Detached Love

When I was in my final year of MBA in my final semester, we had a course on personality growth through psychometric instruments. Needless to say, it was a very intellectual course, and yet at the same time it helped us to look at our emotions through the prism of our mind. Most of us have a whole range of emotions which we accept as our unique personality, something that defines us and to a large extent these emotions happen on their own without any conscious choice on our part. But we can choose what type of emotions we want to have.

One example of this that I have is strategic anger. What is the point of getting angry if it is not going to change anything. But if getting angry serves a purpose - say if a shopkeeper is trying to cheat you, and you want to scare him into giving in - then it is most beneficial to get angry. 

But to come back to the point, the instructor told us about detached love. He said that every time he does this course, what he feels for his students is detached love. The love he feels for his students helps him to be closer to them, to empathize better with them and to intuit their emotional states and help them in their emotional well-being. And yet the love is detached in the sense that he is able to leave it behind him when he goes home to his family. He is able to let it go when the course ends and he is able to feel it again for the next batch that comes in. This love does not rule his mind and allows him to empathize with the emotions of the students and yet remain unaffected by it.

This is really a very powerful concept if one can apply this in real life. I feel this same type of detached love for my employees, for my students, for my vendors for everyone whom I am in close contact with. There may be a few I deal with whom I don’t like, but by and large I consciously try to develop this detached love with at least my students. This is what makes me an unbeatable teacher. I can not only make a small group of students feel my love, but I can do it even with a large group and with many groups. I think this is the hallmark of great spiritual gurus like shri shri ravi shankar, They can make tens of thousands of people feel their love and hence they have such a large and devoted following.

How did I develop this capacity of detached love? Well, it came from a basic realization that love is really the most important thing in life. It is the memory of love that we cherish the most, not memories of money and other worldly pleasures. Love is what causes us to grow and expand our boundaries. The more we love, the more we learn and grow. I was inspired by two authors to develop this type of thinking – Richard Bach and M. Scott Peck.