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In 2016 and 2017, I went through a rough breakup that hurt me deeply.
There was pain.
That part was real.
But what I couldn't see at the time was everything my mind did with that pain afterward.
I kept replaying the past.
I wish I had done this differently.
I wish I had said that differently.
Maybe if I had handled this better, things would have turned out differently.
How could this happen to me?
The relationship had ended, but the conversation in my head hadn't.
Looking back now, I can see how much of my suffering came from living inside those questions.
I played the victim.
I replayed scenarios. I tried to rewrite something that had already happened. I imagined different versions of the past and wondered whether changing one decision, one conversation, or one action might have created a different outcome.
And every time I did that, I experienced some version of the pain again.
The breakup happened once.
In my mind, I lived it many more times.
I Didn't Know I Was Suffering
That's probably the strangest part when I look back.
I didn't wake up every morning thinking, I'm suffering.
Life continued.
I worked. I built things. I traveled. I met people. I kept moving.
But underneath everything, I was carrying something I hadn't really processed.
For at least a year, the victim mindset was very strong. Even after I stopped consciously thinking about the breakup every day, some part of the experience stayed with me for much longer.
Today I can see something else that I couldn't see then.
I wasn't connected to the source.
I had always considered myself spiritual in some way, but I didn't have the understanding or practice I have today.
And when I wasn't connected to anything deeper than my own mind, my mind became the place I went looking for every answer.
Why did this happen?
What did I do wrong?
What could I have done differently?
What if I had done this?
What if I had done that?
And the mind will keep answering if you keep asking.
It can create another scenario.
Another explanation.
Another regret.
Another person to blame.
Another version of yourself to blame.
Another version of the past.
But none of those thoughts could change what had already happened.
The breakup was over.
I was the one continuing to live it.
Pain and Suffering Are Not the Same Thing
Almost ten years later, I came across a passage in Om Swami's The Ancient Science of Mantras that gave me a completely different way of looking at what I had experienced.
In the story, Devi asks Shiva about suffering.
She doesn't understand it.
She knows happiness and bliss, but she hasn't experienced the human emotions associated with grief, fear, separation and sorrow.
Shiva explains something that I found profound: suffering isn't something you can simply look at from the outside and fully understand.
It has to be experienced.
And when Devi asks what people can do when they don't even recognize the ignorance behind their suffering, Shiva points her toward remaining connected to the source.
That stayed with me.
Because when I looked back at my own life, I began to see a distinction I couldn't see in 2016.
Pain and suffering weren't necessarily the same thing.
The breakup hurt.
That was pain.
The sadness was real.
The disappointment was real.
The emotions were real.
I'm not interested in pretending spirituality somehow makes those things disappear.
But then there was everything I added afterward.
The resistance.
The replaying.
The what ifs.
The why me?
The wishing something had happened differently.
The refusal, consciously or unconsciously, to accept that something had happened and couldn't be changed.
That was different.
For my own experience, the simplest way I can describe it today is:
Pain happened to me.
Suffering grew as my mind kept negotiating with what had already happened.
My Environment Wasn't Helping Me See Clearly
There was another part of this that took me years to understand.
Your mind doesn't exist in isolation.
The people around you matter.
Your environment matters.
What you consume matters.
How you treat your body matters.
The conversations you have matter.
At that point in my life, my environment wasn't necessarily helping me become more conscious.
And when everyone around you sees life through a certain lens, it's difficult to realize there might be another way of looking at it.
I couldn't see clearly because I didn't yet have the tools to see clearly.
That didn't change overnight.
Slowly, I started becoming interested in health and wellness.
I started taking better care of myself.
I started reading.
I started paying attention to my mind.
I changed my environment.
I changed some of the people I surrounded myself with.
I started questioning beliefs and behaviors I had carried for years.
And little by little, I changed.
Transformation Took Years
I wish I could tell you there was one book, one morning, one meditation or one realization that changed everything.
There wasn't.
The transformation probably took four or five years of working on myself almost every day.
And I'm still working on myself.
That's another thing I've come to understand.
Transformation rarely announces itself.
You don't necessarily wake up one morning and suddenly become a different human being.
You read something.
