How do we overcome the fear of loss?
We overcome the fear of loss by recognizing that nothing is ours to begin with. The fear of loss is rooted in the illusion that I actually own something. If I don’t own anything, I’m not afraid of losing it. For example, I don’t have a fear of losing my diamond earrings. Why? Because I don’t have diamond earrings! The fear of losing something is founded upon the idea that we have it. But when we think more deeply, we realize that nothing is ours. Every single thing, every single person, every ability is being lent to us.
Look over the course of your life. You gain so much—you learn how to be a fantastic cricket player, a great doctor, an engineer. But give it a few decades, and as the body and brain start to degenerate, you’re no longer a fantastic athlete, your hands shake too much to be able to perform surgery, you no longer remember engineering equations.
We’re so attached to our beauty, our degrees, our titles, our careers, but we lose those anyway. Even if nothing drastic happens and we simply age, we would still lose everything. Everyone retires. Everyone’s body starts to degenerate at pretty much the same rate. The same is true of our money. We’ll eventually lose it, whether now or once we pass over. God may decide to give us a lesson a little bit earlier—the stock market might crash. But that’s just to teach us: ‘You thought it was yours. I needed to remind you: it was never yours.’
It’s not that God took something from us. People tend to bemoan their fate and ask, ‘Why did God take everything from me?’ But it was never actually ours; it was lent to us for a while.
The same is true about our relationships. Eventually, whether through breakup, betrayal, divorce or death, we’re going to lose everyone. It’s sad, but until and unless we recognize that as an ultimate truth of life, we can’t really live, because we’re grasping at something that is slipping inevitably through our fingers. Instead, if we are aiming for enlightenment, spiritual awakening, self-realization or even just peace in life, we must ask ourselves: what is it that I don’t lose? If I’m going to lose everything, including my loved ones, then being attached to these things is an exercise in futility. I am going to lose them regardless of how hard I try to hold on. So the question becomes: what should I be attached to? What should I make so dear that I become afraid of losing that? What is it that’s not going to degenerate, divorce me or die? The answer is: the spiritual connection, the Divine. And here’s what’s beautiful: it’s not the Divine as separate from your loved ones, or instead of your loved ones. It’s the Divine through your loved ones, and through everything in the natural world, because everything is pervaded by the Divine.
This does not mean, of course, that we love our loved ones any less or care about them any less. We don’t pronounce: ‘OK, honey, I’m not going to love you and be attached to you any more; I’m going to love God instead.’ What actually happens is we realize: ‘OK, instead of being desperately attached to that really beautiful young face, the way I look in those clothes or the way I dance, I’m going to be attached to my essence, spirit, and the Divine that flows through me.’ The path forward becomes shifting our connection to the spirit, the consciousness, the essence, the Divine in our loved ones, rather than to just what they do and say, how they look, how much money they make, etc.
This is the only way I have found to overcome that fear of loss. I can cut myself off from life, deciding that I’m not going to care about anything, but all that does is contract the heart. What the heart does is love, because that’s what it knows how to do, and if I prevent it from loving for long enough, it atrophies. It becomes hard and closed off, and that is not the way to live. Instead, I can love your essence, your divinity, God through you. I can certainly enjoy your form or my form at this moment. God wouldn’t have created so much beauty if we weren’t supposed to enjoy it. But we don’t get attached, just as we don’t get attached to a sunset because we know we’ve got about forty-five seconds before it dips below the horizon. We must never fall prey to the illusion that by grasping hard enough, we can prevent the sun or the moon from setting. So we focus on that which is unchanging, the presence of the Divine.
When we’ve experienced hard times and hard things, how can we still open our hearts?
No spiritual scripture or Guru promises that if you keep your heart open and follow a spiritual path, you will never be hurt, or no one you love will ever leave you, or everything will always go your way. We must open our hearts despite the near surety that we will be hurt, because to live with a closed heart is to die while alive.
