Aften you will hear people saying that they can feel the pain of the other. Think about it. Can you really feel someone else’s pain? You may be grieved by their pain and feel sad for them, but can you feel their pain? No. Your pain is your own and someone else’s pain is his/her own, but someone else’s grief becomes yours when you connect with them emotionally.

Both pain and grief cause suffering and amount to cancelling out your negative karmas. While the origin of pain is within you, the source of grief is usually someone else. People tell me that pain is better than grief since it can be cured by medicines while grief takes a long time to heal, and sometimes may leave a permanent scar. You will be surprised to know, it is actually the opposite. It is very simple to get out of grief. Pain, on the other hand, has to be endured. It is a misconception that medicines cure your pain, there have been enough studies on medicine and their mechanism to show that in the long run medicine causes more harm than good. If you still want to go the medicine way, then take poison; your grief too will disappear.

We relate to our body as the different body parts that are visible to us but hardly anyone is aware of that which runs the body that you see, it is only a select few who with regular practice of Sanatan Kriya and Ashtang Yog are able to develop the senses to see the etheric body and energy centers. The source of grief is outside your body, it relates to the emotional center, the solar plexus, located between the navel and chest region. This center forms emotional connections with the people you meet through the day in the form of narrow tubes. You must have observed that if you see an accident on the road or visit someone in the hospital, you feel low…it is simply their grief being transmitted to you through the connections you form with them. It is ironic that those who give emotional counseling are the ones who are most troubled emotionally, because they are constantly forming connections with aggrieved individuals who pass on their grief to them. To get out of grief all you need to do is cut connections with the person who is the source of your grief and visualize him/her going away from you. Your grief will disappear in a matter of few minutes.

Yet, pain is better than grief. Why? Because when you are in pain you think of God, you ask him to relieve you of the pain but when you are in grief, you think of a way to get out of it, you look for solutions and do not remember God with the same intensity. The impulse of grief gets transmitted very easily, every person possesses the capacity of giving you grief, but nobody except yourself can give you pain. The more aggrieved you are due to others, the more connections you have formed with them and the more you are tied to the physical (or the unreal) and away from God (real). So pain takes you closer to God while grief takes you further away from him.

That is why yogsutras mention different ways of putting the body through pain, and not grief. In fact, yogis after a stage stop interacting with people and live in isolation because it is natural for the body to form connections with those you meet. If there is no impulse from the outside, your body will not react and it will not feel anything. Is it necessary to feel sad for someone else?

People tell me it is important to share the grief of others as it motivates you to do something for them. This is the greatest avidya (falsehood). You should in fact remain unaffected by someone else’s grief. The more you get motivated by someone else’s sorrow, the more you tie yourself to the physical by establishing connections with them. Whatever suffering or grief an individual is going through is because of his/her own karmas, they have to bear it to balance out their karmas. There are many people who approach Dhyan Ashram repeatedly for healing their grief, at times we just do not respond. Why? Because these people have made it their habit, whenever they are sad, they ask for a healing. They forget that the grief they are going through is because of their karmas, a person may stop it for sometime with the power of his/her yogshakti but after that time period ends, it will come back in some other shape or form because you have to bear the effect of your karmas, you cannot escape it. The healers never refuse someone in pain but if they keep on removing someone’s grief, the person becomes habitual to it. It might seem like a convenient option but it will only take you to greater hells because you will neither think nor work towards improving your karmas, rather you will keep on stockpiling your negative karmas by preventing them from fructifying.

—To be continued

—The writer Yogi Ashwini Ji is the head of Dhyan Foundation, Delhi. For details contact: ashwiniyogi@yahoo.co.in