You change a habit.
You make a better decision.
You change your environment.
You become aware of a pattern.
You catch yourself reacting the way you always have and, maybe for the first time, choose something different.
Then you do it again.
And again.
And somewhere along the way, you look backward and realize:
I'm not the same person anymore.
The breakup didn't change.
My relationship with it did.
Coming Back to the Source
Over the last few months, my spiritual journey has gone much deeper.
Discovering Om Swami's teachings has played an important role in that.
I've begun practicing sadhana more seriously. I've incorporated mala japa into my daily life. I've spent more time in silence. I've started looking at ideas like surrender, karma, dharma and suffering differently.
I'm still learning.
Very much so.
But I think I'm finally beginning to understand what being connected to the source means for me.
It doesn't mean painful things stop happening.
It doesn't mean I never become sad.
It doesn't mean I won't experience another heartbreak, failure, disappointment or loss.
And it certainly doesn't mean I have figured life out.
For me, connection means I don't have to believe every thought my mind produces.
I can observe it.
I can sit with it.
I can bring myself back to my practice.
Back to my mantra.
Back to God.
Back to something greater than the story playing inside my head.
The mind may still ask:
Why did this happen?
But perhaps I don't have to spend the next three years demanding an answer.
Maybe Pain Is Part of Life
This is something I'm still exploring, but I'm beginning to believe there is an important distinction here.
Pain seems unavoidable.
If you love, you can experience heartbreak.
If you build, you can fail.
If you care about someone, eventually you may experience loss.
If you have expectations, sometimes life will disappoint you.
We are human.
We are going to feel things.
And I don't think the answer is to become numb to any of it.
Maybe the work is learning how to experience pain without building an entire home inside of it.
To feel sadness without becoming sadness.
To experience grief without making grief our identity.
To acknowledge what happened without spending years negotiating with a past that cannot be changed.
That's very different from pretending everything is okay.
Sometimes everything isn't okay.
Sometimes something hurts terribly.
Maybe we simply begin by saying:
This hurts.
Without immediately adding:
This shouldn't have happened.
My life is ruined.
Why me?
I'll never recover.
If only I had...
Perhaps that's where pain begins turning into something else.
If You're Suffering Right Now
I don't know what you're going through.
Maybe it's a breakup.
Maybe you lost someone.
Maybe your business failed.
Maybe someone betrayed you.
Maybe something you spent years working toward didn't happen.
Maybe life simply looks nothing like you thought it would.
I'm not going to tell you not to hurt.
And I'm certainly not going to tell you to “just let it go.”
But I will share something I wish I could have told the younger version of myself:
Pay attention to the difference between what happened and the story you're continuing to tell yourself about what happened.
You may not be able to change the event.
You may not be able to change another person.
You may never receive the explanation you want.
You may never get the apology.
You may never completely understand why something happened.
But perhaps you can begin becoming aware of what your mind is doing with it.
And awareness creates a little bit of space.
In that space, perhaps there is an opportunity to choose differently.
Change your environment.
Pay attention to the people around you.
Take care of your body.
Read.
Sit quietly.
Pray.
Meditate.
Find a practice that brings you back to yourself.
And, if it means something to you, find your way back to the source.
It may take time.
It certainly did for me.
Ten Years Later
What's fascinating to me is that almost a decade later, nothing about the original event has changed.
It happened.
It ended.
That part of the story is written.
But the person reading Swamiji's words today isn't the same person who experienced that breakup in 2016.
And perhaps that's one of the gifts hidden inside our difficult experiences.
Sometimes life gives us the experience long before we have the wisdom to understand it.
Years later, we encounter a teaching, a person, a practice or even a single sentence—and suddenly something from our past looks completely different.
The event didn't change.
We did.
I'm beginning to understand that I can't control whether life brings me pain.
But I can continue working on the awareness with which I meet it.
I can remain connected.
I can watch the stories my mind creates.
I can allow myself to hurt without endlessly fighting reality.
And when I inevitably forget all of this, as I probably will, I can return to the practice again.
Maybe that's part of the journey.
Not learning how to live a life without pain.
But learning, slowly and consciously, not to turn every pain into years of suffering.
