Let them keep their karma: a spiritual path to healing
How do we feel when others wrong us? When someone takes our money, neglects or humiliates us, or even when we are victims of violence? The mixture of emotions can be complex. How to leave it behind?
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How do we feel when others wrong us? When someone takes our money, neglects or humiliates us, or even when we are victims of violence? The mixture of emotions can be complex. We can feel pain, anger, impotency, outrage, fear, or even guilt, and in many cases, these feelings can persist for many years. Often, we may carry them with us until the end of life. If we look around, we can see many who are consumed by these feelings. If we look inside, we may find a number of painful episodes of our lives that we may still struggle with.
One side of it is to notify the proper authorities of what happened so the perpetrators may not continue to roam free doing the same to others. That’s another thing. What I’m speaking about here is how to deal with the internal conflict, the pain we carry inside, and continue to victimize us, often even after many years have passed and the perpetrators have already died. How to heal that?
Kṛṣṇa emphasizes in the Gītā that we should learn to tolerate reverses and unpleasant situations just as we tolerate summer and winter, understanding that they are unavoidable:
“O son of Kuntī, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed. O best among men [Arjuna], the person who is not disturbed by happiness and distress and is steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation.” (Bg 2.14-15)
Arjuna mentions (Bg 2.8) that his grief was drying up his senses. That is a very relatable description of emotional pain. Kṛṣṇa does not say we should pretend it does not hurt. However, He teaches us that pain is temporary and must be tolerated with sobriety, just as we tolerate the changing seasons. Summer and winter come and go, but we do not abandon our life’s purpose because of them. Similarly, we face many painful episodes, but we should not allow them to permanently steal our attention.
Next, Kṛṣṇa makes another delicate point:
“That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul. The material body of the indestructible, immeasurable and eternal living entity is sure to come to an end; therefore, fight, O descendant of Bharata. Neither he who thinks the living entity the slayer nor he who thinks it slain is in knowledge, for the self slays not nor is slain.” (Bg 2.17-19)
The pain is real. To say it doesn’t exist would be Māyāvāda. However, it is important to define where it exists. The pain exists on the mental and emotional level. Kṛṣṇa, however, calls our attention to the fact that our real identity goes beyond that. We are the eternal soul, the eternal servant of Kṛṣṇa, who existed before the creation of the body and mind and who continues to exist eternally, beyond these coverings.
If I identify with the mind, the pain is there, and it can be very intense. However, once we hear about the difference between body and soul and start working on applying this knowledge and converting it into practical realization, pain and fear become easier to manage.
The central difference resides in our perception of a situation as temporary and permanent. Losing our seat on a plane is uncomfortable, but it is much less serious than losing our house, because the seat is perceived as something temporary that we keep only until the end of the flight, while our house is seen as something permanent. However, is it true? If our life in this world is impermanent, how can the house be permanent? We use it only for a few years; therefore, it is not much different from the plane seat in a sense.
Once we understand the temporality of life in this world and our real identity beyond that, as the traveler who boarded this life to reach a certain destination, we can see things from a different perspective.
Spiritual knowledge does not erase the pain instantly. It should not be used as a bypass to ignore the grief. That’s a mistake many of us make. What it does is give us a place to stand beyond the pain. If I think that I am this wounded mind, this damaged destiny, this humiliation, then the trauma becomes my identity. The trauma becomes what I am, and from there, it will follow me wherever I go.
Kṛṣṇa, however, calls us back from it. The self is deeper than the body and mind. The soul was not created by the traumatic event, and the soul cannot be destroyed by it. The body may be wounded, the mind may be damaged, the bank account may be emptied, but I’m not this body, I’m not this mind, and I’m not this bank account. All of these are part of this world, and they will remain in this world after I go. The people who are attached to them may remain, but I am free from all of it. I am the soul, eternal, pure, and always connected with Kṛṣṇa. This is the correct way to use spiritual practice and spiritual knowledge, not as a bypass, but as a practical process to reinforce this transcendental identity.
In the Bible, we find the passage where Christ teaches his disciples to show the other cheek when struck, instead of striking back. This may appear naive at first, but the meeting of Parīkṣit and Dharma in the First Canto of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam adds a deeper explanation to it.
Dharma, in the form of a bull, is beaten by Kali. When Parīkṣit asks who caused his suffering, Dharma refuses to single him out as the single culprit. This is not because Kali is innocent, but because Dharma sees the full picture.
People who wrong us are at the same time culprits and instruments of karma. As culprits, they should be punished, just as Parīkṣit, in the role of the king, is prepared to do. At the same time, however, the story teaches us that the desire for revenge keeps us bound to the karmic cycle. This is the point about forgiving. It does not mean they should continue walking free, but we should leave the punishment to be administered by the qualified authorities (king, state, karma, etc.) and move away from it.
If we become attached to seeing them being punished for what was done to us, not only will we have to carry the emotional load with us, but we will have to be there. In many situations, enemies become husband and wife or father and son. This is certainly a very effective way to cause pain to someone who wronged us, but we have to see if that’s what we want.
The way to get out of the cycle is to move away and focus on our spiritual development. These people may stay here with the results of their actions and reap whatever they are sowing. We don’t need to stay with them.
This is a delicate point, but understanding it properly can save us from many painful mistakes. A mature devotee privately thinks that, somehow, by the laws of karma, this suffering has come to him. Instead of developing hatred, he takes shelter in Kṛṣṇa and moves forward. On the other hand, when he sees another person being harmed, he shows compassion to the victim and deals with the culprits according to duty. He is not philosophically indifferent. Similarly, when we are wronged, we should notify proper authorities to protect others, but we should not personally carry hatred or let the pain become our identity.
An even higher realization of these points is given later by Queen Kuntī in her famous prayers:
“My dear Kṛṣṇa, Your Lordship has protected us from a poisoned cake, from a great fire, from cannibals, from the vicious assembly, from sufferings during our exile in the forest and from the battle where great generals fought. And now You have saved us from the weapon of Aśvatthāmā. I wish that all those calamities would happen again and again so that we could see You again and again, for seeing You means that we will no longer see repeated births and deaths.” (SB 1.8.24-25)
All these episodes that Kuntī had to face alone, when she was already separated from her husband, having to navigate a dangerous and hostile environment while protecting her children, were surely distressing and painful. However, later on she sees that Kṛṣṇa was the one protecting her from even great harm and realizes that all of it had brought her closer to Him.
We should not pray like that unless we are prepared to face serious difficulties in the same spirit, but her prayers give us the higher understanding that can help us to deal with our grief. Instead of allowing it to consume us, it can become an engine that helps us to come closer to Kṛṣṇa.
Leaving trauma behind is not easy. It is not a single, heroic moment in which we destroy all our material conditioning. It is a slow, painful process in which we have to dismantle it layer by layer. We need sincere friends who can hear us without judgment. We need regulated chanting, study, service, and association with advanced devotees who are applying these principles in their practical lives; we may even need professional help. The main point, however, is that our spiritual practice is the foundation that supports us in all of it and also the path for the higher realization we are trying to achieve.
We also should keep in mind that trauma is composed of two levels of pain. The first is the pain caused by the offender. The second is the pain of replaying what happened again and again in the mind and associating with it. The first goes away with time; the second does not. The offender may have harmed us once, but the uncontrolled mind keeps repeating the scene thousands of times. We don’t have control over the actions of the offender, and we cannot change the past, but we can stop the mind from repeating it endlessly, and we can prevent the ego from making it our identity.
The person who harmed us may remain with the reactions to his actions; we do not need to remain with him. We are going to Kṛṣṇa.
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