The moment your eyes open from a somewhat successful sleep after a torturous struggle of trying throughout the night, your mind has already rushed to think various scenarios of dealing with the hardships in life. There is no slow progression in the strength of worrying as you slowly wake up, rather it’s like a hard slap the moment you gain consciousness. It feels like there was no cessation of the war even for an instant, you just somehow passed out to become unconscious. When you become aware of your surroundings, you sense the blows again.
Amidst this mayhem, a thought arises Why does my life have to be this hard? What wrong have I done to deserve these endless struggles? How am I going to survive another day like this?
The Changing Times
Brothers and Sisters, this is the reality of life. Suffering is the ground truth! This is Buddha’s first noble truth. When you were going through a good phase of health, prosperity, and relationships, you forgot about it. You built great hopes for your lives to continue being pleasant and absent of hardships. That time of life felt so easy. You were so motivated to do whatever needed to be done. Although there were some struggles you never felt too heavy and burdened. You were agile. You were passionate about cooking, reading, and taking care of yourself. You felt pleased to take care of others.
Beneath those pleasing conditions, the roots of suffering were always there. Your awareness was just focused on what was pleasant. When a loving partner enters your life to make you feel happy or you experience joy by bestowing all affection in raising your kids or your financial situation is healthy enough to feel relaxed, the seeds of suffering due to separation, death, loss, additional burden, etc. are already sown. Impermanence is the guiding principle of phenomenal existence and change in the present situation is bound to happen. It can lead either to a better or a worse situation that is beyond your control.
Now every day of your life has become a struggle. Everything seems out of place and you are battling constantly with all activities. Unpleasantness has been piling up to squeeze you under its growing heaviness. Suffering has become so obvious to your consciousness that all you see and feel is dissonance in life. Mind is churning 24*7 generating thoughts on how to improve the situation or why things are so bad. You feel so burdened and responsible for all the suffering of your people. You are demotivated and tend to help others only out of obligation. You feel lost and don’t know what your passions are anymore.
When your consciousness is trapped in suffering, time passes extremely slowly. You expect hard for the difficulties to pass soon but time never ceases this opportunity to tease you. You think of a plan to act patiently but the perception of this slow passing of time with insufficient results makes you restless. You then decide to act more with desperate attempts and an expectation of results with the snap of your fingers. When there are no visible changes in the condition you again fall back to the depressing thoughts of “Why my life is this hard?”, “What did I do to deserve this?”.
Why My Life has to be this hard?
External conditions change according to the rules of nature. Every being changes at a different pace and goes in different directions based on their pre-dispositions, ability, and inherent nature. The market situation, job circumstance, health condition, relationship status, burdening responsibility, etc. will follow the changing tune of the divine orchestra of nature. Within this system of continuous dynamism with its countless moving parts, you fixate on one particular outcome that would be pleasant to you. Even if this particular condition arises, some component of it will have to change sooner rather than later resulting in dissonance.
It’s not only you. Everyone’s life is filled with struggles with some or the other kind. Someone’s hardships in life are more visible than others. At this point, someone is fighting more with life than earlier. The rich people are suffering from the fear of loss and the poor people from the expectations of abundance. Healthy people suffer from the fear of getting disease and diseased one’s from the fear of death. A vendor is suffering from jealousy of getting fewer customers than his competitor and the customer is suffering from the anger of not being treated like god. Look around closely dear, everyone is suffering! But everyone feels only their suffering.
Your consciousness is trapped in your suffering, therefore, you can only feel that. By default, humans tend to be captivated by their suffering. It is the design by nature. Humans undergo hardships in life and difficulties to evolve from their state of being. Change and evolution can be seen in nature happening all the time. A flower changes into a fruit, the fruit is carried to another place by an animal, a seed gets planted, and another tree comes up. The seed has to bear the hardships of pressure from its external cover and the soil above it to evolve into a plant.
Hardships in life present Opportunities for Evolution
The evolution of the human body has already happened and you are endowed with a magnificent physical structure to use in so many ways, but now the next phase of progression has to be that of the mind. It doesn’t mean intellectual alone. Intellectual is just one part of it. The mind has to break through its known emotional, mental, and psychological patterns and conditions. In the seed example, when the life force was trying to pierce through the hard coverings it also must have struggled. If there was no struggle then it was lying dormant and not trying to make any advancement. But the divine will makes sure that it doesn’t stay dormant forever.
When your life is pleasantly going by with the fulfillment of your wishes, the mind stays within its comfort zone. It continues to operate with its set patterns and conditioning. The hardships in life are the result of your life force trying to break through this conditioning. If you notice, it’s all in the mind. If you are suffering in your job and can’t leave it yet, then you are in the process of disintegrating your mental condition that has adjusted to the comfort of the safety that the job has provided. Every such situation, however critical it may seem is a challenge as well as an opportunity for you to evolve. Worrying is a natural instinct of the mind that needs to be changed. You can read more about it here.
