When the Disposition that Releases Fixation is available, Fixation transforms. Fixation can be freely worked with as if navigating a lucid dream.
"Fixation" has almost no positive connotations in English. "Attachment" does. Let me start with that. It's always seemed to me an obfuscation in modern Buddhism to ignore how literally "non-attachment" was understood in traditional Buddhism. To become a monk or serious practitioner you had to sever ties to family, friends, and ordinary work and communal life. That wasn't the end state of non-attachment practice, but it was considered a necessary starting place.
Evolutions in the understanding of non-attachment did occur in later Buddhisms. For example Zen, which I know best, is very concerned with doing ordinary life tasks with wholeheartedness, full engagement, and single-pointed concentration. Dōgen, founder of the Soto Zen traditional, wrote a whole practice manual that is also a concrete set of instructions in how to cook for the monastery.
Even though traditional examples of wholehearted activity in Zen are monastic or martial, I think you can apply the principle and function to modern worldly life (e.g., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The key point is doing things with what's been called "non-attaining mind". It's a version of Mushin or "no-mind mind" applied to activity. It includes the vastness and openness of non-conceptual mind that one realizes in sitting. It adds to that the doing of ordinary life things without a care for what results from them. You burn up all your spirit in the doing. You leave no mental room for experiencing a craving or aversion for what will result from your doing.
Doing things with non-attaining mind is an evolution from the early vision of non-attachment because you're still doing things. Work, family, and non-monastic community pose no problems in principle, as long as you're engaging them with Mushin.
My conceptual problem with this idea has always been that, by itself, the directive to do things with Mushin is silent about what kind of things to do. This came up in a dharma talk I was at once. Someone asked the Soto priest how doing things with non-attaining mind fit in with having personal ambitions or commitments one cared about. The priest gulped and said something to the effect of
When you're cleaning your room, just clean your room. Don't focus on the nice room you'll have at the end.
When you're cooking, just cook. Don't focus on the meal you'll have later.
But this seemed unresponsive to the original question. A human being with a worldly life still has to decide what sequence of things to do with Mushin. People on Zen retreat or in a monastic community don't have to worry about it, because the activity calendar is completely prescribed. They do have moral precepts and commitments to live out one's interpretation of the Bodhisattva vows, but that at point we're being guided as much about particular traditions for dealing with "the relative world" as we are by Mushin.
In answering the practitioner's question to the priest for myself, I come back to the things I ... fixate on. These are self-narratives I can't imagine giving up or wanting to give up. They might be things like I'm the person who can do this job well or I'm the person who's not going to let his mother down.
There's a common view that what practice is supposed to do is stop you from being contracted by self-narratives like this. You contact experience closely in the moment and see that this sense of self—and the stories around it—are a kind of fabrication. The goal of practice then becomes unwinding and freeing oneself from these self-narratives. It becomes about relating to what's going on without self-referentiality or, at least, without the distortion of view that comes from taking the fabrications of one's self-narratives at face value.
I feel like this throws out the baby with the bathwater. For me, the viewpoint of those self-narratives and fixations becomes a way of personally answering the question: what sequence of things should I be doing with Mushin today? When you realize the vast mind of practice and see through the fabrication of a self-narrative, one possibility is that the self-narrative drops away. The other possibility is that it transforms. It becomes a thing in one's mind one is stuck with, but not contracted by.
I don't particularly want to be free of the person who's worried about letting their mother down. Vast mind lets me see that fixation as a fabrication, a story I'm overlaying on experience that is fundamentally free of it. Nothing coming through my sense gates has "letting-down-mother" properties attached to it.
Yet, since becoming more acquainted with vast mind, I'm not particularly contracted by the don't-let-down-mother story that gets overlaid to my experience. Instead, I find it funny. ("Oh, a lapsed Catholic worried about letting his mother down. Call the press.")
But I still inhabit the fixation. It's mine. It—and my other fixations and self-narratives—tell me, in many instances, what I should be doing wholeheartedly. This is why they can have the character of a dream––they're fabricated, not intrinsic to what's streaming through my senses from the external world. But they can have the character of a lucid dream—I'm navigating their narrative overlays on my experience with freedom, non-contracted.