As I write this, my bags are packed for Varanasi, a city I have never seen but have somehow always known. For the next five days, I will be immersing myself in the oldest living city on earth, not as a tourist but as a student of something I have been circling for years: spiritual detachment. People assume detachment means you have stopped caring. In my experience, it means you have finally started caring about the right things, in the right measure, without the desperate grip. This article is my attempt to explain the stage of life I find myself in, and why a city built on impermanence feels like exactly the right classroom.
What Ignited This Journey
It was not one dramatic moment. It was an accumulation of quiet ones. A few weeks ago, I received news that would once have kept me awake for three nights, and I noticed, almost with curiosity, that I slept perfectly well. I felt the feeling, acknowledged it, and it passed through me like weather. That is when I knew something in me had shifted, and that the shift deserved attention rather than assumption.
Varanasi called for a simple reason. It is the one place on earth where impermanence is not a philosophy but a public fact. Life and death share the same riverbank. The ghats do not let you pretend that anything lasts. For a man in my stage of life, that is not morbid. That is medicine.
I have written before about what the river taught me during my Ganges practice in Rishikesh. Varanasi feels like the advanced course.
The Stage of Life I Am In
If I am honest, I am in the most detached phase of my life so far. Not detached from people, from work, or from purpose. Detached from outcomes, from applause, from the compulsive need for things to go a particular way.
In yogic philosophy, this is called vairagya, a Sanskrit term that is often translated as non-attachment but is better understood as freedom from craving. It does not ask you to feel less. It asks you to grip less. The Bhagavad Gita, a text I return to constantly, frames it through nishkama karma, action performed fully and sincerely, with the results surrendered. You do the work. You release the fruit.
Neuroscience quietly agrees. When we fuse our identity with outcomes, the brain treats every uncertainty as a threat, keeping cortisol, the primary stress hormone, in steady circulation. When we act with full engagement but loosened expectation, the nervous system settles. Detachment, it turns out, is not just spiritual hygiene. It is physiological intelligence.
I call this stage the unclenched life. The unclenched life is full participation with an open palm instead of a fist. You hold your work, your relationships, and your ambitions the way you would hold water: attentively, respectfully, and without squeezing.
What Detachment Actually Looks Like Day to Day
Grand definitions are easy. Ordinary evidence is harder. Here is what the unclenched life looks like in my actual days:
The unread message. When someone does not reply to me for days, I no longer construct stories about what it means. I notice the silence, and I let it be silence. Five years ago, my mind would have written a full courtroom drama.
The lost opportunity. A project I had prepared for carefully recently went to someone else. I felt the sting for perhaps an hour. Then I noticed my life was entirely intact. The opportunity was never mine; only the effort was.
Praise and criticism. When a keynote lands beautifully, I enjoy it that evening and release it by morning. When criticism arrives, I extract the useful 10% and let the remaining 90% float past. Both are visitors, not residents.
Possessions. I recently gave away things I once considered part of my identity. What surprised me was not the giving. It was how little I felt afterwards. The objects had already left me long before they left the house.
Being misunderstood. People occasionally describe me in ways that are simply wrong. The younger me corrected every misreading. The current me lets people hold their version. Their opinion of me is their inner work, not mine.
I explored the relational side of this in detachment dating, and in love is detachment, because nowhere is the fist more tempting than in love.
The Ego: The Great Clencher
Here is the uncomfortable truth I will carry to the ghats. Every act of gripping is the ego at work. The ego is not a villain; psychologically, it is simply the self-concept, the story the mind constructs about who we are, built to help us survive and belong. The trouble begins when we mistake the story for the storyteller.
The ego is what needs the message answered, the opportunity won, the criticism refuted, the possession kept, the misunderstanding corrected. It clenches because it believes its survival depends on outcomes. Detachment does not kill the ego. It gently demotes it, from managing director of your life to a useful junior employee.
The verse I chose for my first tattoo, from Adi Shankara’s Nirvana Shatakam, names this precisely: neither hatred nor attachment, neither greed nor pride. It is not a description of numbness. It is a description of freedom.
Sit with these for a moment, wherever you are reading this. What is the one outcome you are gripping so tightly that it has started gripping you back? Whose approval, if withdrawn tomorrow, would genuinely destabilise you? And what would you do differently this week if the result were already guaranteed to be taken from you?
Detachment is not the absence of love. It is the absence of the fist. You can hold everything you cherish with an open palm, and lose nothing except the fear of losing.
What I Hope Varanasi Does to Me
I am not going to Varanasi to find answers. I am going to sit beside a river that has watched ten thousand generations arrive, certain of their importance, and leave without their names. I want the city to do what no book can: make impermanence felt rather than understood.
Five days. No agenda beyond presence. First visits have a particular grace; the mind has no stored comparisons, so it must actually look. I intend to look.
If something in this article named a grip you have been holding, perhaps begin where I did: notice one clench a day, without judgement, and simply soften it. And if you would like to explore what the unclenched life might look like in your own leadership, relationships, or inner world, you are welcome to book a fifteen-minute consultation with me. One conversation, no pressure, open palm.
Leave a Reply