Your mind will always try to avoid difficulties and it is its inherent nature. The life force that gave rise to you is a part of the collective life force of the universe and it has to flow along and dance along. Wherever the divine will wishes it to move, it has to move accordingly. Your separate independent identity is a myth that has come into being from those mental patterns. This independent mythical identity safeguards these patterns and resists what may bring the change. The violent internal battle only results in pain and suffering that can only be avoided by surrendering to this higher life force.
Surrender doesn’t mean Inaction
This doesn’t mean you should step back into the mode of inaction. There are multiple views regarding this. In Shankaracharya’s school of thought, if self-realization is the ultimate goal, one has to retire from all worldly actions. The pursuit of self-realization is altogether a different discipline that intends to take you out of worldly matters and therefore transcends all societal laws. However, the goal here is not self-realization but inculcating practical spirituality to improve your life. You are probably already doing whatever needs to be done. You haven’t slipped into lethargy and doing nothing out of laziness. You are already doing so many things to manage this situation.
You are steadfast in your duties only because you anticipate outcomes that could change all these difficulties and bring back pleasant situations once more in your life. This is where surrender should happen, unattaching yourself from all the results of your actions yet doing all that is needed to be done. Controlling your life to drive towards pleasantness alone and you as an individual can anyhow do it is the mental condition that needs to be shattered. Accepting all the outcomes be it the death of a loved one, separation, defeat, or victory without craving for things of your attachment, or averting things that make you feel angry, jealous & fearful is the real surrender.
Why should you act at all, If you have to let go of all your personal ambitions, pleasantness, and unpleasantness? Action is the external manifestation of your life force, which is in constant flux. With your willpower, you can choose to become dormant but if you don’t know how to control your life force yet, inaction results in further dissonance. You are part of a machine that is running constantly and if you decide to stop at once more friction could lead to aggravated situations. As a gear of this machine, if you let go of your whims to move in a different orientation then harmony is restored.
Practical Implications
As far as knowledge is concerned, you know it. You probably have heard and understood Bhagavad Gita’s essence of leaving behind the fruits of action as the way of life. Hearing about these wonderful philosophies gives us respite for a day or maybe a week but pain and suffering hit back with all its might. Dry philosophy without effort is of no use. You can read about swimming from multiple books and understand the principles very well but unless you have jumped into the water to swim you really can’t swim. You are dealing with strong conditioning and require consistent effort to break through them.
Building Compassion slowly weakens the stronghold of ego principle thus allowing it to surrender. Reading through inspiring articles, books, and life stories of saints shifts your focus from your suffering to the suffering of all beings. It serves as a good starting point to carry the momentum. There are multiple ways in which you can involve yourself in compassionate acts through philanthropic activities, offering selfless services through welfare camps, donating your used items to the needy, feeding animals and homeless people. There are so many helpless suffering people who are in way worse conditions than yours and you could bring a moment of respite in their lives.
Practice gratitude for what you have. Remind yourself to be grateful for today’s meal, and enough resources being available to ensure physical safety and comfort. It is the habit of the mind to return to worrisome thoughts. You have to act intelligently to constantly remind yourself to be grateful for all the small things you take for granted. This can be practiced through mindful breathing. Sit down quietly for some time and just focus on your in-breath and outbreath. Catch hold of your breath at least for 1 minute after every 1 hour. This releases tension and stiffness and prevents the accumulation of worrisome thoughts.
Bhakti or devotion is a powerful tool for training the mind to enable surrender. This may not apply to all as many of us are not aligned with the idea of having faith, which is perfectly fine. Numerous tools/methods are there to invoke spiritual growth according to one’s predisposition. But those who are aligned or want to try this method can practice japa. Japa is a method of repeating the name of the higher power you believe in, or a mantra(usually 4 worded mantras like Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Namo Bhagavate Basudevaya, etc). You can repeat it aloud or mentally. Usually, it is accompanied by a counting bead necklace(mala) to keep your mind focused.
When you shed a drop or two of tear just expressing your hardships in life to your beloved almighty, not as a complaint and demand to rectify the situation as soon as possible but simply sharing your challenges as a child would express to his father or mother, you shed the burdens of your heart along with it.
Regular practice of Tai-chi, Yoga, Pranayama, Vipassana, and Meditation takes your mind away from victimhood and allows you to see the larger picture from a macroscopic point of view. You gain insights about the life force and its operations. With prolonged and consistent practice you tap into the power to control this life force flowing through you.
All these practices are meant to help you break your present conditioning and set you on the path of spiritual growth that takes you beyond all the sufferings of the material world. The key is your willpower to allow these techniques to do their work through dedicated practice and consistency. You have to stay motivated to come to these basics every new day, no matter how many times your mind takes you away on its fantasy ride. Your mind is not going to yield with just a couple of days or a couple of months of active motivation, for most successful practitioners it has taken years of dedication.
May the light of dharma show you the path to overcome darkness!
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