by Jay Shetty
1. Find new in the old. Remember when, as monks, we looked for a special stone on the same walk we took together every day? You too can open your eyes to the world you already live in. Have a candlelit dinner in the middle of the week. Read a book to each other before bed instead of staring at your phones. Take a walk together in the neighborhood and challenge each other to find a certain kind of mailbox or to be the first to spot a bird.
2. Find new ways to spend time together. A study by psychologist Arthur Aron found that couples strengthen their bonds when they do new and exciting activities together. My wife and I started to do escape rooms together. An escape room is a game where you’re both locked in a room and have to find a way out. The staff gives you a few clues, and you have to work together to solve many steps of the puzzle. It may sound a little creepy, but it’s actually a lot of fun. You get to learn together. You get to make mistakes together. It’s an even playing field when neither of you has more experience or expertise than the other. When you experiment together as a couple, you feel yourselves growing together in all areas of your life. You could even try something really scary together—like skydiving or something else that’s outside your comfort zone. Remember all the benefits that we found in getting close to our fears? Playing with fear together is a way to practice going into your deeper fears, sharing them with your partner, feeling their support, and together transforming fear.
3. Serve together. Just as serving gives meaning to your life, serving with your partner adds meaning to your connection, whether it’s organizing charity events, feeding the homeless, or teaching something together. My most bonding experiences in monk life came about when I took part in collective projects. The horrid two-day train journey that I’ve mentioned. Planting trees together. Building a school. Instead of focusing on the challenges of the relationship, we develop a shared perspective on real-life issues. Connecting for a higher purpose, we feel gratitude and bring that back into our relationship. I know many couples who have met through volunteering, so if you’re looking for a well-suited partner, find a cause that is close to your heart. If you meet through an activity such as volunteering, from the start you already have something very deep in common, and you’re more likely to form a deeper bond.
4. Meditate and chant together. (See page 270.) When a couple who has just had an argument comes into a room, you can feel the negative energy vibrating between them. The opposite is true when you and your partner chant together. You are bringing your energy to the same place and feel, literally, in tune with each other.
5. Finally, envision together what you both want from the relationship. When you are aware of what is important to each other, then you can figure out how much you’re willing to adapt. Ideally, each of you is striving to live in your own dharma. In the best of relationships, you get there together.
OVERCOMING HEARTBREAK
It can be hard to see clearly when your heart is at stake, but there is one point I want to make abundantly clear: There is a difference between being grateful for what you have and settling for less than you deserve. If we are still listening to our child minds, we’re attracted to people who aren’t good for us but make us feel better in the moment. Don’t wrap your self-esteem around someone else. Nobody deserves verbal, emotional, or physical abuse. It is better to be alone. Nor should you allow an abusive, manipulative, or toxic relationship to transition into friendship. The dynamic won’t change, trust me.
In every relationship you have the opportunity to set the level of joy you expect and the level of pain you’ll accept. No relationship is perfect, but if joy never reaches a certain height, or holds to a low average, that won’t change unless you both put in a lot of work. The same is true for how much disappointment you’re willing to bear. Your connection may get a slow start—it can take a while to know each other—but if it never reaches a satisfying level, you need to decide whether to accept it or move on.
I know it’s not easy. When you’ve spent quality time with someone, when you’ve invested in someone, when you’ve given yourself to someone, it’s so hard to let go. Tibetan Buddhist nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo points out that we often mistake attachment for love. She says, “We imagine that the grasping and clinging that we have in our relationships shows that we love. Whereas actually, it is just attachment, which causes pain. Because the more we grasp, the more we are afraid to lose, then if we do lose, then of course we are going to suffer.” Ultimately, holding on to the wrong person causes us more pain than letting them go.
The strategies I recommend to overcome heartbreak tie directly to monk ideas of the self, and how we find our way toward peace and purpose. No matter what thought we have, we don’t run away from it. We give ourselves space to assess and make changes. SPOT, STOP, SWAP.
Feel every emotion. It’s possible to distract yourself from heartbreak, but the fix is only temporary. And if you deny your feelings, you end up suffering in other ways. Researchers followed incoming college freshmen to see how well they adapted to their transition and found that those with a tendency to suppress their emotions had fewer close relationships and felt less social support. Instead, think about how the other person has made you feel in this situation. You might want to articulate your feelings by writing them down or recording them. Read what you’ve written and listen back objectively. Do you hear any recurring patterns?
You can also do a question meditation, asking yourself about the loss. We like to replay emotions: how perfect it was, how it could have been, how we thought it was going to go. Instead of reflecting on how romantic the relationship was before it crashed and burned, focus on the reality. What were your hopes for the relationship? What did you lose? Is your disappointment tied to who the person was, or who they weren’t? Explore your emotions until you uncover the root of the pain and disruption.
