The heart is responsible for 5-6 litres of blood circulating through your body each minute, which makes about 7500 litres of blood being pumped every single day.
The human heart is one efficient muscle, doing the visible and invisible, responding to every flicker of emotion ever felt by us. Our pulse picks up when our crush is near, or we’re frightened of something. It slows down when we feel safe. You could be brain dead and survive, but heart dead? That’s not even a thing.
Some say it’s barely the size of a clenched fist. Yet it holds such a well of emotions—pain, love, hope and heartbreak. It holds what makes us human. It gives us the sparkle in our eyes. Yet so many of us spend our entire lives tiptoeing around that well, and never looking in, because maybe that one time, a long time ago, we saw a flash of something that clawed its way too deep in our brains.
Bhagvad Gita 18.66 says, “don’t grieve”. Some stoics may feel immediately inspired reading just those two words, but context is important. Because if you’re anything like me, you must’ve frowned reading that and wondered if that was a bit insensitive considering it was set in a scene where Arjuna was supposed to annihilate his cousins, family and friends and he was too overwhelmed and scattered in despair. You see, Krishna is not telling Arjuna to suppress his emotions or pretend everything is fine.
At the beginning of the Gita, Arjuna is overwhelmed. He sees his teachers, relatives, and friends on the battlefield and collapses in despair. Krishna doesn’t tell him to not feel sad. He says,
“Why are you grieving for what is inevitable, and for what is not truly lost?”
According to Krishna, bodies perish, relationships change, fortunes rise and fall—but the Self (Ātman) remains.
Therefore, grief that comes from believing something has been permanently destroyed is based on incomplete understanding. Everything you love will change. Everything you fear will change. You will love new things. You will fear new things.
Grief becomes unbearable when we demand permanence from an impermanent world.
We grieve not only from the incident, but from the need to control outcome. Krishna repeatedly stresses that we do not have control over outcome of events or fruits of our actions, and attaching ourselves to the meaning of them is only going to cause us to feel disheartened.
And here is my observation on the behind-the-scenes of why we keep circling the past and being stuck:
We glorify our suffering because we don’t feel ready to believe someone we trusted could cause us so much pain. We refuse to see our the lessons and growth our failures brought us because subconsciously we are more comfortable believing that we are incapable of achieving something genuinely remarkable. It is much easier to believe someone who doesn’t see our greatness because to not believe them would mean to stand up for ourselves, step out of the box in which we sit alongside them comfortably and possibly lose some of the only people who matter.
We enter the loop because of our feelings, and remain there because of our self-imposed delusions and cause heartbreak because we curtain ourselves from the truths that have already revealed themselves.
