When your mind is expecting something in the future or regretting the past, you are not in the moment. But when you are centered, you are totally in the moment. So when you are eating, you can enjoy every bite. Every look, every sight is fresh and new. Your love is like the first love. You look at everything like it is the first time.
The term ‘dispassion’ can also be misunderstood and appear so dry. People who are melancholic or sad think that they are being dispassionate. They run away from the world and say that they have renounced it. That is not renunciation.
Dispassion is something more precious, refined and more valuable in life. There are several types of dispassion. You are dispassionate because you realize the misery in the world. The events in life — the pain, the suffering one experience’s or sees — brings dispassion.
The second type of dispassion is born out of the desire to reach something higher. Some consider dispassion as a path to enlightenment. If you renounce something here you gain something out there. Those who are seeking enlightenment practice austerities and take vows for a better place in heaven.
The third type of dispassion comes out of wisdom or knowledge. A broader understanding of the transient nature of things brings a state of non-attachment to any events, objects, people or situations, that lets you remain calm and unperturbed.
Dispassion does not take you away from joy. It gives the joy which nothing else can give. Because you are so totally in the moment, every moment is a joyful experience.