I find detachment to be a really interesting concept, specifically as a Libra. No, this isn’t going to be about astrology (not all of it, at least). But for right now, let me just help you understand it a little better.
There are twelve signs in the zodiac. Each is symbolized by a living creature or figure: a ram, a bull, the twins, a crab, a lion, a woman, a scorpion, a centaur, a goat, a water bearer, and two fish.
But there’s only one whose symbol is an inanimate object. Libra. The Scales.
Long before Libra, as well as the other signs, became simplified into the zodiac we recognize today, Libra and the scales were a symbol of balance, truth, and justice.
In ancient Babylon, the constellation was associated with the Scales, while ancient Egyptian beliefs used the weighing of the heart against a feather to symbolize truth and moral order. Even the Greeks and Romans personified justice in their own ways.
Today, we see this symbolism in courtrooms, legal emblems, and the very language we use when discussing justice: weighing evidence, considering both sides, and reaching a balanced judgment. The scales represent the ideal that decisions should be made through discernment rather than personal bias or unchecked emotion and attachment.
In Sanātana Dharm, there is an ancient concept known as ṛta (Rita, for an easier pronunciation), the cosmic order that sustains the universe, governing the rhythms of nature and the relationship between truth and existence.
The Rigveda, dating back to approximately 1500-1200 BCE, speaks of this order long before the classical zodiac took the form we recognize today. Its related philosophical counterpart, dharm, speaks to the principles that sustain order and guide right conduct.
Although neither concept is a direct description of Libra, both offer an interesting lens through which we can understand its symbolism. And to me, that is where the symbolism becomes particularly interesting.
Balance isn’t necessarily about making two opposing things equal, but about seeing each for what it truly weighs.
And perhaps this is why Libra is so interesting to me. As an air sign, Libra is associated with thought, perspective, and the ability to consider something beyond one’s immediate experience.
Perhaps detachment begins with that same principle. Not by denying what we feel, but by learning to see beyond it.
The scales don’t suggest that emotion doesn’t exist; they suggest that everything must be weighed before a judgment is made. There is a difference between feeling something and allowing that feeling to determine what is true.
In that sense, detachment isn’t necessarily about being emotionless. It’s about creating enough distance to see a situation for what it is, rather than only through the lens of how it makes us feel. And that distinction is where I want to begin.
I do want to start off by saying, this is such a profound topic that one blog post is simply not enough.
My girl reminded me of a situation that happened with a mutual friend of ours. The whole ordeal still stays in my memory quite vividly, but not as vividly as I thought it did.
So, let’s start from the beginning. A few of us went out to the city for brunch, and I remember that it was dark when we left. So, we genuinely did have a lot of fun.
But then something happened.
I found myself in a verbal altercation that I did not volunteer to be in. The friend in front of me was upset, and I had upset them. Why? Well, let’s just say there is a difference between loving someone and being possessive of them. And at the time, when we were friends, and for the sake of my own sanity, I am going to say that this person was very possessive.
If they didn’t get enough attention, it was a problem.
This altercation had nothing to do with me. I was not wrong. I did nothing wrong. I was having fun with friends, and I was having fun making friends.
And so, when I found myself being yelled at, with this person screaming at the top of their lungs in the MIDDLE of Manhattan on a Saturday night… I apparently detached.
And I did.
Because when my girl reminded me about it again, she told me how I had been backed into a corner.
I didn’t even remember that because I felt so out of body in that moment. I think the history of our ten-year friendship was something I was taking into consideration, along with the fact that this person was always angry when they were drunk and that I was not going to engage in that.
My girl asked me how I could be so calm in that moment, especially because she wasn’t. She went off on him for me. Her question has always been a simple one:
How do you detach from moments like this?
And I’ll tell you.
I’ll tell you what my thought process was like in that moment.
At first, I was in freeze mode. I have trauma associated with people yelling at me, so freezing is a natural reaction for me. I will instantly start shaking, and I can feel the adrenaline pumping through me, even if my mind is calm.
