14 February 2015 - QA 5

I have lost myself and I am not able to be happy. I feel like taking sanyaas (recluse). What do I do?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Sanyaas comes from a fulfilled mind, not from running away from life or from reality. It is staying amidst and being centered. That is what sanyaas is.
If you are too feverish and too passionate then you will be unhappy. It is good to have a little dispassion. Dispassion is like breathing out, while passion is like breathing in. If you’re only breathing in and are not able to breathe out, then you’re in trouble.

Everybody has some degree of dispassion. It grows with life and with maturity. Just see, when you were a baby, what did you do? You were holding onto your mothers clothes even while sleeping, or you were very fond of different candies and ice creams, but as you grew up, these things started losing their significance, isn't it so? You used to hold on to some toys, but as you grew up, there was dispassion for toys. Some amount of dispassion in food has come in you as well. As you grow older, even the attachment towards your friends diminishes. All of this is a type of dispassion.
When you see life from this perspective, then whether success or failure, you don’t mind. Every businessman knows this. When you have to bear loss, you have to move on, and that moving on is dispassion.

Suppose you made an investment and the stock market came crashing down, what can you do? You cannot go on cribbing about it the whole time. You have to swallow that bitter pill. Swallowing that bitter pill and digesting it, in my opinion is dispassion. Dispassion is not contrary to passion, it goes along with passion. Dispassion keeps you sane and gives you the much needed strength.
Adi Shankaracharya in one of his poems wrote, ‘What joy does dispassion not give you?’ This means that dispassion brings you all types of joys.