me, “I know I'm doing God's will,” I wonder whether they are still listening. I am more interested in whether, at this moment, I am paying attention and willing to learn than whether I can announce that I know the plan. Imagine walking a narrow mountain trail with a guide. There is a mountainside on one side and a drop on the other. Knowing that it is a narrow trail does not tell you where the next loose rock will be. You still watch your feet, listen, and notice what is happening. Once we think we know, we often stop looking. I prefer to say, this is what I have learned, or know…so far. That leaves the door open to more learning.

Part Two: Chop wood, carry water

Let's say you fall in love. You have a history of unhealthy relationships, and you want to do this differently. You also really want this one to work. How do you check your detachment without turning the whole thing into another exercise in self-doubt? You slow down and go back to the beginning. What am I doing? What am I feeling? What am I not doing? Not doing is also a choice, and it can tell you quite a bit.

You begin noticing the attachment itself. I want this person to pursue me. I want them to show affection in certain ways so I will feel better. I don't want to get hurt. I want to know where this is going, and I'd like to know by Thursday. These are the things going on in the background while we may be telling ourselves how open and available we are. Getting honest about them gives us somewhere to start.

You do not have to make all of this go away. Trying to force yourself to stop wanting what you want can become another way of brutalizing yourself. For the moment, lay it out like cooking ingredients: salt, cumin, turmeric, a little pepper, lemongrass. Here is what is in the meal I'm about to cook myself. Here is my fear, here is my fantasy, here is my timetable. You are looking at it, without immediately turning the observation into a demand that you fix yourself.

Then you may need to spend some time there. You might journal, pray, vent, or talk honestly with a friend, a group, a teacher, or a counselor. You may need self-care before you can make much sense of anything. In my own experience, eventually I can become rather bored with my agenda. Yes, there it is again: the entire story about what has to happen before I can be happy. It hasn't necessarily disappeared, but I am less interested in letting it run everything. Again, that shift is something I notice. I can't order it to happen.

Some of the wanting may remain as background noise. I don't take that as proof that the work has failed just as I don’t take certainty as proof that I have made the right decision. Intuition combined with logic is more subtle than that. It is not black and white. That background conversation may be exactly what I am about to learn something about. If I rush to declare that I have already understood, forgiven, released, and moved on, I may be shutting down the very process that could teach me something new. In my spiritual life, I am interested in what I don't yet understand. If I have already decided what the lesson is and how it should arrive, how much room have I left to listen?

When something is unfamiliar, I go slowly. If I were learning to ice skate, I would stay near the rail. If I were learning to ski, I would start on the bunny hill. This is common sense. Having an epiphany doesn't mean you immediately know how to live it. You still have to put it into practice, notice what happens, and make adjustments. There is no prize for pretending you are more comfortable or more experienced than you are.

Balance is the closest comparison I can give. Think about learning to ride a bicycle. You feel everything: the movement, the fear, the possibility of falling, whether somebody is watching, whether you look ridiculous. And in the middle of all of that, you are finding your balance. Eventually you don't have to think about every little adjustment. You still pay attention to the next curve, but balancing has become more familiar. With detachment, too, what initially feels overwhelming can gradually become an ordinary part of how you move through your life.

My attention begins to change. Instead of continually asking whether I am going to get what I want, I become interested in the next step. What happens when I make this phone call? What happens when I don't answer that one? What am I noticing as I drive to the job interview? I am paying attention to my behavior, my feelings, and my self-care. Somewhere in that is a thread going out to spirit: help me, stay with me. I don't necessarily need to feel a response. I am practicing being more interested in listening than in controlling where all of this goes.

Then the trail gets rocky. Here is where we often launch into the familiar speech: “I made the wrong decision. I shouldn't have come here. I'll never get this right.” But if you were actually on a mountain bike, you would need to work out how to ride this section of the trail. You might slow down, stop, or decide to turn around. You would respond to what was in front of you. Detachment doesn't remove the need for judgment or action. It helps you pay attention without making every difficulty into a verdict on your worth.

You may come out of an experience with some scrapes. You may be disappointed or hurt. There may also be room to say, “Well, I got through that, and I learned a lot.” Hear how different that is from “This happened because I'm a screw-up.” In my experience, much of the suffering that diminishes is the self-hatred, the obsessive attempt to control, and the endless evaluation of whether I am doing life correctly. Pain can still be there. So can the need to change something. But beating the crap out of myself doesn't have to remain the main event.

Progress is not no problems. You may have new problems. Perhaps you are no longer repeating the same destructive relationship, and now you are learning how to be closer to people who are actually available. That can be uncomfortable too. You may still have the old thought that everything is your fault, but another part of you can recognize, “I'm feeling that. It doesn't make it a fact.” You find your balance sooner. You spend less time trapped in the same argument with yourself.

So please don't aim for the end and mock up what you think it should look like. Start at the beginning. Chop wood, carry water. When a new challenge arrives and your detachment flies out the window, return to the ordinary questions: How am I behaving? What am I saying? What am I feeling? What does my self-care look like? How am I staying connected? That is the footwork. You don't have to pretend you have arrived in order to begin.

If you need a place where you can be honest about what is happening without being told you're negative or not spiritual enough, you might consider working with me. I don't fit people into one method. We work with you, your life, and what is actually coming up. A free 30-minute introductory session on Zoom is available at DrMarie.org.

For a simpler way to meet me and bring a question about your own life, there is also Ask Dr. Marie — Life Path Healings on Substack. Paid members can submit one question each month for my video Q&A. It is a way to get to know how I work through specific questions, beyond generic advice. You can find the Substack information at DrMarie.org.