It’s just that sometimes, energy can FEEL so potent, and your mind can really be your greatest weapon and savior in allowing you to remain present and centered in your body and spirit.
After that, I honestly just looked at everyone around me who was walking by, and that was it. That’s what made me dissociate. I may have been looking at him, I may not have been. All I know is that my attention had shifted to the people looking at him and thinking:
Wow… this guy is crazy.
Honestly? Satisfying enough.
Because if there is one thing I learned from my mom when I was a kid, it was this: you don’t ever want to do anything that will point the finger back at you.
And that’s probably why I’ve learned never to stoop to anyone’s level. Nah, I’m good at my level. No matter how low I am, I am certainly never going to be THAT low.
I began to look at him just like everyone else did, too. And, to be honest, I was really fascinated by how someone could allow their character to show up like this.
I could never. I could never stand in front of someone, hover over them, and yell in their face. Especially as a man.
But he was that kind of person.
That’s really sad.
I thought about how sad it was that this was my best friend. We had known each other since we were kids. Of course, we all do stupid things when we’re drunk, and he had done plenty of them that I had been there for.
But I wasn’t sad about that. Because the person I considered my best friend was not there in that moment. My best friend would NOT yell at me like this. And so, when I did not see that person, I did not reciprocate by becoming that person in return.
I was sad because… it’s sad to see. Someone could be so out of control that they couldn’t help but show their ugliness to the world. Someone could be so possessive that they couldn’t stand to see you having fun with or around other people.
What does that say about the person who is reacting? What does that say about their life? Their habits? Their peace? Their values? How they handle their emotions and reactions?
None of that had anything to do with me. This way of reacting had nothing to do with me. This reaction may have been triggered by a situation involving me, but I am not the root of anyone’s reactions. I am not the root of anyone’s words. I am not responsible for the choices other people make in response to their feelings.
So, this is not my problem.
Yes, we did end up telling this person that if they ever did it again, it would be over and done with. They promised they wouldn’t.
Exactly sixteen months later, it happened again. And it was done.
Some people really think they sit at the top of some hierarchy when, in reality, their behavior puts them at the lowest level of emotional maturity in the room.
Hm, sad to witness.
Detachment is hard. Again, I don’t think I can fit it all into one blog.
Our whole lives as human beings revolve, in part, around understanding the balance of importance: the importance of having and the importance of being without. That balance can tip at any time. Any singular moment can have us stepping out of balance and into attachment.
But Sanātana Dharm taught me something incredible about detachment, and I always reference it back to the Bhagavad Gītā and the Kurukṣhetra War.
Now, this war wasn’t between two separate families.
It was a war within the same extended family…
On the battlefield, Arjuna is overwhelmed by grief at the thought of fighting people he loves. How could he fight against the very people he considers his brothers, uncles, elders, and gurus? How could he dare to raise his bow against the very people who had taught him, guided him, and helped shape the warrior he had become?
He wants to withdraw, unable to reconcile his emotions with the duty before him.
But Krishna doesn’t tell him to stop loving them. He doesn’t tell him that his grief is meaningless. Instead, He teaches Arjuna to look beyond his personal attachment and understand his responsibility.
Krishna explains that we have a right to perform our actions, but not to control their results. We must do what is right without becoming consumed by how things turn out.
That is detachment: not the absence of love, grief, or desire, but the ability to act with discernment even when those emotions are present.
What makes this example especially relevant is that Krishna doesn’t teach Arjuna to escape the situation or become indifferent to the people involved. He teaches him to change his relationship with his emotions and the outcome.
This is one of the first lessons I learned and one of the first I have always tried to master. Because, to me, someone who could master that could truly live a more peaceful life in a world full of chaos.
I learned this when I was just a little kid, actually. While Maharashtrians love Ganesh, additionally, my mom had a particular love for Krishna. She looked to Him as her best friend.
And she was also a Libra! So maybe I just had a really good understanding of detachment.
Think about a relationship you desperately want to work out. You love someone, you’ve invested your time and energy into them, and you’ve imagined a future together. But despite everything you give, you cannot control how they feel, what they choose, or whether they ultimately choose you.
