Why we suffer? And wisdom from the Gita on how we can navigate suffering
By Shwetha Sivaraman
Has life been treating you well? A common misconception about inner work and self-mastery is that when you are on this path, everything starts working in your favour. That is far from the truth. We do the inner work to gain self-mastery so we can thrive regardless of whether life circumstances are in our favour.
Krishna doesn’t paint any rosy picture about life or the world in the Gita. Rather he describes it as Dukhalaya and Ashashwatam.
In Chapter 8, verse 15, Krishna says this world is an abode of sorrow – he uses a strong word here Dukhalaya and also goes on to say Ashaswatam – which means transient.
मामुपेत्य पुनर्जन्म दु:खालयमशाश्वतम् ।
नाप्नुवन्ति महात्मान: संसिद्धिं परमां गता: ॥ १५ ॥
mām upetya punar janmaduḥkhālayam aśāśvatam
nāpnuvanti mahātmānaḥsaṁsiddhiṁ paramāṁ gatāḥ 8.15
In a way Krishna says because the world is ever changing and transient, it is an abode of sorrows.
We’ve all experienced suffering and transience in our lives.
We get attached to how we look in our 20s only to loathe our hair and skin when we are in our 30s. We identify in our roles as daughters and wives and when we lose our loved ones we suffer the loss of their presence and our identities in relation to them. We love the food from our nearby restaurant and make a ritual of going there for Sunday lunches only to be disappointed when the chef moves out and the replacement doesn’t cook as well. It can be trivial and mundane or deep and profound. Regardless, we experience change and don’t like it.
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Now, Krishna could have stopped here!
Saying the world is a place full of sorrows so suck it up and deal with it. But then Gita wouldn’t be the transcendental text it is. He goes a step further to say how humans end up suffering in a transient world with a very simple mathematical formula.
When I first heard my Yoga Teacher share this, I couldn’t believe it was that simple. But the more I contemplated and sat with it, the more I realised how on-point the formula was.
Raga + Moha = Shoka. Raga means Attachment. Moha means Delusion. So the formula simply states that any delusory attachment leads to sorrow.
Let’s break it down a bit
Say a B-School graduate Lakshmi gets the most prestigious placement on campus. Lakshmi is celebrated for cracking the interview, being validated as one of the best in her batch in the eyes of her peers and entering the workforce geared for more recognition. With every passing year, she gets more attached to the accolades and recognition and eventually forgets she’s more than just her role and designation. She gets so caught up in her identity as a women leader that she neglects anything that takes her attention away from her fast-tracked growth. She sacrifices her parents, her friends, her relationships, her hobbies, recreation, and everything for the role. One day she gets laid off for no fault of hers. Enter Dukkha. Having spent years attached to the fruits of being a career woman and deluded in totally identifying all of herself with her role, designation, salary, and pincode, the wave of suffering hits her like a Tsunami.
Pick any aspect where you suffer in life and break it down and you’ll realise both raga and moha play a deeper role in the cause of your suffering. And, the path to self-mastery is breaking free from these delusory attachments.
How do we navigate suffering?
- Attach Yourself to Something Higher – Our minds cannot detach just because we ask it to. The nature of the mind is to cling. If we want it to detach from something, we need to give it a higher ideal or a principle to hold on to.
So to detach from your role and designation, find a deeper purpose or meaning or impact you create through your work. To detach from your attachment to being a mother, attach to the larger purpose of being a nurturer in everything you do. This way we weaken our tendency to attach.
- Seek knowledge to break delusions – We remain deluded because we don’t know any better. The only way to break this is to follow our curiosity and keep learning. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the scriptures. It could be music, dance, or any form of creativity I feel connects us with something much more deeper and profound beyond our limited existence and identities. Keep learning and growing to avoid getting deluded.
We all suffer, but to what extent and how quickly we can pick ourselves back up is the journey of self-mastery.
Meraklis Insight
Remember the formula, Raga + Moha cause Shoka. Whenever you catch yourself suffering, ask yourself how attachment and delusion are playing a part in it and explore ways to rewire your outlook so you can suffer less and do what’s needed of you.