There is a story of a man who goes to his Guru after his son has died. The man is as miserable as one can imagine. He’s furious at God, and cries, ‘I’ve been a good, devout person. How can you hurt me in this way?’ He goes to his Guru and says, ‘You’re my Guru. Bring my son back to life! This is unfair, this isn’t right, I shouldn’t be hurt like this, bring him back to life!’
The Guru says, ‘OK, you’re right. You are a good devotee, you shouldn’t be hurt in any way that is different from the way other people have been hurt. I will bring your son back to life, but I need one thing from you. I need you to bring me one grain of rice from the home of someone who has never lost a loved one. With that grain of rice, I will bring your son back to life.’ So the man rushes out to find that family. He goes from house to house, village to village, and of course he cannot find any house in which they haven’t lost a loved one. Finally, he comes back to his Guru, bows at his feet and admits, ‘I’m so sorry, forgive me for demanding that of you. I’ve spent the last several days immersed in the pain of others who have also lost loved ones, and I realize this is everywhere.’
In life, sometimes we lose. We get hurt. It’s the nature of the universe, it’s the nature of nature. If we love a certain type of tree, we can worship its green leaves as much as we want, but come autumn, those leaves will fall to the ground. We may love the summertime, but we’re going to lose it to winter. We may love the snow, but we’re going to lose it to spring. We can love our youth, but we’re going to lose it to middle age and then old age.
Whatever we love, we lose. It’s the nature of life and we have to accept it as it is. An open heart is my choice to accept the incredible call of the universe to join it in co-creating my life. Closing my heart doesn’t change the nature of nature; it simply means that I’m in pain every day, rather than just on the days that I lose something. Closing my heart means 365 days a year, I hurt. Opening my heart means I may hurt sometimes, but certainly not all the time. It is my only opportunity to truly experience love and joy.
We don’t get joy by merely getting up every day, having a shower, getting dressed. We don’t get joy from hugging our money, car or house. Has anyone ever actually embraced their house? Or the fender of their car? Or their wallet?
The things we embrace are people, animals, trees, things that are living. Yes, we will lose them some day, they may also hurt us knowingly or unknowingly, maybe just by dying, maybe while living. Or, we’re going to hurt them. But our only chance to experience real life, any joy, any meaning in life, is in staying open-hearted. To close our hearts is to say no to life itself, to turn down the invitation of the universe.
It’s not always easy, I know that. This is where courage is needed. We usually think of the words ‘bravery’ and ‘courage’ as synonyms, but they’re not. Soldiers are brave because they have steel plates shielding their chest, steel masks over their heads and 20-foot spears in their arms. They are able to approach a warring army with bravery because they are armed and protected.
The word ‘courage’ comes from the Latin root ‘cor ’, meaning heart. It’s the same root as seen in the French word for heart—‘coeur ’. The root of courage is literally an open heart. So courage becomes our only choice. It’s not a matter of ‘how to’; it’s a matter of ‘I have to’. So what we do is we just fill our lives with as much love, joy and meaning as we possibly can. Yes, some of it is going to hurt us, but if I can fill myself with enough love and joy, where it’s not coming from one direction alone, then when I feel hurt by one person, or lose a pet, or the leaves on my tree fall down, at least I’ve got other sources.
You should love people, nature, your work and spiritual practice, but the safest thing you can do if you don’t want to be hurt is to love God. God’s not going anywhere. God’s not going to betray you, tell your secrets, leave you for someone else or insult you. Saints and sages who lived in caves were blissful. They had no family, no friends and no social life. You’d think they must have been lonely. But their inner connection was so strong that even living far from other humans, with just the river, the deer and snakes, the sun and moon for company, they were blissful, peaceful and fulfilled.
