Most of the time, when people think of spirituality and finances, they tend to focus on how to deal with money worries, how to make more, or how to manifest more. That’s a big theme in the spiritual landscape we see online these days. But today, I want to talk about the opposite issue that a lot of people face.
And that is our attachment to, and identification with, our success and accomplishments. Before we dive deeper, it’s important to recognize that while these may seem like opposite issues, they are both sides of the same double-edged sword. We fall into the identification trap, whether it’s with success or failure.
It’s essential to understand that joy and sorrow are two sides of the same coin. They may lie on different ends of the emotional spectrum, but ultimately, both are just fluctuations in sense perception, feelings of agitation or pleasure.
The same goes for attachments and clinging. If we are attaching to concepts, it doesn’t matter whether they are positive or negative; we fall into the same trap. And success is one of the easiest traps to fall into, because it’s so alluring. It’s intoxicating. It is, quite literally, a drug. Success, fame, money, power — these are all drugs.
We must not fool ourselves about this. We need to look at them soberly and mindfully if we want to free ourselves from the mental stories we attach to them. This “success drug,” like any other substance, whether it’s caffeine, gambling, or workaholism, becomes a way to escape the present moment. It becomes a way to avoid negative feelings, responsibilities, duties, or the parts of life that feel unsatisfying, monotonous, repetitive, boring, or mundane.
Whatever the reason, when we rely on substances or activities to cope, we lose our ability to self-heal. We become dependent, and our internal mechanisms for healing, our ability to return to peace or alter our mood, atrophy.
That’s the trap: once we lose our soothing mechanism, we get frustrated and anxious, because we’ve not only become addicted, but we’ve lost touch with our own capacity to regulate our state of mind.
But we all have that ability. We’ve all had moments when we’re in a bad mood and a memory or thought changes everything. That shift doesn’t have to be accidental; we can train it. And meditation is one of the most profound ways to develop it. Through meditation, we become fully aware of our physical body and mental state because we’ve removed the distractions.
So now, we become aware of any tension we’re holding, even the subtlest amounts. Then we learn how to release it. One way is by breathing into the physical pain. That simply means focusing on a specific spot in your body where there’s tension, maybe a little tightness, maybe a dull ache. It’s often in the back, but it can be anywhere: knees, hips, elbows, neck, shoulders, anywhere.
Wherever it is, you bring your full attention to that spot. You don’t analyze it, label it, or wish it away. You just stay fully present with it. As you breathe and maintain focus on that area, something begins to shift. Your body starts to respond. Your entire healing system channels its attention to that one area when you focus fully and consistently.
Through deep breathing, oxygenated blood flows into that region. And often, it is oxygen deprivation that underlies many forms of bodily pain. In this way, the breath becomes medicine.
Similarly, we can apply this to our feelings. We can breathe peace and loving energy into our emotional space, the non-physical realm where we feel, where we sense, where we are, instead of doing or thinking. As we begin to loosen our attachment to success, we shift into a deeper space: the space of joy for no reason. Joy that is not dependent on any external achievement or event. The joy of simply being alive. The love for life itself.
As long as there is life within you, there can be love and joy. That doesn’t mean you can’t feel pride in your accomplishments or celebrate success. And it doesn’t mean you won’t feel sad when you fail or make a mistake. What it means is: you stay mindful. You observe every emotion and thought as it arises. This is how you avoid falling into the success trap.
You notice that burst of delight when reflecting on achievements, but you also remain aware that sadness might arise if it ends, or if things go wrong. You start to recognize that making your happiness dependent on temporary things is fragile. This awareness helps you stay grounded; it helps you avoid getting swept away in pride or superiority.
You don’t have to force your emotions to change. Simply recognize them as temporary. Recognize what’s fleeting and conditional. Understand that the high will wear off, and when it does, you can rest in a deeper, more lasting peace.
It’s easier to do this when you’re feeling good, when you’re flying high. It’s much harder when you’re in the depths of stress or fear, when your thinking is clouded and your emotions feel overwhelming. That’s when the real practice begins.
This is the practice of being your own analyst, your own psychologist. You observe your internal state. You become alert to thoughts and emotions that could carry you away, whether it’s greed, ego, or craving. You don’t push them away; you observe them through your deeper intelligence and wisdom.
You begin to see clearly whether a thought or feeling is helping you or causing you suffering, whether it’s keeping you grounded or making you miserable and blind to reality. Because if you believe you are nothing without your accomplishments, then you’ve reduced the most advanced biological creation in the known universe, the human mind and body, to just one label: failure.
And even that isn’t accurate. Because you are not your body or your mind. You are universal consciousness itself. You are made of the same stardust as billions of stars. Before that, you were energy in an infinitely small point at the center of the universe. Just like everything else that exists, you are the universe. The universe is you.
There is no separation. There is no isolated “me.” We were all birthed from this universe, by this universe, for this universe — to experience itself.
Even if all your titles, money, achievements, and accolades were stripped away, you could still watch a sunset. You could still gaze at a flower, see the face of a puppy, hear a baby laugh, and feel the vibrant life force within you and around you. You can still connect to that oneness, be flooded with gratitude, and overflow with love, love that needs no recipient, love that simply is.
