Family is a word that you think of and immediately become warm and look forward to meeting every day. If there is no family to meet and no good people to lend an ear for many years, all you will be left with is walls that cry and plead to you to give up on your life. Such is the fate of some people I know who are living in trauma.
A psychotherapeutic approach that is radical in its essence but helps a trauma-struck individual immensely is to make them learn to live as if they have nothing to live for until one day they live for themselves.
One may die at any moment but must have survival instincts like a sepoy in the army who passes his lifetime in barracks.
One should live without a name but not self-respect.
One need not free oneself of responsibilities and show up to the call of the day.
One lives for a bigger and larger cause and not just money.
Such a living will inculcate mental toughness that will heal all trauma and help develop divine love by taking responsibility even without acknowledgement from others, and their loving actions wouldn’t care about the consequences by not making it look petty with expectations, and one would act in submission to something worth bowing your head for. Something like respect, or work, or sincerity and moral values.
For example, I always submit to the day in the morning, plan my schedule, minimize distractions, do the things that I am supposed to do amidst chaos, and retire for the day without any freedom or means to break free from my circumstances, so I create. I have a salary but no freedom to spend it due to uncertainty about the future, with some grossly insane gestures around defining my impermanence in this setting.
There is another beautiful revelation that has healed my trauma and has enabled me to fight my softness and develop a military attitude. It is that I don’t look around to achieve a name, accolades, or praise for my work. Maybe because I am beyond it now. Name is acquired by the fake people, or trained people, while Eklavya, the disciple, and Karan, the warrior, never got any from anywhere during their lifetime, so much so that Karan’s mother did not even acknowledge him as her son. He was more talented than Arjun and could beat him in competition once, but during the war of Mahabharata, he gave up his shield in the name of charity and lost his life unprotected.
Sometimes we are pushed into something with no means to come out of it, like the young son of Arjun, Abhimanyu, who couldn’t come out of the trap and lost his life also during the war of Mahabharata.
Traps are rigid, like temptation, lust, vice, mockery, ridicule, and defamation, but you do what you have to, undeterred.
You don’t have to become harsh in any such circumstance; all you have to do is march forward and leave your fate to the God who wants you to live without freedom, name, and money but not without expression, self-respect, and a rich mindset that can still do charity or fulfill needs for as long as it is possible.
As a Hinduism follower, I want to share something through my experience of the religion. Despite immense satisfaction in performing your own rituals, there is wisdom in recognizing and learning from other religions and promoting them and not your religion by cursing others in the name of your bhakti. God is one. For me God is energy and gravity.
One is very lucky if they follow their religion without being loud about it. The rituals that I perform in the quietness of early morning hours have a deep mind-cleansing effect that leads to the success that I want in my life. For me, it is to gain knowledge even if it goes unacknowledged, and I continue to respect myself bound to the chains of a particular mentality that cause me defamation by others who envy me or cannot bear me because I don’t expect anything from them and continue doing what I need to.
I learned this way to live very early in my life from my father and also my teachers in Russia. They all simplify things and build their faculty, ability, and nation by sacrificing their personal gains in terms of freedom, name, and money.
As a consequence, my father remained positive all the time in life, kept earning a lot of money and saved it for our future while having a very small appetite for food, and rejoiced in other people’s accomplishments and guided them towards achievements and switched off from distractions, lived lavishly by earning his stuff, provided for the larger kin, and was brave enough to create an impact of sincere work, for which he was mocked often, but he continued without fail without letting the pain of fame, name, affluence, and freedom affect him to become high-headed. He continues with sincerity. I am proud that I am like him. And I am not clever. I am hardworking. So people laugh at me; God will laugh at them one day.
Papa I give you your name and fame. And accolades for your life’s innocent journey.
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