This doesn’t mean you should go live in a cave, but that inner connection inoculates us from the pain of loss, betrayal and loneliness, because we’ve got something that grounds and anchors us, something deeper than that which we’ve lost. Imagine having your best friend always with you, then imagine it a hundred times better than that! Remember that beautiful line in the prayers we sing every morning that I told you about? ‘Tu akele nahin pyare, Ram tere saath mein. ’ My dear, my love, you’re not alone, you’re never alone, God is always with you.
Everybody else may hurt you, everybody else may betray you, but that spiritual connection carries you at these times in your life. That’s what gives you the courage to keep your heart open. It doesn’t matter what name you use for God or how you worship the Divine. When we connect deeply, we become a child in the Mother’s arms—absolutely fearless.
How do we deal with death? How do we deal with people around us dying?
Death is one of those things over which we have no control. We actually have very little control over most aspects of life, but this is especially apparent with regard to death. The only way to deal with it is through acceptance, because there is no alternative. Our lack of acceptance isn’t going to change it.
Usually, we think that if we don’t accept something that bothers us—our child wants to marry someone we don’t approve of, our loved one is having an affair, we’re about to get fired from our job—somehow our anger, silence or pain is going to undo it. So we live mostly in this illusion of our control.
The truth is, we have almost no control over anything that happens in life, other than our own actions. But death is the area where that hits home most clearly. We can’t convince anyone not to die, we can’t go on a hunger strike, we can’t cut anyone off financially for not doing what we want, there’s nothing we can do to try to prevent death from happening when its time has come.
There are so many aspects to the pain of death. One is the loss of the loved one. Another is the loss of the sense of control and faith, and of understanding the universe. We’re usually not quite so torn apart if a loved one passes away at ninety-five or hundred, especially if it happens peacefully in their sleep. We miss them, of course, we’re sad, but we understand that their body was done functioning. However, when it’s someone who has not reached such an age, we feel cheated by the universe. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s not fair.’
Whether we accept it or not, deal with it well or not, try to manipulate God or not, there is nothing we can do. The beauty and power of that awareness is that it so directly brings home the truth that we’re all going to die. Not just that person. I can’t do anything even for myself. One day I will die.
When we sit at the sacred Ganga aarti ceremony every night at Parmarth Niketan, just across and slightly downriver is the cremation ground for Rishikesh. Sometimes, if you look out downriver, you can see a fire going at the time. Usually, during aarti, I keep my eyes closed, but if I ever see a cremation taking place, I always keep my eyes open, focused and meditating on that fire.
The easiest thing would be to ignore it. We’re over here celebrating; death is safely on the other side of the river. That is cutting ourselves off, though, from the fullness of existence. The deeper, fuller way is to realize that yes, today we’re celebrating and someone else is mourning, someone else is burning, but tomorrow or the next day or a few years from now, it’s going to be us standing over a burning pyre, mourning a loved one, and then tomorrow or the day after, a few years or even a few decades from now, it’s going to be our body burning in the pyre. To hold all of that awareness at the same time is an incredible, deep meditation, to stay fully present in the aarti, in a joy-filled celebration of life, and also to allow ourselves to be there simultaneously in the cremation, to be the mourner and the one in the pyre.
Can you be burning and celebrating in the same moment in the same consciousness? Can you hold both of those in your awareness at the same time? It’s not easy, but you can achieve great depth in your consciousness if you can get it to happen. Our consciousness expands so fully in that moment that we realize, ‘Wow, this is all part of the package deal of life. The joy, the celebration, the mourning, the burning.’ Otherwise, the river seems like a very safe barrier, but just a few feet above the water, the flames of their cremation mingle with the flames of our aarti and you can no longer tease apart which was a flame of death and which a flame of life. That’s the only way to deal with death that I know of.
It’s also, according to saints and sages, the way to deal with life. One of the deepest, core tenets of the Indian spiritual tradition holds that until you can die, until in your consciousness you are able to fully understand and accept (you don’t have to love it) that this is part of the package deal of life, you can’t truly live, because then life amounts to just running from death. That’s the source of the restlessness, anxiety and fear.
