This has become a regulation mantra of sorts for me recently. It helps me reground in a certain relationship with the world when I find myself slipping to my default.
Coming from a default hypervigilant posture towards the world, this mantra helps me catch myself. Hypervigilance is predicated on the opposite assertion, where theres a clinging to a specific outcome, which maps to some perceived sense of safety. This outcome is perceived to be outside of myself, it hinges on external reality. If everything is attention, this story of an outcome becomes a sink, which eclipses my own experience. My experience becomes a frenetic adrenaline-fueled flight-fight instinct, which crowds out everything else, and exists as single-minded pursuit for some fixed outcome. The whole orientation is disembodied and narrow to the point of blindness.
“Care without attachment to outcome” is the inverse. Care comes from within. Attention flips inward. In grounding on my experience, it’s regulating, aligning, and focused on maximizing pull-motivation rather than fear-induced push-motivation. It keeps focus in the body, and different parts of the body on the same train. Its relationship with the external world is one of acceptance and surrender of any specific outcome. Implicit in non-attachment is a sense that even if it isn’t alright, it’s alright. Groundedness is the security in the fundamental insecurity, a letting go of control, letting go of the myth that it’s even possible to control. In letter go, there’s no grasping to specific external target, attention can remain open to peripheral opportunity, spacious and free rather than narrow and trapped.
The whole experience shifts in this state. In a state of hypervigilance, a job interview would be ungrounding and fear-inducing. My body would be shaking from excitement and nervousness. From a state of non-attached care, it’s just chatting and vibing with another human being. Spacious curiosity of alignment rather than some zero-sum assessment. And if it doesn’t work out, no worries, the care will find another way. The care is a kind of gradual approach to search, step by step the body is kept on the same page and the direction can change unexpectedly at any point. In contrast, outcome is an inflexible story “out there in the distance”. It’s a head-oriented approach to search, and the narrowness of its attention prevents seeing peripheral opportunities.
These peripheral opportunities could be interpreted as reality signaling support for the general direction of my life. An outcome-anchored attention would be blind to this kind of feedback. Ironically while being outward-oriented, it also’s less attentive to the outside. It’s perversely self-defeating, it loses both inside and outside awareness. The sole focus is a specific story of the outside, which originates from the inside. In fact, hypervigilance is a kind of internal fixation, the very definition of delusion.
The two orientations can arise at the same time, and rather than attempting the blot out the tendency towards hypervigilance I can gently apply the same mantra to it. I picture myself as a parent and the fear tendencies as a kid who’s scared, who desperately wants to be good so that they’re safe. From the perspective of the mantra, my care turns into compassion, it turns into a big hug for that kid, and gratitude that they care so much, that they really want to be met in connection, in understanding. My lightly held hope is that this can meet the parts in what they desperately need, which is understanding and safety, and also in a way that isn’t attached to the outcome of them going away either. Care without attachment to outcome. I don’t want to banish that kid, which would produce the very fear and shame that gives him life. I’m now the parent and my job is to give that kid the spacious love that he continues to long for. I can be the parent now that he still needs.
Lets see, I love the meta-ness of this mantra, and I’m curious to see how it can be applied recursively to different layers of experience.