THE WITNESS

THE WITNESS

Sailing on the boat called Life, Shivi Verma discovers the importance and joy of detachment

Long ago, while on a reporting assignment in Uttaranchal, I had met someone who seemed to possess great spiritual prowess. Eager for any kind of spiritual mentorship, I had latched on to him and had hung on to each and every word that he said.

Though, later on, I had developed a few doubts about his credibility, one advice which has always held me in good stead was his constant reiteration that all sorrow existed because of our tendency to cling to things, people, and ideas. Although I never met him after that, this teaching went deep into my mind.

It helped me handle plenty of dysfunctions in my life. Like all young girls of my age, I had fixed ideas about how my life should pan out. It included a timely marriage, children, a flourishing career, a thriving social life, and yearly travel to exotic locales across the world.

But nothing happened as I had planned. On the contrary, life seemed to have a mind of its own, and I felt helpless against its flow. All my mega plans were blown to smithereens, as failures, ailments, and rejections became routine in life. My twenties were spent in trying to heal my depression, find a stable career footing, and get a spiritual breakthrough, which I was unable to because of the unavailability of a spiritual guru or an institution dedicated to helping seekers in the place that I lived.

My dream of achieving domestic felicity became secondary to these priorities, and while all my friends were checking all the aforementioned boxes, I was struggling to know who I was or whether there was a purpose to my life. I realised that I could not get everything I wanted at the same time. In these moments, the message of letting go and not being attached to any thought or outcome always came to my rescue. I let go of my dream of enjoying a regular family life like others because worrying about it, and hankering for it would only have intensified my angst.

Thankfully, as I grew spiritually, I realised that the higher you vibrate, the easier it becomes to understand the grand overall design of the Universe. What earlier was supposed to define my happiness, simply became a missed signpost in the long journey of life. A few things I achieved and a few I did not, but not once did it define my worth and value as a person, a woman, and an individual.

My identity was not incumbent on how many boxes I had ticked on my bucket list or whether I had achieved things considered important for women by society. I was just a soul, enjoying the unfolding of life in its myriads of shades and hues in my sojourn on earth, but I was none of these things myself. My happiness was defined not by what I attained in life but by how easy and comfortable I was with things I had not achieved. I was neither the body nor the mind, and neither the enjoyer nor the sufferer. I was simply a witness to the beautiful and mighty flow of the river of life. How liberating!