In terms of mourning the death of loved ones, hold on to the knowledge that when they were alive, it was their spirit you loved. On the deepest level, you did not love only their body. It was their spirit, their essence, their soul you loved. If they got plastic surgery and looked different, you’d still love them. If they had to get an arm amputated, you wouldn’t love them any less. What you love is the essence and spirit, and that still remains, even after death.
Just as our loved ones’ bodies change so many times during their lives, as they grow old, after death, the body again changes form. It goes back to the earth, but the Soul hasn’t gone anywhere. The Soul was never born, the Soul doesn’t die. That which you loved is still here. Please know that the connection you had, that love you experienced, is still here because it’s in you. Allow yourself to feel that.
Sadly, our culture encourages wallowing in the feeling that your loved ones are gone. If you say, ‘Oh, I can still hear them, they still talk to me’, people will tell you, ‘Get over it.’ But the truth is, you still can hear them. Not with these physical ears, of course. What you are hearing is not vibrating sounds in your tympanic membrane, but their inner voice, which is still in your inner ear.
Our culture is so focused on the body that people will tell you that you need therapy if you think you can still hear departed loved ones or still feel them with you. They will say that you’re not letting go and need help. Well, why? You spent so many years loving someone, why should you let go? What is there to let go of? Their soul that is interlocked with your soul, the love that is still in you, how do you let go of that? Can you somehow remove the love from you? You can’t. There’s actually nothing to let go of other than the concept that who you loved existed only in the physical form. That myth is all we need to banish. Of course, keep loving them. Love is beautiful, and what you loved anyway is their soul and spirit. That’s still here. Love the memory of their body, but love the presence of their soul.
Why do we feel depressed when we lose someone or something important to us? How can we deal with that depression?
Many times in life, sad things happen. Maybe a loved one dies, or you get divorced, or you lose your job, or something else happens due to which, naturally, we feel sad. Society has now become so habituated to seeing depression as an illness. I know a countless number of people who have told me that they have been prescribed antidepressants in response to tragic life circumstances, the most natural response to which is grief.
The response to a sad occurrence is to be sad. It is not natural to feel bouncy, ecstatic or joyous in the midst of death, loss and tragedy.
So we need to give ourselves time and space to mourn and be sad. Mourning is necessary not only when someone dies. We mourn loss of opportunity, loss of relationships, loss of youth. There’s so much in our lives that we lose that precipitates a natural and legitimate sadness.
It’s really important not to lump every moment, week or month of sadness into the category of clinical depression. We must first ask ourselves: ‘What have I experienced? What’s going on? What have I lost?’ That loss could even just be the loss of an idea. We had an idea of what our life was going to be like, or even what an evening or a weekend would be like. When that doesn’t happen, there’s a moment of mourning, a natural sadness. This is the moment we need to encourage ourselves to go through before we can move on healthily with our lives.
In contrast, when one has everything, when nothing has happened to cause depression and yet one is feeling depressed, there are many ways to look at it. I will address just two of these ways. The first has to do with the brain. There are certain chemical imbalances and fluctuations that we associate with depression. But there is a difference between being associated with and being a cause of something.
We know that depression is associated with (not necessarily caused by ) certain imbalances in the level of certain chemicals in the brain. We know that when we give people medicine that changes certain chemistry in the brain, depression often lifts.
Another thing that we know is that people who have experienced trauma in their childhood, even if it was fifteen, twenty or thirty years before they started to experience depression, tend to have similar imbalances of chemicals in their brains. This leads us to say that trauma in childhood can be linked to the depression experienced later in life, which is associated with chemical imbalances.
For this reason, I do not advise people to categorically refuse antidepressant medication. If you have diabetes and there are imbalances in the insulin production levels of your pancreas, you would understand the benefit of taking medicine to balance your insulin. In the same way, sometimes medicines are needed and are deeply helpful in rebalancing the chemicals in the brain and bloodstream. Sometimes medication is exactly the life-raft that someone needs to prevent themselves from drowning in the ocean of depression.
