I am a few weeks away from defending a doctoral thesis based largely on the cultivation of the Eastern contemplative principle of nonattachment and exploration of its acceptability and effectiveness for symptoms of trauma. I now know a fair bit about nonattachment because of 5 years of work centred on this principle, several publications, from 2 years of a Master’s degree with a thesis centred on the same concept, followed by 3 years of doctoral study.
I would like to pull nonattachment into the current political landscape by describing what it is, clarifying what it is not, and outlining a case for its application in the current public arena. To do this, I will tell the story of the creation and development of nonattachment across time and space. To connect nonattachment to the current political landscape authentically, I will draw on personal experiences to foreground the lens through which I have viewed recent events as they have transpired around me. In qualitative research, we call this reflexivity, which just lends transparency to one’s own assumptions and biases on an issue.
Long, long (and long again) before it was a psychological scale or clinical construct, long before MRIs and clinical trials, nonattachment started as a human question: Why does holding on hurt? Around the 5th Century B.C.E. in Northern India, a man who would come to be known as the Buddha started teaching that suffering (Sanskrit: Dukkha) had a cause. Early discourse identified the problem as taṇhā (craving) and upādāna (clinging). The human condition is to grasp at pleasure, identities, relationships, beliefs, and even the idea of self. And because everything changes, clinging guarantees distress. The solution was not withdrawal from life, which we would today call ‘detachment’, but letting go of the default mode of compulsive grasping. This was the seed of nonattachment. Not indifference or emotional numbness (i.e., detachment) but the freedom of living a life without needing reality to stay fixed.
Around the same time (broadly), another text in India asked a different version of the same question. Namely, how do we act fully in the world without being psychologically destroyed by outcomes we cannot control? In the Bhagavad Gita (Easwaran, Trans., 2007), the warrior Arjuna is paralyzed before battle. Krishna tells him something radical: He must Act. But he must not cling to the fruits of action. This principle, nishkāma karma, reframes nonattachment as engaged participation without possessiveness. You do your duty. You love. You commit. But you release the illusion of control over outcomes. Nonattachment here became not escape, but courageous involvement. Not passive, not a without, but an active, verb-state of doing.
Centuries later, Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers asked an even subtler question: What exactly are we clinging to? Texts like the Heart Sutra (Conze, Trans., 1958) suggested that things do not possess the fixed, independent essence we imagine. This insight was philosophically elaborated by Nagarjuna (2nd–3rd century C.E.), who argued that suffering arises when we treat phenomena as inherently real and solid. Nonattachment here became cognitive and ontological (the philosophical exploration of how we can know the essence of something). It was not just letting go of possessions or outcomes, it was relaxing (note the verb), rigid views about self and reality itself.
Over time, and across the waters, in ancient Greece and Rome, Stoic philosophers were arriving at similar conclusions. Epictetus taught that suffering comes from trying to control what is not within our power (Dobbin, Trans.,1995). Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that peace comes from aligning with nature’s impermanence (Hammond, Trans., 2014). Though historically independent, Stoicism echoed a functional form of nonattachment: Care deeply (note the verb), but do not demand that life obey you.
For centuries, nonattachment remained embedded in spiritual and philosophical traditions. Then, in the late 20th century, mindfulness entered Western medicine through Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (Kabat-Zinn, 1990). Mindfulness, in its first-generation definition, was defined as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.
But something was implicit. Mindfulness involves observing thoughts without clinging to them.
Yet the word “nonattachment” was rarely foregrounded. The concept was there, but unnamed.
In 2010, a major turning point occurred. Sahdra et al. published the Nonattachment Scale. They defined nonattachment as a flexible, balanced way of relating to experiences without clinging or suppression. This was significant for three reasons: 1) It distinguished nonattachment from emotional detachment. 2) It showed nonattachment to correlate with well-being and lower distress. 3) It made nonattachment measurable. From there, empirical research began to explore the connection of nonattachment with psychological and clinical constructs, including (but not limited to) anxiety, depression, pro-sociality, rumination, psychological flexibility, materialism, and PTSD.
Nonattachment had moved from monastery to measurement. No longer a spiritual ideal, nonattachment was increasingly understood as an active, regulatory stance toward experience;
a way of relating to thoughts, emotions, identities, trauma, and uncertainty without fusing with them. Today, nonattachment is being explored not as withdrawal from life, or a byproduct of mindfulness, but as the capacity to participate fully without being psychologically owned by what we hold. We are learning that we can use the vehicle of mindfulness to get to the destination of nonattachment.
