Opening to Love

The concept of non-attachment seems particularly confounding in the context of love. How can we not be attached to the people closest to our hearts? It’s not about loving or not loving, but rather how we love. Openness and compassion are the foundation for not only loving without expectations and conditions but also loving in service of one another. 

AWAKEN Season 4 is hosted by actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini. Guests featured in this episode include Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder and Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc. Dr. Richie Davidson, contemplative social scientist Eve Ekman, artist and writer Jenny Odell, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Annabella Pitkin, author and transformational thought leader Sonya Renee Taylor, teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong. The Tibetan at the start of the episodes is spoken by Tashi Chodron.

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Creators & Guests

Host

Isabella Rossellini

Actress, Model & Filmmaker

What is Awaken?

AWAKEN is a Webby Honoree podcast about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” Throughout the series we dive into the personal stories of guests who share how they’ve experienced a shift in their awareness, and as a result, their perspective on life.

Tashi Chodron:

ཇི་སྲིད་ནམ་མཁའ་གནས་པ་དང༌། ། འགྲོ་བ་ཇི་སྲིད་གནས་གྱུར་པ། ། དེ་སྲིད་བདག་ནི་གནས་གྱུར་ནས། ། འགྲོ་བའི་སྡུག་བསྔལ་སེལ་བར་ཤོག །

Isabella Rossellini:
“For as long as space endures
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.”

Eve Ekman:
This idea of non-attachment and non-clinging, it doesn’t make you love less. It makes you love better. Truly.

Annabella Pitkin:
Grasping is quite different than what a lot of us probably mean, or at least want to mean, with words like love, or even words like pleasure, right? Grasping is an extra edge. It’s this kind of addictive craving that’s fiery and sharp, and sucks us into a kind of vortex of more and more and more. And it’s quite painful. And so it is described by very early Buddhist sources as being at the root of our experience of dukkha, of dissatisfactoriness, or what’s often translated as suffering.

Ocean Vuong:
That’s probably the greatest work I have to do, is that I am attached to my loved ones.

And that again, the Buddha says this will be the number one suffering: sickness, old age, death, birth. And I tell my partner and my family office, “Look, we’re not monks, and even monks struggle. We’re not there yet.” Maybe in a couple lifetimes I’ll get there, but I don’t imagine that I will be able to successfully detach from the people I love, and I’m okay with that.

Isabella Rossellini:
Welcome to season 4 of AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am Isabella Rossellini, an actress and activist and your host for this season of AWAKEN, where we are exploring a fundamental concept in Buddhist thinking and philosophy: attachment.

Himalayan art has long been a pathway to insights and awakening, and in this season, we will look at objects from the Rubin’s collection as a way to better understand attachment and its

counterpoint, non-attachment, which translates to openness, or seeing things as they truly are. With stories and wisdom from artists, writers, poets, Buddhist teachers, psychologists, scholars, and others we will explore the meaning of attachment and how it shows up in different parts of our lives.

In this episode: Love. The concept of non-attachment seems particularly confounding in the context of love. How can I not be attached to the people I hold closest to my heart. But it’s not about loving or not loving, it’s all about how we love.

Contemplative social scientist, Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
Our afflictive form of loving and clinging is so dependent, right. When we’re in love with someone romantically we just—our whole life really has a center around them. We wish for their well-being. We think about what would make them happy. We do things to surprise and delight them, especially in the first couple years, but if we’re lucky, for many, many years. But then what happens if we end up separating from that person? Very often that love disappears. So, what was that love? It was a self-referential love. A love that existed when it really served us. And of course there could be great harms. You could be in a relationship and there could be transgressions that were painful.

But this idea of a love that’s deeper than just this self-referential, that’s what we’re aiming for with non-attachment. So it’s not not loving; it’s loving, again, without hope of fruition. Loving without this clear expectation, like fully in your heart that you have no idea how it will turn out, you just love all the way and whatever happens after is not your problem, not your business. Like you just fully love.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
This constructive/destructive, healthy/unhealthy attachment, it simply comes down to one point.

Isabella Rossellini:
Teacher and meditation master in the Buddhist Bon tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
Are you attached to them because you’re trying to find yourself? Are you attached to them because you are trying—you are—trying to find themself. Are you attached to them because you’re trying to find your happiness? Are you attached to them, you are really seeking for peace, which you never found it, now you’re trying to find in them? Sometimes we get attached to other people trying to find something what we have lost, what we haven’t found in our life, and that is the basis of destructive relationship.