Learn from the situation. Movies, music, and other media send us limited, often inaccurate messages about what love should look like. Use the reality of the breakup to set realistic expectations about what you deserve and need from a new relationship and remember that yours can be different from the person you broke up with and/or the next person to come along. What was the biggest expectation you had that wasn’t met? What was important to you? What was good in the relationship, what was bad? What was your role in its demise? Instead of exploring your pain here, you want to investigate the workings of the relationship in order to identify what you want from your next relationship, and what you might have to work on in yourself.
Believe in your worth. You may undervalue yourself in the moment of a breakup, but your value doesn’t depend on someone’s ability to fully appreciate you. If you wrap your identity around the relationship, the pain you feel is that you’ve had to sacrifice that part of your identity. If you expected one person to fulfill all of your needs, then of course there is a vacuum when they’re gone. Now that you’re single, use this time to build a community of people with shared interests whom you want to be in your life forever. Make yourself whole. You need to be someone who makes you happy.
Wait before dating again. Remember, if you haven’t healed past pain, you might miss your next opportunity for an incredible connection with an incredible person. Don’t rebound or revenge-date. This only causes more hurt and regret that spread further, a virus of pain. Instead, take some time to get to know yourself better. Build your self-esteem. Invest in your growth. If you’ve lost yourself in the relationship, find yourself in the heartbreak.
The monk way is to build awareness, address, and amend. Either within a relationship or before we enter one, we take a step back to evaluate and make sure we understand our own intentions. Then we can venture into the dating world or return to the relationship with self-awareness and love. SPOT, STOP, SWAP.
* * *
We have turned our attention outward to address the intimate relationships in our lives. Now we come to our relationship with the larger world. I mentioned that at the ashram I felt a bond beyond my ties to my family
, a far greater force uniting and connecting us all. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the Earth, chemically. And to the rest of the universe, atomically.” Knowing this, we must look to the universe to find true meaning in our lives.
ELEVEN SERVICE
Plant Trees Under Whose Shade You Do Not Plan to Sit
The ignorant work for their own profit… the wise work for the welfare of the world…
—Bhagavad Gita, 3:25
I am a novice at the ashram, and we’ve been dropped off in a village with no money and no food, with the mission to find our own way for thirty days.
The weather is decent, and we’ve been given a warehouse for shelter. We leave our mats there and venture into the village. There are simple huts from which people sell food, spices, and sundries. Laundry is strung between the huts. Most people travel by bike or on foot—some of the children are barefoot.
Untethered, without a plan, the first thing we feel is fear, which provokes us to do whatever it takes to survive. We ask for handouts—people in India are generous and often give bread, fruit, or coins to people in spiritual dress. We visit the temple where pilgrims are given free food called prasad—this is sanctified food that is offered to God, then handed out. Anxious about our survival, we resort to selfishness and hoarding.
By the second week, we’re in better shape. We’ve figured out that we can earn our provisions by offering help to people in the village. We start assisting people with heavy loads or peddlers who could use a hand with their carts. We soon learn that opening our hearts and souls encourages others to do the same. The donations we receive aren’t dramatically different from the ones we got when we first arrived, but the exchange gives us a warm sense of communal compassion and generosity, and I feel like I’ve absorbed the lesson of our journey. We thought we had nothing, and indeed we had barely any material possessions. But we were still able to give people our effort.
However, by the final week, we’re well-fed and secure enough to notice something deeper. Though we had come with nothing, we still had a certain kind of wealth: we are stronger and more capable than a lot of the people in the village. There are seniors, children, and disabled people on the street, all of them in greater need than we are.
“I feel bad,” one monk says. “This is short-term for us. For them it’s forever.”
“I think we’re missing something,” I add. “We can do more in this village than survive.” We recall Helen Keller’s refrain: “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” This is, unfortunately, no exaggeration. In India, you often see people with missing limbs.
I realize that now that we have found our way, we can share the food and money we have received with those who aren’t as able as we are. Just when I think I’ve learned the lesson of our journey, I come upon a revelation that affects me profoundly: Everyone, even those of us who have already dedicated our lives to service, can always give more.
These three stages of transformation felt like a microcosm of the entire monk experience: First, we let go of the external and the ego; second, we recognize our value and learn that we don’t need to own anything in order to serve; and third, we continually seek a higher level of service. On that trip I recognized that there is always room to rise, there is always more to give. Sister Christine Vladimiroff, a Benedictine nun, as quoted in The Monastic Way, wrote, “Monastic spirituality teaches us that we are on a journey. The journey is inward to seek God in prayer and silence. Taken alone, we can romanticize this aspect of our life.… But to be monastic there is a parallel journey—the journey outward. We live in community to grow in sensitivity to the needs of others.… The monastery is then a center to come out of and to invite others into. The key is always to maintain both journeys—inward and outward.”