So here we are in 2026, and we understand that nonattachment is an active choice, and a stance of full engagement and courageous participation in life. Nonattachment requires being mindful of time and space to ‘zoom out’ so that you can more effectively ‘zoom in’ on whatever is next. And here is where I see us getting stuck. The scope of examples on a global level is so enormous and so overwhelming that it is impossible to detail but a couple, and so I have chosen based on my personal experiences to highlight the glaring absence of nonattachment in these situations, where it could have shown up, and how it could have helped.
As someone raised in the UK, I’ve grown up ‘knowing’ the royal family as the mighty entity they are. We all know the names, the faces, the public personas. As a small child, I stood on the balcony of the company my father worked for in Trafalgar square and watched the wedding procession of Andrew and Sarah move toward the mall after the ceremony at Westminster. I was in Paris in 1997 when Diana was killed. I heard the sirens, but did not know what they were for. I mourned when HRH Elizabeth II passed away in 2022, more as a function of her enduring dignity and matriarchal authority than anything else. My parents, in varying capacities, have both visited Buckingham Palace and worked for the Prince’s and now the King’s Trust. My paternal grandfather was amongst the diamond miners in the Canadian Northwest Territories who hosted Prince Phillip in 1970. It was the Pizza Express in my hometown of Woking that Andrew claimed to be in when he was confronted with timeline and narrative inconsistencies in his interview with the BBC in 2019. I have never met any of the royal family members personally, but I do have a sense of ‘knowing’ them from a distance, which is, I would guess, comparable to the sense most Brits have of our Royal Family.
I have also read Nobody’s Girl (Giuffre, 2025) and followed the news and documentaries, conservative and liberal, regarding the shocking involvement of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The monarchy is an entity like no other, and there is no scope in this paper to debate the merits of the British royal family. However, at its core, we see a man of enormous wealth, social stature, and power, engaged in scandal and corruption profound enough to dismantle empires, imprison rapists, and accomplices alike, and condemn the monarchy to the pages of history. Let’s zoom out on that: A member of the British royal family was directly involved in an international pedophile ring. If the testimonies of the hitherto innumerable (thanks to the US Department of Justice and Secretary Pam Bondi), but certainly edging toward 100 (Sisek et al., 2026), survivors and complainants in the Epstein files are to be believed, then this man was one of many who raped children. One more zoom out here for good measure: This man raped children.
Yet last month our newspapers and TV screens were absolutely lambasted with that unflattering picture of Andrew, leaning back and horrified, leaving incarceration. The systems, meta-systems, culture, patriarchy, misogyny (ad infinitum) that contribute to that photo even being a possibility are gargantuan and likely buried well below the level of public knowledge and scrutiny to which this author has access. But allow me to introduce nonattachment into the equation. Nonattachment, the intentional, mindful, full and courageous participation in life without clinging to ensuing outcomes could do us all a world of good in this situation.
Firstly, nonattachment dispenses with the right to benefit from the fruits of one’s labour or standing. Culturally, if Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been Andy from Staines, one would expect he would still be in a holding cell. That he is in the comfort of his own home currently is indicative of a cultural and legal grip to principles, systems, and privileges that are hurting us all. To harken back to the original question of nonattachment: Why does holding on hurt? In this case, one could argue that we have clung so blindly and fiercely to these principles, systems and privileges that we have lost sight of context. Had we been less attached to our systems, our legacy culture, our patriarchy, might we have been able to zoom out sooner? Might we have been able to prevent the rape of children?
I don’t know the answer to this. I do know that today we do not pause, choose mindful awareness, zoom out, and then zoom back in to the next right thing. This is not allowed. Instead, we are rewarded and glorified for who can be the busiest, who can make the most money and amass the most power, who has the best Instagram pics, or the most inspiring Linkedin posts. Where is the time to zoom out in between all these drivers? And there is seldom space to step out of line in this cultural drive. Choose to ask questions, challenge authority, question the systems and principles that got us here, and you risk your job, your income, your means of feeding and clothing your family. A 2025 report from the BBC (Peachey, 2025) suggests that 10% of us have no savings whatsoever, and up to 39% of us have savings under £1000. It feels like there is no time or space for nonattachment in that. However, any seasoned yoga teacher will tell you that when a student reports having no time or space for yoga, the only solution is yoga. Similarly, I would suggest that the glaring lack of time and space for nonattachment in this context is the exact reason it is most necessary. I hope to reinforce this through example number 2 below.
