Do you feel like life has been throwing you more challenges since you started your spiritual journey? That may not be a bad thing! Find out what Sadhguru has to say about the correlation between spirituality and challenges in life.
Questioner: Ever since I started this spiritual process, why does it seem like I am facing difficult situations at home, work, and life in general?
Sadhguru: For whatever reasons you came to the Yoga program – maybe because of some health situation, or problems in the world – in a way you are trapped in the longing to know something more than what people are normally aspiring for. In a sense, Yoga is a trap which cooks you in such a way that after some time, the longing to know becomes bigger than yourself.
As one begins to experience a little bit of something, wanting to know more of it and experience all of it becomes so big that everything else recedes into the background. When this begins to happen, it is important for you to learn to handle your external situations with a little tact and skill; otherwise, they will fall apart. When there is a raging longing within you that you cannot make anyone around you understand, it needs a certain amount of skill to manage the outside situation.
When you get touched by anything spiritual, in a certain way, you are putting your life on fast-forward. When you put your life on fast-forward, probably more things will go wrong than ever before. The more intense your pursuit is, it may so happen that troubles that otherwise would have come to you in slow installments over a period of ten years happen to you within a few months. One may lose heart and think, “All this Yoga is bringing me trouble.” Yoga is not bringing you trouble. It just hastens up the troubles so that your quota of troubles will be over as soon as possible.
In the initial phase of doing spiritual sadhana, people might invite more trouble than ever before, simply because the very process of life is put on fast-forward. The very reason why someone chooses the spiritual path is because they are in a hurry. They are not willing to take the evolutionary route of ten million years. They want to make it happen now, in this life. Spiritual people are in so much more of a hurry than materialistic people – they are putting their whole life on fast-forward. They want to be done with the small things quickly and go faster and faster.
When troubles come and situations keep changing more dramatically than ever before, one needs a certain amount of balance and skill to handle all that. Because if they collapse around you, then you may give up your spiritual process. Managing outside situations needs a certain amount of wisdom.
On a certain day, Shankaran Pillai went to a Guru and said, “Master, I love my wife very much, but I get attracted and aroused by every woman I see on the street. I feel ashamed, but I cannot stop it. What should I do?” The Guru looked at him and said, “Son, it does not matter where you work up your appetite, as long as you eat at home.”
You got into the spiritual process, but you still have to go to the office, manage your family, and balance the social situations around you. It does not matter what nonsense you do with your body, whether you are in a temple, a hotel, or in the Himalayas, as long as you know how to use everything to make it into a spiritual process within you. It does not matter whether you are living with gentle people or with people where there is push and pull every day. Whatever kind of situations you live in and whatever you are doing does not matter as long as you keep your focus.
If you do not get this skill, then situations will collapse around you. It does not matter how stupid people around you are. Generally, idiots have more power on the planet than the wise. That has been the unfortunate history of humanity. The wisest never had the power to create anything out of their wisdom simply because they were always looking for ideal situations.
Never look for an ideal situation. Every situation is ideal. The more unpleasant it is, the more conducive it is. If you want a plant to grow well, the more filth you throw at it, the better it grows. The more filth life throws at you, the faster and quicker you must grow. Everything that happens can be used as a process of growth, or everything that happens can be used to entangle and suffocate yourself. Whatever kinds of things happen around you, there are no barriers if you know how to handle them skillfully.