Attachment convinces you that if you love harder, explain yourself better, or do enough to prove your worth, you can guarantee the outcome you want.
Detachment asks something different of you. It asks you to love without trying to control, to show up without abandoning yourself, and to accept that another person’s choices are not yours to make.
You can fight for a relationship without believing you can single-handedly save it. You can grieve its ending without deciding that the love you gave was wasted. And you can want something deeply while understanding that wanting it does not guarantee it belongs in your life.
You are responsible for your actions, your intentions, and the way you show up, but you cannot dictate the fruits of those actions.
Detachment isn’t giving up on what you love. It’s giving up the illusion that loving something gives you control over it.
You are your own universe, and the control you have belongs within it. Others are their own universes, and controlling them is not your responsibility.
Think about the last time you were stuck in traffic, running late for something important. You start getting frustrated, checking the time every thirty seconds, imagining everything that could go wrong, and becoming increasingly angry at something you have absolutely no control over.
The traffic isn’t moving any faster because you’re upset, but somehow, you’re making yourself suffer twice: once because of the situation, and again because of your resistance to it.
Detachment, in this moment, doesn’t mean you stop caring about being late. You can still look for another route, notify someone, and do everything within your power to get where you need to be. But once you’ve done what you can, you have to accept that the rest is beyond your control.
This is a small, everyday reflection that your responsibility lies in your actions, not in your ability to guarantee the outcome. You can control how you respond to the traffic, but you cannot command the cars in front of you to move.
Detachment is learning to take responsibility for what is yours without taking ownership of everything that isn’t.
Think about working toward something for years, convinced that once you finally achieve it, you’ll feel like you’ve made it. Maybe it’s the career, the house, the financial stability, or the version of yourself you’ve spent years trying to become.
You sacrifice, you plan, you do everything you believe you’re supposed to do, and then life takes a turn you never anticipated.
Someone else gets the opportunity. The plans fall apart. You’re still waiting for the life you thought you’d have by now. And suddenly, the disappointment isn’t just about what you lost or haven’t achieved; it’s about the version of yourself you thought you’d be by this point.
You begin to measure your present against a future that existed only in your imagination, treating everything you are today as insufficient because it doesn’t resemble everything you expected to become.
But what if detachment means learning to release not the dream itself, but your insistence that it must unfold according to your timeline?
You can continue working toward something without making your worth dependent on achieving it by a certain age, in a certain way, or before someone else gets there first. You can grieve the life you imagined without refusing to live the one that’s unfolding.
It is important to understand how to act without becoming enslaved to the fruits of our actions, and perhaps that lesson extends beyond the outcomes we chase and to the expectations we carry about who we should already be.
Sometimes, the hardest thing to detach from isn’t what we have. It’s the life we convinced ourselves we were supposed to have by now.
But how do we detach from the life we thought we would have?
Maybe we begin by acknowledging that we are grieving something, even if it never actually existed. The version of ourselves we imagined becoming, the milestones we thought we would have reached, the timeline we were so certain our lives would follow. We can become so attached to these expectations that we mistake them for promises life made to us. And when reality doesn’t honor them, we feel as though something has been taken away.
But an expectation is not a guarantee, and a different timeline is not necessarily a failed life.
Krishna teaches Arjuna to focus on his actions rather than become attached to their results. Applied to our own lives, this means we can continue to work toward the things we desire without making our happiness conditional upon achieving them exactly as we imagined. We can have ambitions without turning them into deadlines for our self-worth.
We can make plans while remaining open to the possibility that life may unfold differently, and, more often than not, in ways better than we could have imagined.
Our human minds cannot comprehend the vastness of the universe, so why would we limit ourselves to what we can currently imagine? Why would we put a time constraint on it? Why would we impose such rigid expectations?
Doesn’t that feel like restraint?
And perhaps the most difficult part is learning to stop comparing our present to an imagined future. Because every time we tell ourselves we should be further ahead, we turn the person we are today into a disappointment simply for not being someone we haven’t become yet.