A common downside though, and one worth contemplating, is that many antidepressant medicines limit the range of your emotions. If on one side of the emotional spectrum there is great joy and on the other side there is great despair, antidepressants chop off both ends of the spectrum, leaving you somewhere in the middle feeling ‘nothing’.
Even in situations where you are physically programmed to feel joy, you may feel nothing.
The other way of thinking about depression, if you are not going to take medication, is to realize that you have to find ways to experience joy again. One of the easiest and most effective ways is to help others. One of the greatest prescriptions for a general state of depression is service. In psychology, we study that some types of depression lead to people feeling as if it is all happening to them, that they are worse off than others.
Serving others, helping those less fortunate, is a fantastic way to realize just how much we have to give. It works best when it is interactive. It can be with children, animals, old people, anyone, but you should try to serve a living being—a plant, an animal or a person with whom you can connect, whom you are serving and whose life is getting better because of your presence and help. It is very difficult to do this when in the throes of depression, but it’s very rewarding and effective.
When you smile and hug a child who is deprived of his parents’ love, when you visit an elderly person whom nobody has visited in six months, when you plant something and water it and see it slowly growing, when you cook food and give it to homeless people—these moments of service are precious. When you string enough of them together, they can make you feel ecstatic in your connection to humanity and your efficacy in bringing light to others. Lying in bed at night, you’ll be able to say, ‘It was a good day.’
How do we get over the pain of someone leaving us? Someone whom we built a life around and trusted?
We don’t get over it. What happens is that who we are expands enough to include the experience. It’s no longer a hole within us, but we are able to make room for that pain and for a joyful, peaceful life as well.
Just like the sting of any other pain, physical or emotional, the sting of the pain you feel when someone leaves you also goes away. The sensation of a knife digging in your heart goes away. But the love that you felt, and still feel, doesn’t go away, and there’s no reason for it to.
Your love is still here. Can you just for a moment allow your heart to feel it? Without the commentary? That love didn’t go away with that person who left you. You’re still holding on to it. What happened is that you were habituated to experiencing that love in the presence of a specific person. That person’s presence was connected in your mind to the love. Now that person has left you. But you have the love without that person’s presence, the love is still there.
The brain plays all kinds of tricks on us. It will tell you that the love is gone. But it hasn’t; the love is with you. All that’s gone is the familiarity of the one you identified with the love. In that person’s presence, through that person as a medium, you were able to plant and nourish and nurture this seed of love within you that has grown and grown over time. The person may be gone, but the love that you nourished and nurtured is still there.
This is really important to know, because when the pain is fresh, the love is linked with it because of the associations in the mind. But try, in your meditation, to sit quietly for a moment with your hands on your heart, feeling the presence of the love, but with the mind so quiet that it doesn’t have a chance to start its commentary (‘He left you’, ‘She left you’, etc.), and all you do is experience the love. You’ll know it’s still there. Whether a person leaves us by choice, whether they betray or cheat or abandon us, or leave us because they leave their body, in every case, the love is still ours.
The other most important point is: it’s not your fault. There’s nothing you could have or should have done differently. That person’s karmic package was such that they were blessed with your presence, and were supposed to be blessed with it for only a certain amount of time. You came into their lives and you played a beautiful role, but in their karmic journey that seed wasn’t yet ripe enough to fully grow into that tree of love with you. Sadly, we don’t have control over other people’s karmic packages. It would be so nice if our parents, spouses, in-laws, children, everybody did what we wanted them to—if they loved us, stayed with us, were honest with us, and didn’t hurt us. Unfortunately, that isn’t a power that any of us has been given.
So what you can do, instead, is realize that the love is still with you, and allow yourself to feel it. It’s there. Only your identification with the owner of this love needs to change. You are the owner of this love, not someone else.