To sit in that space of pure love and bliss is more profound, more powerful, more transformative than any paycheck, bank balance, or title on a business card. When we lose touch with our true nature, our true self, we begin to look outside ourselves for fulfillment. We grasp at superficial things to fill our inner void or to dull the suffering that’s happening beneath the surface.
At this point in human history, denial has become more popular than courage. It’s the default defense mechanism. The human body has become remarkably adept at repressing emotions and thoughts. That’s why there has been such a dramatic rise in psychosomatic disorders, illnesses where the mind creates real physical symptoms in the body. And this isn’t pseudoscience. It has been cited in the Harvard Business Review and surveys by the American Academy of Family Physicians, as reported in U.S. News & World Report. The real numbers could be even higher because we still understand so little about the mind-body connection.
But according to top experts, stress and repressed emotions are at the root of many 20th- and 21st-century ailments. For example, ulcers once became widespread, almost like an epidemic. Then, when it was discovered they were largely caused by stress, they stopped being the subconscious mind’s go-to outlet.
Once the truth emerged, the subconscious found another outlet. We’ve seen this cycle throughout history, non-contagious illnesses rise in epidemic waves, then decline. Why? Because once a condition becomes socially “acceptable,” the subconscious uses it as a vehicle to shift attention away from the mind and onto the body.
That way, the ego doesn’t have to confront what’s really happening inside. It avoids feeling like a failure. And remember: it’s the ego orchestrating this. The ego wants to puff itself up, beat its chest like an ape, and scream, “I matter!”
After ulcers came carpal tunnel, the new “badge” of stressed-out desk workers. Yet, carpal tunnel wasn’t nearly as common among typists before computers. The pattern is clear.
We see these kinds of physical disorders that have no real cause. And we usually realize it only after we are already in the grip of this mass psychosis. Today, the epidemic-level proportion of physical symptoms is mostly back pain. Not completely — there may be elbow pain, knee pain, hip pain — but many of these, which have no clear cause like a major accident or surgery, are typically stress-related. They are often caused by suppressing and repressing feelings that we are not comfortable, subconsciously, experiencing consciously. They’re too scary. So our subconscious thinks it’s protecting us by hiding them from us. But it can’t really hide.
It manifests in many different physical ways. Whenever we are trying desperately to latch on to something externally for joy, there is an underlying unhappiness. It can feel safer to ignore that and just try to fill up our lives with drugs and alcohol and parties and all the fun stuff — or work and all the boring stuff — but equally effective at filling our life with external things to avoid the internal.
But one day, that catches up with us. Everybody retires. Everybody takes time off from time to time. And we all know those types of people who can’t enjoy vacations because they are too addicted to work. The only way we can tap into those emotions and thoughts that are just beneath the surface is by quieting the mind. We must get into such a relaxed state that we’re not quite awake, not quite dreaming or sleeping, but in this meditative state — deeply calm, deeply peaceful, and deeply relaxed.
We start to quiet the mind. We put our attention on our breath. When thoughts come in, we just watch them come, watch them go, and bring our attention back to our breath. It is in the thoughts that pop up that we can decipher what’s going on underneath. Sometimes, we need to address something. Sometimes, there’s a really critical inner voice that we discover when we set the distractions aside. Then we can deal with that. Then we can learn how to accept instead of resist. We can learn to embrace instead of always judging. We can start to transform our mindset and our perspective, away from unhappiness and separateness.
All feelings of pride or achievement stem from that feeling of separateness, because we are taking more joy in our own achievements than we would in someone else’s. Slowly, we can move into gratitude, acceptance, and pure love, which is the greatest feeling in the world. It is that healing energy that transforms us, and everyone around us, when we start to look back on our lives and focus more on how much love we gave to others, instead of how much money we gained.
The feeling of not being enough without your successes disappears. In fact, this whole attitude of looking at your life critically disappears because you are bathed in love, and your concern is for others. Your life is filled with so much meaning and purpose because of how much you cared for others. When we live shallow, superficial lives, when we live just for ourselves or our pleasure, it may seem like that’s the way to happiness but there are billions of stories throughout human history that prove the complete opposite.
We are already enough. Against all odds, this universe manifested us into existence, for a brief, fleeting, beautiful moment. And it was a gift. Not a test. Not torture. But a chance to reach our greatest potential. And to have that choice — to walk that path or not. It is up to us what we make of this time here.
We can hold on to things from the past that no longer exist. We can hang on to those good feelings from the past — those promotions, those raises — and try to squeeze as much joy as we can out of those non-existent figments of our imagination. Or we can connect with that source of life within us, bask in the love of this universe, and share that love with others. The choice is up to us.
But one of those paths is infinite, multi-dimensional, mystical, and miraculous.
And the other is an ember from the past — a flame that’s gone out. To experience that deep state of being, we simply have to let go of that which we cling to so hard. We think we’re holding on for dear life, but that very grip is what’s disconnecting us from life. Once we let go, we realize we won’t fall. The universe will support us. And it was that holding on — that tight grip we were afraid to release — that was actually the source of our stress and tension.
To the layman, happiness is dependent on external situations, things, and people. But to the spiritual seeker, it is understood: no one is responsible for our happiness — our joys and sorrows — but us.