How do we know that version of ourselves would have been happier or healthier? How can we definitively say that?
We cannot.
Detachment doesn’t mean abandoning the dream. It means allowing yourself to grow beyond the version of the dream you were once convinced you needed. It means being willing to change the timeline, reconsider the destination, or even discover that what you wanted five years ago no longer serves who you are today.
You can honor the life you once imagined without making it the enemy of the life you have.
Not everything deserves equal weight. Not every person deserves the same access to you. Not every disappointment deserves to become an identity. Not every desire deserves to become an obsession. And not every version of your life deserves to be mourned simply because it was the version you expected.
Sometimes, we are so busy trying to restore the balance that we forget we are the ones holding the scales.
We keep weighing the same situation, replaying the same conversation, revisiting the same disappointment, asking ourselves what we could have done differently. We keep placing our peace on one side and someone else’s behavior on the other, wondering why we feel so heavy.
And sometimes, the answer is embarrassingly simple.
You’re trying to find balance in a situation you’ve already outgrown.
You cannot force someone to develop the self-awareness you had to learn the hard way. You cannot make another person understand the damage they’ve caused simply because you’ve explained it beautifully. You cannot convince life to honor a timeline it never promised you.
And you certainly cannot heal by repeatedly reopening the very thing you’re trying to make peace with.
At some point, you have to stop asking what else you can do to change the situation and start asking why you’re still giving it the power to change you.
That, to me, is where detachment begins.
Not in the dramatic declarations that you don’t care. Not in pretending something never hurt you. And certainly not in becoming so emotionally unavailable that nothing can reach you.
Because let’s be honest: sometimes what we call detachment is just avoidance with better PR.
Real detachment requires you to ACTUALLY feel the disappointment, acknowledge the grief, recognize the anger, and still make a conscious decision about what happens next.
It requires you to be honest about what you want without becoming a prisoner to whether you get it.
It requires you to understand that acceptance is not approval, forgiveness is not reconciliation, and compassion does not require you to volunteer as someone’s emotional punching bag.
You can understand why someone behaves the way they do without making their behavior your responsibility.
You can recognize someone’s pain without making yourself the place where they unload it.
You can love someone and still decide that the version of them standing in front of you is not someone you can continue to make room for.
And you can be disappointed with where you are in life without treating the person you are today like a failed version of the person you hoped to become.
You are allowed to change your mind about what deserves your life.
I think about that night in Manhattan sometimes. How someone who had known me for ten years could stand in front of me and behave like a stranger. How I could look at a person I once considered my best friend and recognize that, in that moment, I had nothing to defend.
Not because I was above him. Not because I was incapable of being hurt. And not because I had somehow transcended the very human experience of wanting to be understood.
But because I realized that I did not have to participate in every version of myself that a situation invited me to become.
I could be angry without becoming cruel. I could be hurt without becoming vindictive. I could recognize that someone was behaving badly without feeling compelled to behave badly in return.
And perhaps most importantly, I could stop confusing our history with an obligation to tolerate our present.
Ten years of friendship meant we had a history. It did not mean I owed the next ten years to the same dynamic.
History explains how someone got a place in your life. It does not guarantee them a permanent one.
That lesson applies to people, dreams, expectations, identities, and even the versions of ourselves we have spent years trying to become.
We are allowed to outgrow things we once prayed for. We are allowed to leave behind what once felt like everything. We are allowed to discover that the dream was beautiful, the timing was wrong, the person changed, or we did.
And none of that has to mean we failed.
In fact, I feel the exact opposite. I feel that you are living the human experience exactly as it is meant to be lived.
So, no, you have not failed. Quite the opposite: you are thriving!
Perhaps this is why Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna has stayed with me for so long. The lesson was never that he should stop caring. It was that caring could not be the only thing guiding his actions. He had to learn to distinguish attachment from duty, grief from discernment, and the things within his control from the things that were not.
The same applies to us.
