What is the difference between looking for something and running away from something?
There are always two ways of getting to a place. One is to move towards where you want to go, and the other is getting there by moving away from something that lies in the other direction.
For example, in order to get to Rishikesh from Delhi, I can focus on Rishikesh and find a vehicle to get me there. Or if I hate Delhi, I do my best to get away from it. If I happen to be pushing against Delhi in the northern direction and I do it enough, I’ll end up in Rishikesh. The end result is the same, but they are two very distinct paths.
This is what we’re looking at when we talk about the difference between being pulled towards something versus running from something else. Some people come on to a spiritual path because they want to experience the Divine. Life may be great but they want something more, they want to expand their consciousness and connect with who they really are.
Another way to come to the spiritual path, though, is if we’re really hurt in life, we move to an ashram, start meditating, take up yoga and embrace a spiritual path.
If I find myself on a spiritual path only because I’m running away from something, it’s not going to go very deep. It’ll last only as long as my pain is there. Maybe someone broke my heart, maybe I lost a loved one or I was fired from my job. It stings, and in order to get away from that sting, I start meditating. I move to an ashram and join a spiritual community. If my agenda is only being free of the pain which broke my heart, then the minute that pain heals, which it inevitably will, I discover, oh, I don’t really like living in an ashram, or, oh, I’m actually way too busy to keep up my meditation practice. What you find is that the spiritual way of life was simply an escape. True, it is better than alcohol or drugs or binge-watching TV serials, but this way of adopting the spiritual life doesn’t really take you into the depths of what spirituality can offer.
There is also another possibility. You could get on to the spiritual path in response to something that’s happened, perhaps pushing things away, but if, once you are on the spiritual path, you actually allow it to touch and expand your heart, then it doesn’t matter why you got in.
A spiritual life is one focused on spirit, while material life is one focused on matter. In spiritual life, you focus on essence rather than form. You focus on the soul, the spirit, the Truth of who you are, rather than the vehicle that you’ve come in. If you allow yourself to be really open to that, it’s going to transform you, regardless of how or why you got into it.
Sometimes, spirituality is also used just as a Band-Aid for our brokenness: ‘I don’t want to think about something that’s hurting me, so I will just do my mantra instead.’ In some ways, that’s a great practice. One of the great benefits of having a mantra is that when you find your mind going off in dysfunctional, non-helpful, pain-inducing directions, you can chant a mantra instead. But if there’s something really important in your life you need to look at, the answer is not to ignore it and just chant your mantra.
So, whether you run towards it or come to it by running away from something behind you, don’t worry. The question now is: once you’re on the spiritual path, how do you open yourself fully to the power, the possibility of where you are, and enable your life to be fuller, richer and deeper through your spiritual practice?
Why is a spiritual life sometimes painful? Isn’t it supposed to be only joyful?
There are no mistakes in the universe. This doesn’t mean, however, that everything feels good. We were never promised a life without pain. There’s no scripture I know of in which God says, ‘Come to Me and I’ll make sure you never get fired from your job’, or ‘Come to Me and I’ll make sure everyone always does exactly what you want, when you want it’, or ‘Come to Me and I promise you’ll never get sick or lose a loved one’. We were never promised anything like this. A spiritual life is not an inoculation against poverty, failure or loss.
What a spiritual life promises us is the opportunity and ability to discover who we are. Yes, along the way there are going to be moments of pain as our way of knowing and understanding gets rearranged.
I remember saying to Pujya Swamiji in the beginning, through streams of tears, ‘Nobody ever told me that when you annihilate my ego, you take my heart with it!’ We talk so frequently about the annihilation of the ego on the spiritual path, and that sounds really good. But we don’t realize how the arms of the ego, like an octopus, have wrapped themselves around so much of how we identify ourselves, including our emotions and our hearts. It doesn’t always feel good, just as having a tumour removed does not feel good. But no one with cancer would ever say, ‘Forget it, Doctor, the surgery is going to be too painful, I don’t like being in a hospital.’ We know that removing the tumour is critical to survival.
When we’re on the path and it doesn’t feel good, when in meditation we find ourselves face-to-face with our own darkness and shadows, it feels a lot better to run from that. We need to understand, though, that we’re here for a reason and must allow ourselves to really open up. Underneath it all, it’s beautiful. It is nothing but grace.