THE HIGHEST PURPOSE
In his lecture at my college, Gauranga Das had inspired me when he said, “Plant trees under whose shade you do not plan to sit.” That sentence captivated me and launched me on a trajectory I had never imagined. And now I have to make a confession. I’ve been holding out on you. We have talked about how to let go of the influences of external noise, fear, envy, and false goals. We have explored how to grow by harnessing our minds, our egos, and our daily practices to live in our dharma. All of this is toward the goal of leading fulfilling, meaningful lives—a worthy path. But here, and on social media, and in my classes, and in every medium in which I teach, I haven’t yet revealed the most important lesson I learned as a monk and one that I carry with me every day of my life. Drumroll, please.
The highest purpose is to live in service.
It’s not that I’ve been keeping service a secret; I mention it often. But I’ve waited until now to talk about the central role I believe it should play in all of our lives because, frankly, I think most of us are somewhat resistant to the idea. Sure, we want to help those in need, and maybe we already find ways to do so, but we are limited by the pressure and needs of our own work and lives. We want to solve our own issues first. “Jay, I’m the one who needs help! I have so much to figure out before I can devote myself to helping others.” It’s true. It’s hard to think about selflessness when we are struggling. And yet that is exactly what I learned as a monk. Selflessness is the surest route to inner peace and a meaningful life. Selflessness heals the self.
Monks live in service, and to think like a monk ultimately means to serve. The Monastic Way quotes Benedictine monk Dom Aelred Graham as saying, “The monk may think he has come [to the monastery] to gain something for himself: peace, security, quiet, a life of prayer, or study, or teaching; but if his vocation is genuine, he finds that he has come not to take but to give.” We seek to leave a place cleaner than we found it, people happier than we found them, the world better than we found it.
We are nature, and if we look at and observe nature carefully, nature is always serving. The sun provides heat and light. Trees give oxygen and shade. Water quenches our thirst. We can—and monks do—view everything in nature as serving. The Srimad-Bhagavatam says, “Look at these fortunate trees. They live solely for the benefit of others. They tolerate wind, rain, heat, and snow, but still provide shelter for our benefit.” The only way to be one with nature is to serve. It follows that the only way to align properly with the universe is to serve because that’s what the universe does.
The sixteenth-century guru Rupa Goswami talks about yukta-vairāgya, which means to do everything for a higher purpose. That’s real detachment, utter renunciation, perfection. Some monk sects strictly apply this standard to their practices, stripping themselves of material possessions altogether, but in reality the rest of us need to work for a living. We’re all going to end up owning stuff. But we can look at how we use what we have. We can use our homes to foster community. We can use our money and resources to support causes we believe in. We can volunteer our talents for those in need. It’s not wrong to have things if we use them for good.
The Bhagavad Gita sees the whole world as a kind of school, an education system structured to make us realize one truth: We are compelled to serve, and only in service can we be happy. Like fire is hot, as the sun is light and warm, service is the essence of human consciousness. Know the reality of the world in which you live. Know it to be impermanent, unreal, and the source of your suffering and delusion. Seeing the purpose of life to be sense gratification—making ourselves feel good—leads to pain and dissatisfaction. Seeing it as service leads to fulfillment.
SERVICE IS GOOD FOR THE BODY AND SOUL
Service fulfills us on many levels, beginning with my simple belief that we’re born wired to care for others so service does us good. This instinct is most obvious in children, who aren’t yet distracted by other demands on their time and attention. An image that went viral shows a little girl, probably about two years old, watching a politician crying on Japanese TV. She takes a tissue, goes up to the TV, and tries to wipe away the politician’s tear
s. Such things go viral because we recognize—and perhaps miss—the little girl’s compassion for another person, even a stranger.
In Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, then they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Just as Mandela believed people were born to love but taught to hate, monks believe that we are born to serve, but the distractions of the external world make us forget our purpose. We need to reconnect with that instinct in order to feel like life has meaning.
I have already touched on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the mythic hero’s journey. It is a formula describing the steps that a hero goes through when he embarks on an adventure, encounters trials and obstacles, and returns victorious. One of the key elements of the hero’s journey is one we often overlook—the last stage, which Campbell called “return with elixir.” The hero’s journey isn’t fulfilled until he makes it home safely and shares what he has gained (the elixir) with others. The idea of service is woven into classic story structure as a key part of a happy ending.
Seane Corn is living out the hero’s journey. She made her name as a teacher of yoga asana. She was (and still is) a marquee teacher at yoga conferences and festivals around the world, but at one point in her career as a yoga teacher, she realized that with her platform, she could make an even more meaningful impact in the world, so she shifted her focus to serving at-risk communities. Corn decided to try bringing breath and meditation techniques to those in need, starting with kids who’d been sexually exploited. Then she grew her practice into working with other people society deems as outcasts, such as prostitutes and drug addicts. From that vantage point, she reached back into the yoga community to cofound Off the Mat, Into the World, a nonprofit that links yoga with activism. As dedicated as she is to service, Corn maintains that she gets more than she gives. “Find me someone who has gone to the darkest parts of their own character where they were so close to their own self-destruction and found a way to get up and out of it, and I will bow on my knees to you.… You’re my teacher.”