I left the UK in 1999 and moved to Canada. I had children. My son, a gifted athlete, played hockey both ice and inline for about 13 years. My daughter also played hockey for a season but far preferred the girl-power vibe of the sport to which she ultimately committed, synchronized/artistic swimming, later. I did not grow up in Canada, and so I did not understand what hockey meant to Canadian culture. My son played hockey to a high level, winning provincial championships on several occasions, and sometimes playing for more than one team per season. The schedule was grueling. My son also played hockey year round, which meant that where some families got a nice break for the summer, I was still sitting at an inline arena with all the same commitments as in the winter season.
I understand what goes into being the mother of a young hockey player. Not everyone does, so I will offer a few details. When you have a young and high-performing hockey player in Canada, it doesn’t matter if they are 5 or 15, everyone is getting up as early as 4.45am to be ready for 5.30 ice time on a weekday before school, and possibly Saturday and Sunday as well. As they age, you could also find yourself at the rink at 11pm (sometimes on the same day), nursing abhorrent, weak, Styrofoam cups of tea and praying for no overtime in a game or an early dismissal in a practice. It’s not just practice and games either. It’s also power skating, stick handling, strength and conditioning, and team building events. It’s brutal. It’s expensive. It’s a part time job.
It’s also joyful watching your son grow into a team player, a leader, and a respectful and respectable young man as he navigates the dynamics of growth, competition, wins, losses, tryouts, failures, and successes that mean he must leave his friends behind. Through all of it, mothers are there. Occasionally, we skip out on a late night practice, and let Dad deal, if Dad is in the picture. Sometimes we don’t have the stamina after 8 hours of work, 4 hours in the car taking one to swimming and the other to hockey, meal prep, homework, and necessary errands to sit in the sub-zero rink in the heinous smell of teenage boy sweat to smile for the potential glide-by from your player. So, we walk them in, tie the laces (or make sure they’re safely in the dressing room once they’re older) and then go and hide in the nice warm car with a seat-heater and a book (or Instagram) for an hour. It’s an enormous undertaking and commitment, and a privilege at the same time, for the players, and the parents. The fact that we even had the resources of time, money, transportation, and community support to take on the sport of hockey is a big deal. Beyond the logistics, mothers must also ensure homework gets done, nutrition isn’t ignored, household maintenance goes on, other children have needs and their own schedules and commitments, lots of us work outside the home…the list goes on. Most mothers with a child in a high level sport will be familiar with these demands.
Upon beating Canada in the 2026 Winter Olympics last month, the USA men’s hockey team received a call from the President of the United States, who joked that the women would have to be included in the invitation he was extending them to the White House to celebrate. The adrenaline was flowing, and one of the most powerful people in the world was on the phone. As a mother with a son in his early twenties, I can see how the automatic, non-considered reaction in that moment could have been conspiratorial and condoning laughter. The President of the United States calls you and cracks a joke – what are you going to do…really? I don’t like it, but I can see how it unfolded, even though it’s women who have carried Olympic medals and Gold for the United States for the last six Olympic games, they were reduced to a punch line by the President and laughed at by their male counterparts. What presents itself as deeply problematic beyond this painful reality to me is the fate of the mothers.
Let’s zoom out. These players all had mothers pulling the exact same, and probably greater, heavy duty weight as I pulled throughout my son’s hockey career. These women did what most mothers do, they nurtured, supported, showed up, stood back, engaged, held off, and let their little boys cry into their sleeves after brutal losses over the years, and ignore them to go celebrate with their buddies after ecstatic wins. It’s part of the job, right? Let’s zoom out a bit further. Where is this job description written, and how can I get my hands on a copy of it? Who wrote it, and why should women, mothers, continue to work that job if the reward is reduction to a punchline? Or, as the Mahāyāna Buddhist’s asked, what exactly are we clinging to?
Further to the locker room joke (not the first for this President) all but one of the team members accepted the invitation and showed up not only for a photo-op with the President who had reduced women to a punchline, but for the State of the Union address days later. My own ‘mama bear’ conditioning wants to find an excuse for these men, to explain why they would have made the decision, after time to pause, after public backlash to the locker room call, after the opportunity to zoom out, to engage in the game the president was playing. The psychologist in me offers: “the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet”. This is speculated to occur at 25-27 years of age in men (23-25 in women; Prince, 2025), although recent research also indicates developmental spurts later in life (Mousley et al., 2025). A cursory Google search indicates that the average age of the Men’s hockey team this year was 28. It’s not their brains. It’s society’s painful grip to the same principles, systems and privileges that sent the Andrew formerly known as Prince back to Sandringham after his arrest.
