Re-thinking Non-attachment courtesy of the Good Dinosaur 🦕

Laura, Zaccy and I were watching Disney's The Good Dinosaur 🦕 the other day. It's a little bit like The Lion King 🦁, I suppose. It's the story of Arlo 🦕, this really gentle and frightened little dinosaur who gets swept miles away from everything he knows and spends the rest of the film trying to find his way home 🗻.

And obviously, because I'm incapable of just watching a children's film without finding some unnecessarily deep philosophical meaning to it, I started thinking about how similar Arlo's journey is to the journey we talk about in yoga.

Because although Arlo spends the whole film trying to get home, getting home isn't the focus. The journey home (back to yourself) is the real path. The destination is simply where you arrive after everything you've experienced along the way.

Yogis and mystics have talked about this for thousands of years, this idea that man feels lost because in some sense he is lost, and that much of our suffering comes from searching outside ourselves for the way home. We look for it in success, money, relationships, religion, yoga, gurus, whatever it might be, when the journey is supposed to lead us back to ourselves.

But then there's the obvious contradiction. How can you ever really find yourself if you've never been lost?

Arlo's journey home is littered with fear, grief, loneliness, friendship, love, attachment and eventually letting go, and I don't think he really overcomes any of these emotions. He learns about himself through them not by trying to defeat them. Know what I mean? 🧐

Even his attachment to his little friend Spot isn't something bad that he needs to rid himself of. Their attachment creates this beautiful friendship and helps them both survive, but eventually Arlo has to let Spot go, not because their attachment was wrong, but because holding onto him would have prevented someone he loved from finding his own way home.

And maybe that's what we sometimes misunderstand about non-attachment. It isn't about never becoming attached to anything. What kind of life would that be? It's being able to love and experience something fully, while recognising when holding on is no longer love and it's time to let go.

I've always said that you'll learn far more about yoga from living your life (and watching Disney 🫣 or listening to Gorillaz 😵‍💫) than you ever will from reading a yoga book, because life will teach you about fear, attachment, loss, love, courage and letting go in a way that no book on yoga ever can.

Arlo eventually gets home, but the dinosaur who returns isn't the dinosaur who left 🦕🧐🫶🏽.

You have to get lost, and sometimes really feel lost in every aspect of life, to discover who you are, your self worth and eventually, you will find your way home.

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Namaskar - Eternal Seeker

Zahir Akram

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