Self-protective clinging

Shedding Self-Protective Clinging

Too often Buddhist 'nonattachment' is misconstrued as 'non-loving.' The purpose of Buddhist practice is not to 'renounce' our families or community, but to shed habits of self-protective clinging that prevent us from loving them more unconditionally, powerfully, enjoyably.

- Lama John Makransky, "Family Practice"

In my own life I can certainly attest to the very negative effects of clinging to certain ideas thus inevitably inviting  considerable suffering. Letting go of these ideas, though they have a negative overall influence in one's life, can feel a bit like jumping out of the ship into the unknown depths. Such abandoning of familiar surroundings can seem quite counter intuitive almost like committing a kind of personal suicide. The truth is, it is a kind of personal suicide; a suicide of ego. The ego has a certain set of expectations concerning reality and how one fits into that reality. In fact though, the reality we cling to sometimes so desperately is only a construct of our minds seeking to make sense of such an impermanent situation. The ego is doomed to utterly disappear and this creates clinging, though of course we know the clinging is pointless in the end. There is no way to claw ourselves back on to solid ground. 

I have recently had to jump ship in certain areas of my life because the ideas I had were causing me to suffer terribly. It became obvious that holding on to these ideas was going to bring about even more suffering and I felt that I needed to act in a way that might reverse that direction. It feels at times that I went about it in a very unskillful way. It feels at times that I made this decision to "jump ship" out of fear rather than courage. Certainly such actions do not bring about an immediate resolution to the emotional turmoil, but my hope is that new possibilities will manifest themselves where space has been created.