The wisdom texts of yoga encourage us to respond to the alternating appearances of happiness and distress by tolerating them without being disturbed.
As Krishna tells us in the Bhagavad-gita,
Cultivating a constructive sense of detachment is how we learn to tolerate whatever good or evil comes our way, but the one thing a yogi doesn’t tolerate is the suffering of others.
Most of the time, our attempts to alleviate suffering are directed at the immediate material causes of suffering such as violence, scarcity, natural disasters, and so on.
Yoga wisdom tells us there’s also an efficient or root cause for suffering that ultimately has to be addressed if our attempts to alleviate suffering are to bear lasting fruit.
Attending to the root cause isn’t an excuse to ignore the material cause. In other words, taking care of the immediate need is as important as, and may be a necessary precondition to, taking care of the ultimate cause.
And it most certainly isn’t a rationalization for ignoring the world’s problems on the plea that the best service we can do for the world is to work on ourselves.
Working on our own spiritual development is important and necessary, but not just as an end in and of itself, as if a pre-occupation with our personal growth will bring us the peace and freedom we seek.
On the contrary, our spirituality provides a strong foundation for engaging with the world and spiritualizing our engagement with the world is precisely what yoga wisdom recommends as a more complete and powerful means of self-realization.
For spiritual activists, our yoga is as much about serving others as it is about purifying our own hearts because the former is the means to the latter.
And, for a spiritual activist, doing what we can to alleviate the immediate material causes of suffering goes hand-in-hand with addressing the root cause of suffering.
We may not get the results that we hope for. Sometimes the suffering of others is beyond our control, too stubborn to be displaced, or too big overcome.
Still, we make an effort because it’s our duty to try; if we see something, we have to do something.
And we don’t get discouraged because the benefit of our personal spiritual practices is the development of compassionate detachment; the ability to serve others from a position of equanimity in both happiness and distress.
Here are some personal exercises that can help you develop a balance of compassion and detachment and integrate your spiritual practice with an active engagement with the world:
- Mindful Breathing
- Exercise: Set aside a few minutes each day to practice mindful breathing. Focus on your breath, allowing thoughts and feelings to come and go, neutrally observing them, as if from a distance, and then returning your awareness to your breath. This can help ground you and create emotional distance from the intensity of others’ suffering.
- Benefit: Enhances your ability to remain present and compassionate without becoming overwhelmed.
- Reflective Journaling
- Exercise: Keep a journal where you reflect on your experiences of service. Write about your feelings, what you learned, and how you managed your emotional responses. Include all of your emotions but pay special attention to those moments of compassion and, when you felt detached, what the quality of that detachment was.
- Benefit: Helps clarify your thoughts and emotions, promoting self-awareness and healthy processing of your experiences.
- Boundary Setting Practice
- Exercise: Identify specific emotional or physical boundaries you need to maintain while helping others. Write these down and remind yourself of them before engaging in service.
- Benefit: Establishes a framework for how you can offer support without becoming entangled in others’ struggles.
- Volunteer with Reflection
- Exercise: Engage in a volunteer activity and, afterward, spend some time reflecting on your experience. Ask yourself questions like: “What emotions arose? How did I maintain my sense of equanimity while helping others?”
- Benefit: Encourages understanding of your emotional responses and helps reinforce an integration of compassion and detachment.
- Engage in Creative Expression
- Exercise: Use art, music, or writing as an outlet for your feelings about suffering and service. Create something that expresses your compassion and the balance you seek.
- Benefit: Offers a therapeutic way to process emotions and reinforces the connection between compassion and personal expression.
These exercises can help you cultivate a healthy integration of compassion and detachment that will allow you to serve others effectively while taking care of your own mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
If you try these exercises, feel free to share any insights or revelations you had with me. And if you know of other exercises that have worked for you, please let me know about them.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-K