Eve Ekman:
Can we love even when it’s not directly supporting or feeding us? So that sense of an unattached love is a love in which again, there is no contingency. I love you fully for who you are, as you are, without expectation of you making me happy in every moment. When you do, I delight. When you don’t, I have compassion. I think it’s not different. I think many of us in mature relationships, we already have an unattached love. It’s not that we don’t want someone and that we don’t want to see them every day and we don’t need them. I mean, I don’t know how to do a lot of the things in this household that I have required a partner to do, the basic fixes. It doesn’t mean I’m attached to them. It means I recognized my interdependence with them.

If you’re healthy enough, grounded enough, open enough, other people becomes the door to finding your peace. It’s different than identifying your peace from them, in them. It’s different.

Eve Ekman:
To have that kind of love where we can love even when we’re not being pleased, I think really the kind of archetype of that is the parent. You love your child crying in the night. You love your child who’s being a bossy brat. Right? You love them, you love them, you love them. And so many analogies are that our deepest compassion is like the parent holding the child crying in the night. Can we hold ourselves that way? Can we hold everyone including our grown up adult children that way when it can get harder? So there’s definitely, I think, a lot of examples and paradigms of unattached love that are around us.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
It’s like, what if everything that we hold disdain for, we decided to hold like a baby

Isabella Rossellini:
Sonya Renee Taylor.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
To me, that is my experience, that all of it is some tender, longing part of us that needs tending to, that just needs care. Just wants our care and our attention, and our validation.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
The healthier will be, in this process, recognizing that, okay, well, I love this person, I am trying to do my best, but here is I’m crossing the boundary. Here is I’m trying to impose my lost for their finding, my unhappiness in their happiness.

And so I—therefore I needed to recognize that, and I needed to really detach from that identity. I needed to allow their own process and respect their own process, including their loss and their suffering, but to be there, available, when they are going through that. Not trying to fx it, because that’s their journey. Because if you see other people are other people—in the end of the day, you are you, they are they, no matter how close you are, how much you love them. In relationship, we will say, you did not listen to me. You did not respect me. I was trying to help you. You ignored my help.

So these are the stories not about someone you’re trying to help. You need more help. And if you are that weak, if somebody needed to listen to you, you’re not helping someone, you’re asking someone’s help. You have to be officially you say, please help me. I need you to listen so I feel better. So in that way, you are helping me rather than saying, I have some great idea for you and you have to listen to me and that will help you. That’s not the case. But we in the midst of all this mixed emotion and lost individualities, we cannot see these very simple things. We are not able to see them clearly

Sonya Renee Taylor:
Inside of myself I understand the Sonya that would cling, and grasp, and try to control so vehemently, every aspect of life. And all of this world that got built from that small, simple, totally appropriate need. That—I mean massive world that got built. All kinds of constructions, and illusions. Now I need to not ever need anybody, and now I’ve gotta perform perfection—I was like, oh, we made a whole, you know, Sims game full of possibilities based off of this tiny, human, very true, authentic desire, which was to be physically comforted in a moment. And then, when I dropped beneath that, there was source, and love, and me, and they were inextricably linked, and I could not pull them apart. They were one entity. It was one entity. And that was what was underneath that little tiny human need. And I—so clearly see that small, human need that’s at the core of that, and I love her for needing that. And I have such tenderness toward her, for having not been able to have that need met in that moment. And I have such willingness today, to be like “Can I give that to you?”

Ocean Vuong:
At the core we are earnest, but we’re afraid of that; just in the same way that in our core we’re vulnerable, but we’re afraid of that, so we create all these shields. We create all of these social performances and mores to kind of hide that.

Isabella Rossellini:
Writer, professor, and photographer Ocean Vuong, whose novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, won the American Book Award and chronicles his early childhood, particularly the relationship between him and his mother, a refugee from Vietnam.

Ocean Vuong:
Underneath that, that’s the soil. Earnesty and vulnerability is the soil. All the other stuff is the concrete that we pour over the soil to give the illusion of society.

The Japanese had what’s called the I-novel, which is a precursor to autofiction—quite frankly autofiction itself—around the turn of the 20th century, called Shishōsetsu. And it comes from this long lineage from Buddhism, from Dōgen, which is introspection. “I study myself to forget myself.” So, what does he mean by that? When you start to investigate the conditions of your life, you realize that it goes beyond your personal experience.

I am also my history, which means I am American history, I am Vietnamese history, I am the history of Monsanto, the history of napalm, the history of imperialism, the history of translation, migration, refugeeness, interrelations, and intertextual, cross-cultural, transnational work. All of those things are suddenly no longer the self. You explode beyond that. The act of love is to look at something so thoroughly that you forget yourself, and you go into another personhood. It is literally leaping.

