Question: Dear Sayadaw, I have got from my master that you are very skillful in teaching about abandonment and detachment. I see that abandoning our belongings is easier than detaching our mental attachment. I, myself, have an attachment in loving affairs. I can abandon a person but cannot detach my thoughts about him. It causes me to suffer a lot. Can you guide me to detach from that kind of attachment? Thank you Sayadaw!

The best thing to solve this problem is making ourselves easy with helping the people in need or volunteering for social organizations or meditation centers, practicing meditation seriously at a meditation retreat like this. We need to replace the images by doing something continuously. If we are not busy doing something, it’s difficult to forget something or someone. Besides, the most important of old age is attaching to ourselves. The attachment to someone already exists in our minds. That’s why it’s easy to attach to another person. To detach from ourselves, we should accept ourselves as a meditator or a volunteer. As they have to deal only with Buddha Dhamma and Shanga and other volunteers and meditators. We are responsible to do good deeds by keeping precepts and keeping the mind to be stable and pure. Meditation or mindfulness – detachment by doing all kinds of good deeds is very useful to solve all problems concerning material and mind. We need to practice continuously, we need to cooperate with the other volunteers or meditators also; in this way, our mind will be busy with many people and many things. So it’s easy to remove someone or something from the mind. The best of all is to accept the Truth of ever-new-impermanent nature, by doing that`we can let go or abandon our traditional views of something or someone, I or you, mine or yours, man or woman, living beings or non-living beings as real or true. This is cleaning the mind to be empty. We should leave nothing even ourselves in the mind. Just accept ever-new-impermanent nature. If we even dare to let go of ourselves, we can detach from everyone and everything. This is really effective. We just need to follow and the problem will be solved for sure.