Had these men taken the opportunity of a mindful pause to consider their grasp on the cultural narrative that women mean less, do less, ARE less than they are, they might have found themselves considering their own mothers. They might have recalled the times she pulled an all-nighter bringing you home from hockey at midnight, to leave again at 5am knowing there was no time for sleep in between because you needed healthy fuel to get you through your 5.30 practice, you needed lunch for school that day, you have siblings who needed her to deliver baked goods for a school bake sale the next day, you needed your favourite jeans to be clean for your team building event after school, she had her own work, household chores, topping up the gas in the car for another 4 hours behind the wheel that day. They might have zoomed out enough to remember her face in the stands, watching and cheering, or when you walked out of the change room to her standing waiting and ready to taxi you from A to Z, host the sleepovers, carpool the other boys, sign you up for the extra speed skating camp because your buddy was in it so you had to be in it too, all day, every day, constantly, for years, even if it meant she couldn’t progress in her own career because it would take her away from her commitments to her first love, YOU.
If, as a collective, we do not call out harmful systems, principles, and privileges AND work toward letting them go and finding ways to pause, zoom out, and mindfully consider the next right thing outside of the shadows of the old, then we will never allow space for the new. The children who were raped by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will suffer generational trauma with no recourse and no meaningful way to break the cycle that allowed them to be harmed in the first place. The mothers who put their boys on the Olympic podium will remain a joke, or merely, as one extremist evangelical pastor put it in a 2025 CNN interview, “the kind of people that people come out of” (Wilson, 2025). As a society, we have an obligation in 2026 to pause, mindfully reconsider, and chart a new path toward the next right thing. Ignoring nonattachment ignores the reality that everything changes, and when we find ourselves in worsening health, asking why holding on hurts so much, and what we are clinging to, we would do well to remember the principle of nishkāma karma. As uncomfortable as it is to engage fully with our political landscape today, we cannot escape it. We cannot be passive. Without courageous involvement, we are condemning ourselves and our children to the same cycle we are caught in today. I want to mindfully pause, zoom out, and consider the next right thing. I want all of us to reflect on the old and make space for the new. I want us to notice what we are clinging to and consider why. We know today, as the Buddha knew millennia ago, everything changes. Embracing change offers hope for a new world order, where clinging to the shadows of systems, principles, and privileges of a bygone era continues to hurt us all. I hope we can all find the courage to release the grip and find nonattachment.
References:
Aurelius, M. (2014). Meditations (M. Hammond, Trans.). Penguin Classics
Bhagavad Gita (E. Easwaran, Trans.; 2nd ed.). (2007). The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.
Conze, E. (Trans.). (1958). The Heart Sutra. In Buddhist wisdom books: Containing the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra (pp. 77–107). Allen & Unwin.
Epictetus. (1995). The discourses of Epictetus (R. Dobbin, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published c. 108–125 AD)
Giuffre, V. R. (2025). Nobody’s girl: A memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice. Knopf.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain and illness. New York, NY Delacorte
Mousley, A., Bethlehem, R. A., Yeh, F. C., & Astle, D. E. (2025). Topological turning points across the human lifespan. Nature Communications, 16(1), 10055. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65974-8
Peachey, K. (2025, May 16). One in 10 Britons have no savings, UK Financial Regulator says. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgv6z5pr92o
Prince, A. (2026, February 3). Why do teenagers lie? – blume behavioral health – CA. Blume Behavioral Health. https://blumebh.com/when-is-your-frontal-lobe-fully-developed/
Sahdra, B. K., Shaver, P. R., & Brown, K. W. (2010). A Scale to Measure Nonattachment: A Buddhist Complement to Western Research on Attachment and Adaptive Functioning. Journal of Personality Assessment, 92(2), 116–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890903425960
Sisak, M. R., Neumeister, L., & Marcelo, P. (2026, February 3). Government says it’s fixing thousands of documents in Epstein-related files that may have had victim information. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/government-says-its-fixing-thousands-of-documents-in-epstein-related-files-that-may-have-had-victim-information
Photo by Hugo Jones on Unsplash
