If you think Life has treated you
harshly, celebrate, don’t agonize!
Extraordinary pain is not a sign of your
“past sins” catching up with you as we are often told it is. Instead it is a
precursor to extraordinary grace that is on the way. So, if you are battered,
bruised, bleeding from Life’s blows, don’t bemoan your state. Celebrate.
Because you have encountered the God that you so desperately seek.
God? In pain? Indeed. The reason why you
haven’t seen God so far is because you __and I__have always been told that God
is in places of worship. But we haven’t been told that our pain is a place of
worship, an arena to surrender to a cosmic design, the Master Plan, that which
has no flaws. They say that religion is for those who want to avoid going to
hell and spirituality is for those who have been there! Writing recently in The Times of India’s Speaking Tree
column, Rajshree Birla, the Chairperson
of the Aditya Vikram Birla Foundation defines spirituality thus: “Spirituality
is not about a religion. Neither is it about gods and rituals. Spirituality is
a principled way of Life; it's an attitude.” She couldn’t have said it better
and simpler! You can’t borrow that attitude nor can you acquire it through
training. You can imbibe it only
from experience. That experience can come to you only
from your deep, personal, pain.
When you are in the throes of such
unimaginable anguish__physical, due to some health challenge, emotional, because
you have lost someone, something or broken up in a relationship, or have lost
your own self-respect because of an act committed in haste or in stupor__you,
in your innermost, private recesses, will seek relief. You will want this Life
to end. You will want this suffering to go. In that moment, when you plead,
when you surrender, you will have felt a stirring in you. That, my dear friend,
that’s your God within you. Maybe when you reminisce on your painful experience
now, you may relate to my sharing this. When you feel this way, you will
realize that your pain was a conduit, a Visa, if you may, to travel within and
find the Godseed embedded in you. Just at it is in all of humanity. So, doesn’t pain, if it can take you to your Self, to your
God, call for a celebration? Then, why agonize?
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