So, if I were to define love for myself, it would be that. And I believe Bell Hooks 100%, which is that love is an act. It’s something we do; it’s not something we feel. Something we do. We have to make it.

And to look and be invested in another person, to the point where you forget yourself, is such a generous act of self-abandonment towards another. It’s outward rather than inward. Between love and autofiction in the West, it’s been really warped. Autofiction, to me, is not very new or novel; it’s part of the work of introspection, from a Buddhist perspective at least, that’s been going on for thousands of years. And that has to do with self-abandonment, too; you abandon yourself into another. Simone Vale says, “Attention is the greatest form of generosity,” and there’s a parallel understanding to that.

Isabella Rossellini:
Being fully present opens us up and takes us away from the internal focus that we so often engage in. By paying close attention, we release our expectations about what something should be. Artist and author of How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell, collaborated with another artist to record the sounds at one of her favorite spots in the world: The Rose Garden in Oakland, California.

Jenny Odell:
I’m just trying to faithfully record sounds that are there, but then that obviously affects the way that you’re listening to them, where it’s like, this is no longer something that’s happening in the background while I look at certain things or while I read. This has my full attention, and I’m totally oriented towards these sounds. And I think there’s something really beautiful that happens where it’s not only that you’re no longer attached to the ways that you maybe were listening, or things that you wanted to hear, but in my experience anyway, I always come to really love what is there,

One time I was recording, and this person walked by with this really crinkly paper bag. And I saw them approaching, and I was like, “Oh man, I really hope that this crinkly paper-bag person walks past me.” And they did, and it’s like the best crinkly paper-bag sound. But I think that if I were just sitting there, I might have even been annoyed. Or I just would have thought it was nothing, or not noticed it at all. So yeah, there’s this kind of thing where it flips over into you’re not just observing these things that you didn’t notice, but you actually start to really love them and get fascinated with them.

Ocean Vuong:
A memory that always comes to me is just a memory of my mother sitting at a dining table looking out the window.

Isabella Rossellini:
Again Ocean Vuong.

Ocean Vuong:
What is it about that image? I don’t know. A woman looking out a window. Maybe Edward Hopper was onto something in his obsessive depictions of that scene. But to me it suddenly becomes both mundane, but also hypercharged with a kind of metaphor.

Here, a single mother who’s dreaming, whose opportunities were not available, or she chose not to pursue them, to raise two sons, who’s experienced an immense amount of grief, survived the war, was an orphan. And she arrives at a place of peace when she looks out the window. And we lived in HUD housing; some people call it the projects. There’s not much to look at other than another building with a brick wall, maybe the light falling on the brick, some birds fitting through, the highway median, telephone poles, the sky.

And then to watch your mother, not only just resting, because there’s those scenes too. There’s scenes where she’s collapsed on the couch, exhausted, bereft—but resting in agency. Resting in a moment of reprieve, contentment. To me, I see that with love, because that’s what I’ve always wanted for her. It has nothing to do with me, and it has nothing to do with my understanding of her as a mother, or a woman, or a person; but it’s fully her. At its best, we want the people we love to be fully themselves and then to acknowledge that that is enough.

Isabella Rossellini:
In an interview, Ocean Vuong once said, “Love is self-abandonment into the portal of another personhood.” The shedding of the self and the incessant focus on the self, as we heard in the previous episode, is at the heart of the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. For this episode, we’re looking at a painting of Avalokitshavara whose name translates to, “Lord who looks down with compassion.” Take a moment to look at the artwork at rubinmuseum.org/awaken. Scholar of Tibetan ​Buddhism Annabella Pitkin explains:

Annabella Pitkin:
Here in this image, we see the peaceful aspect of Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig in Tibetan, who is a Buddha, often described as a Bodhisattva, so sometimes appears in Buddhist literature as someone enacting the path to Buddhahood in order to enlighten others and show how it’s done, but then from another perspective is a fully enlightened, cosmic Buddha figure.

And in the Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist traditions, which give us this image of a central figure of Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, with four heads stacked on top of each other, and then each of the heads actually has three sides that we can see. So it’s actually an eleven-headed deity with a thousand arms, two legs standing upright, not seated, gazing directly at the viewer. This image isn’t strongly gendered, but in the Tibetan and Himalayan traditions, Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, is thought of as a male deity.

And then the female Buddha Tara is also a personification of compassion, the personification of compassion in action.

