Are you a bad person?
What to do when we find ourselves taking pleasure in others' struggles.
This week, I had an excellent question from a student:
I am pleased that someone at work has finally got the karma they deserve. In fact, I'm actually delighted he has gotten his comeuppance.
What does that say about me?
The thing is, whether they’re brave enough to admit it or not, almost everyone has these little quirks and foibles like that, which are simply byproducts of accumulated stress highjacking our way of thinking. The extent to which we find ourselves taking pleasure in the suffering of others is directly proportional to the amount of stress we’ve accumulated. It’s not our fault, and definitely doesn’t mean we’re bad people (no such thing) but it’s good to know where it comes from and what we can do about it.
As we purify our physiologies of stress with daily practice of Vedic Meditation, we become increasingly alert and able to catch ourselves in these habits. The more we catch ourselves, the more we can begin to “overwrite" these thought patterns.
In a situation like the one the inquirer described, what we’re ultimately witnessing is the beauty of evolution, through the mechanics of corrective action known as karma.
In the west, we tend to think of karma as a reward and punishment system whereby “good” and “bad” people get the “good” and “bad” things they deserve.
In fact, there is no good or bad, and karma is merely a corrective system which helps us to learn and evolve. The word karma in Sanskrit means action, and more specifically, the binding effect of action, or action that binds.
As an aside, if you’re curious to learn more about karma, my teacher has an excellent podcast which dives more deeply into this topic.
Nature’s only objective is to evolve. It’s all that’s ever happening. The more we align ourselves with nature’s creative intelligence through meditation, the faster we evolve, and the more we enjoy watching others evolve.
Once we know this, with practice and deepened awareness through meditation, we can start applying this perspective to these kind of situations. Instead of taking pleasure in seeing the person get what we may have felt was “coming to them”, we appreciate the sophistication of nature’s intelligence in helping them to learn from their past actions and evolve beyond them.
Another byproduct of a regular meditation practice is that the more grounded in Being we are, the more bliss we experience, inside and outside of meditation. Bliss doesn’t mean ecstatic joy or jubilance, but a supreme inner contentedness.
The more content we are in our own lives, the more our approach to life beomes about helping others rather than seeking greater levels of contentment for ourselves.
From this more evolved perspective, a natural response to witnessing someone be subjected to the corrective forces of karma might also be compassion.
When we are secure in our own Being, there is nothing to be gained from seeing others struggle—we don’t need to elevate ourselves by seeing them be put down.
Shifting our thinking takes time, because as I mentioned in my last letter, these cognitive patterns are often deeply ingrained.
By practicing Vedic Meditation twice daily, we systematically rid ourselves of the accumulated stress underpinning these thought patterns, and by imbibing Vedic knowledge, we help to correct our thinking—all in service to our own evolution and, by extension, the evolution of others.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday September 29 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or use the below links to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your calendar.
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