Amish Tripathi: My question is on grief. We all know, our philosophies tell us that we should be balanced, and treat joy and sadness with the same detachment. But, what if you experience grief that’s beyond your capacity to bear? What if you lose someone who you truly admire? How to handle grief?
Sadhguru: Let us understand this. This is not to belittle anybody’s loss. But I want you to understand this that, grief is always about loss. Loss means that we lost something. It is not about somebody’s death. People can grieve loss of possession, positions, or even professions. So it’s essentially about that an individual human being lost something.
This [Grief] is happening to us, simply because we have built our persona like a collage
When it comes to people, if you lose them to death, the significance of this loss is that it cannot be replaced. Possessions can be replaced, positions can be replaced, money and wealth can be replaced. But when we lose a person, we cannot replace. So the grief becomes more profound in this case. This is happening to us, simply because we have built our persona like a collage. Who we are is because of what we possess, the positions that we hold, the relationships that we hold, and the people who are in our lives. If any one of these things fall out, it leaves a vacuum in our persona. This is what we’re suffering.
It’s very important that our relationships come from the basis of our fullness, not as an instrument to fill our life with a relationship
So it’s very important that our relationships come from the basis of our fullness, not as an instrument to fill our life with a relationship. If you use a relationship to make yourself complete, then when you lose it you become empty. If you form a relationship because you want to share your fullness, then there will be no grief.
When we lose somebody very dear to us all this may not work. This looks like trivialising one’s loss. So this must be cultivated throughout our life. That who we are is not determined by what we have in our lives. Who we are decides what we have in our lives. This must happen to every human being. This is what spiritual process means.