And the compassionate quality and the special features of this iconography hint at a kind of transcendence of gender, which is an interesting layer to bring to this image, even though the communities in the Himalayan region in Tibet that produced images like this, and produce them now, understand Avalokiteshvara as a male Buddha, an interesting dimension to consider.

But probably the most striking aspect of this iconography for the viewer, particularly for viewers seeing it for the first time, is this wheel of a thousand arms, stretching all the way around the central figure. And of course, the first question a viewer might ask is, why so many arms, and also why so many heads? And if a viewer looks closely at all of the extended arms and hands, they might even be able to notice that there are images of eyes on the palms of the hands. And the explanation for this, the message which this iconography is communicating, is that as the embodiment of all compassion, Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion, hears, sees, and responds to all of the world’s and the universe’s sufferings and needs.

So every single moment of sorrow, or loss, or grief, or despair, or suffering of any kind that one may feel oneself to be deeply alone with, this iconography says, this Buddha is always with you, always perceives, and doesn’t just perceive the suffering of the world, but has generated this special kind of form in order to be able to respond to all the forms of suffering.

So that image of the thousand arms and hands is a kind of visual metaphor for limitless engagement, relationality, activity, compassionate responsiveness. And this responsiveness and compassion and kind of witnessing, attending to others’ suffering is the real goal of practices of non-attachment.

And for viewers seeing it for the first time, it’s a reminder that human cultural practices, art, painting, literature, jewelry making, statue making, technologies, poetic forms, literary forms, intellectual forms like philosophy, and science, math, and biology, these are all modes of knowledge and engaging with the world around us that depend on people passing them along, human to human, being to being, across generational time and also across geographic space. And all of that is visually encapsulated in this image because of the way that it is dense with figures, each one of whom symbolizes a link in that chain of knowledge and practice.

Isabella Rossellini:
The passing on of knowledge, of teachings, of experience happens in community, in the connections we make with others: Parents, friends, co-workers, strangers on the street, all those people that we have an opportunity to connect with. Psychologist Dr. Richie Davidson Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder & Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc.:

Dr. Richie Davidson:
There is a plethora of scientific evidence that shows that connectedness is really important for well-being and also for health more generally, and its antithesis, which we might think of as loneliness, or at least that’s one aspect, is really detrimental to our well-being and to our health.

Loneliness is a greater risk factor for premature mortality than is smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That’s hard data. There’s hard data to show that, and it’s amazing. So, this is something real. It gets under the skin, and it affects our biology in ways that are consequential for our health.

When we engage in practices to cultivate connection, we’re not creating something de novo but rather we’re reminding ourselves of the fundamental nature of our minds. Because we are born to be kind; we’re born to love; we’re born to flourish. That is the natural state.

Sonya Renee Taylor:
Life is love, right? Like its source is love trying to express itself through existence, right? Through life. And it is always trying—one of the things I’ve been talking about, playing with, and sort of languaging over the last few years is this idea that all of life is asking to be reconciled to love, right? Which means all of life is being called back to source. And! All of life is being asked to recognize itself as love. And the distance—and the degree to which it does not recognize itself as love is the degree to which we experience it as oppression, and devastation, and despair, and bondage, right? And the freer a thing is, the closer it is to understanding itself as love.

Isabella Rossellini:
Love truly, love with presence, love deeply. And the more we can love without grasping and conditions, without expectation, without attachment to outcomes, the more we become open to giving and receiving love in all its forms.

You just heard the voices of Dr. Richie Davidson, Eve Ekman, Jenny Odell, Annabella Pitkin, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and Ocean Vuong.

I am Isabella Rossellini, your host.

To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more stories and news from the Rubin, follow us on Instagram @rubinmuseum and sign up for our newsletter at rubinmuseum.org.

AWAKEN Season 4 is an eight-part series from the Rubin.

AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with Tenzin Gelek, Jamie Lawyer, Kimon Keramidas, Gracie Marotta, Christina Watson, and Sarah Zabrodski in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.

Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

AWAKEN Season 4 and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now are supported by Bob and Lois Baylis, Barbara Bowman, Daphne Hoch Cunningham and John Cunningham, Noah P. Dorsky, Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), Mimi Gardner Gates, Fred Eychaner, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Jack Lampl, Dan Gimbel of NEPC, LLC, Agnes Gund, New York Life, Matt and Ann Nimetz, Namita and Arun Saraf, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Eileen Caulfeld Schwab, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and UOVO.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The Rubin Museum’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

Thanks for listening.