Do your part. Love sincerely. Work toward what matters. Make the plans. Chase the dream. Show up for the people who show up for you.
But do not make a guarantee out of an outcome. Do not worship a timeline.
Do not turn another person’s approval into your personal religion. And for the love of all things sacred, do not keep auditioning for a place in a life that requires you to abandon yourself to remain in it.
We are responsible for our actions, not entitled to dictate every result. The world is far too vast, existence far too complex, and life far too unpredictable for us to believe that our limited perspective can account for every possibility.
We are not meant to control the entire universe. We are meant to understand our place within it.
And maybe that is where we misunderstand balance at times. We think it means keeping everything in equilibrium, finding the perfect proportion between holding on and letting go, making sure nothing tips too far in either direction.
But balance is not about keeping everything. Balance is knowing what to put down. And in order to do that, you need to understand detachment.
The scales cannot remain balanced if you insist on carrying the weight of everything you refuse to release.
And the beautiful, uncomfortable truth is that you can spend your entire life trying to control what comes into it, what stays, what leaves, what happens, and when it happens.
Or you can learn to meet life as it comes without surrendering your discernment along the way.
You can care without clinging. You can act without demanding a guarantee. You can grieve without making grief your home. You can want more for yourself without resenting the life you have while you work toward it.
You can hold something close without holding it hostage. And you can let something go without declaring that it never mattered.
The movie Ae Dil Hai Mushkil has the perfect example of this, to me. You guessed it: it is when Shah Rukh Khan enters the story. His monologue is beautiful, truly.
For those who know and read Hindi:
Ek tarfa pyaar ki taaqat hi kuch aur hoti hai… aur rishton ki tarah do logon mein nahi bat’ti. Sirf mera haq hai ispe, sirf mera…
Mujhe Saba se beinteha mohabbat karne ke liye Saba ki hi zaroorat nahi. Ho sakta hai isse behtar ishq ho, aur agar baazi ishq ki baazi hai, toh jo chaahe laga lo, darr kaisa?
Agar jeet gaye toh kya kehna, gar haare bhi toh baazi maat nahi.
In English, the sentiment is something like this:
The power of one-sided love is something else entirely. Unlike other relationships, it isn’t divided between two people. It’s mine, and mine alone.
I don’t need Saba to love me back in order to love her endlessly. Perhaps there is no love greater than this. And if love is a game worth playing, then stake whatever you want. What is there to fear?
If you win, wonderful. And even if you lose, it isn’t necessarily a defeat.
And I think there are two types of people: those who understand that, and those who have not allowed themselves to understand it just yet.
That is a balance we will ALL continue to learn and understand in deeper, more profound ways.
Not the balance of someone who has mastered detachment, but of someone who understands that the lesson will keep presenting itself in different forms. A person. A disappointment. An unanswered question. A dream that takes longer than expected. A version of myself I eventually have to leave behind.
Life will keep giving us things to hold and things to release. The practice is learning to recognize the difference.
So, I don’t know if the question is whether we can detach. Perhaps it is whether we can accept that something can matter deeply without needing to remain ours forever.
And if there is one thing I want you to take away from all of this, it is this:
Your peace is not a bargaining chip. Stop trading it for things you cannot control.
Not for someone’s approval. Not for a relationship’s survival. Not for a deadline you invented. Not for a future that has yet to exist.
The scales will tip. Life will happen. People will disappoint you. Plans will change. You will change.
And when they do, you will have a choice.
You can spend your life trying to restore the world to the way you thought it should be.
Or you can learn to find your balance in the world as it is.
As for me?
I have learned that not everything that enters my life is meant to stay, not everything I lose is a punishment, and not everything I want is worth the cost of losing myself to get it.
I am no longer interested in proving that I can carry everything.
I’m interested in learning what I was never meant to carry in the first place.
At the end of the day, I can weigh the world, consider every perspective, and spend an eternity trying to make sense of every little thing.
But the scales were never mine to use to measure my worth.
And I was never meant to carry the entire universe just because I was born under a sign that knows how to weigh it.
– nk
