Sublime

Attachment—how is an attachment formed? First comes the contact with something that gives you pleasure: a car, an attractively advertised modern appliance, a word of praise, a person’s company. Then comes the desire to hold on to it, to repeat the gratifying sensation that this thing or person caused you. Finally comes the conviction that you will

Once we understand that love is our true identity, we realize that the skill of learning to love is mostly an undoing of the ego obstructions that have gradually overlaid our natural tendency toward loving. This means letting go of our ego entitlements and inflations. We then look for all the practices that can help that happen, especially those th

form. As Zen master Dogen says, “Flowers fall with our attachment, and weeds spring up with our aversion.”

Attachment and dependence occur because we feel incomplete within ourselves; therefore, we seek objects, people, relationships, places, and concepts to fulfill inner needs.

When your partner can sense that you have both felt and navigated the time and space of your relating, and she can feel the width and depth of your being, she can fully let go of any need to hold the structure. She can simply be the flow of energy and love that the structure you have created calls for.

The beautiful thing is, there is so much more depth that can occur when we learn how to be in relationship as a spiritual practice—and over time, the gifts we receive are well beyond the chemical cocktail of pleasure and excitement we feel in the beginning. Part of aligning yourself for the type of relationship you desire is having a clear and dire

The piles result in five different aspects of life that we tend to cling to as our fixed identity or misidentity: the body itself, the sense impression or feeling tones of the body, the mind or objects of the thinking mind (which include thoughts and the roots of emotions),