Burdens we Carry

Photo Credit: Twitter.Com||S. Gurumurthy

Burdens we Carry 

Have you seen a butterfly take birth? It progresses from egg to larva to caterpillar to pupa and then when the sun is out it shakes itself, struggling to break the pupa, slowly opening its wings and lets the sun dry the wings before it takes off. If you are watching this struggle to take birth and decide to help the butterfly and assist it in any way, you are only harming its prospects of survival. The struggle is necessary to take birth, that burden has to be carried to survive. This is true of all beings, without a struggle, without burdens life will become meaningless.

We all carry burdens in some form or the other, lack of education, poverty, death of a loved one, it could be anything – but the purpose of life is to overcome these burdens and move on. Every burden we carry has a lesson in it for us to learn. We just have to learn the lesson, and slowly let the burden fall away from our subconscious and conscious mind.

We carry burdens because all the good things in life require a lot of effort on our part to get them. Burdens are nothing but journals of hardship to the ‘promised land’ of what you desire or need. Just as times of hardships and challenges in life help in character building, so too do our burdens. As a matter of fact, it is our burdens that make our trials tough on us. When we go on a hike our backpack is our burden as we climb uphill, but it also carries life saving equipment, so it is both a burden and a life-saver. What we carry may be dragging us down, but it is not stopping us, only we can stop ourselves. Burdens like trials come and go in life, but the way we face them and handle them stays with us for the rest of our life.

When we embark on the spiritual path, with time we begin to see the burdens we carry for what they are – they are nothing but stepping stones to character building. Once we see them in that manner, they are no longer burdens and we soon get over them as if they never happened – the only thing it does for us is makes us a stronger and better person.

Meditation helps us empty our inner self of all our burdens, as we become more and more empty, the burdens fall away into the distant past and then just fade away. We become stronger, better, compassionate and more loving as individuals.