How To Get Over A Breakup?

Questioner: Sadhguru, how to move on after a breakup?

Sadhguru: Your body has a tremendous amount of memory. This memory is on many different levels. There is evolutionary memory, genetic memory, karmic memory, conscious and unconscious levels of memories and articulate and inarticulate levels of memories. You do not remember how your great-great-grandfather looked like, but his nose is sitting on your face. So obviously your body is carrying a very complex mechanism of memory.

When this body is capable of such a complex sense of memory, do you think it is not gathering memory with whatever you touch and feel and relate with? It is gathering an enormous amount of memory. For example, going up and down the steps looks very simple, but it is very complex. Your body has to remember, otherwise it cannot go up and go down so easily. Today the sports experts are talking about muscle memory – building memory into their system so that the sport can be executed at a certain level of efficiency. This is not only for sport or for a specific activity; you are imbibing so much memory every day. If there is a certain kind of cohesiveness to this memory, it will become productive. If there is a certain sense of chaos to this memory, then you may know everything, but this memory will work against you because it is contradictory and conflicting within itself.

So, the question is coming up because it matters to you. It matters because you have invested your thought and emotions and maybe even your body into the relationship. Once you have invested these three things, there is a profound sense of memory about that. If you create a lot of contradictory memory in your system, you will see that you will have everything, but you feel like you have nothing because it is confused and joyless; it does not have exuberance. It is very important that young people understand the mechanism of what you have been given. If the human system was just a lump of flesh, you could have done whatever you want with it. But this is a very sophisticated machine. If you treat it sensitively, it can do things in a phenomenal way. Otherwise it will do mediocre things.

Let us say that you know nothing about computers and I gave you an Apple Macbook Air. It is very thin and sharp so you took it home and started chopping cucumbers with it. It works very well. But is it not a tragedy that you are using a computer to chop a cucumber? Nothing wrong with the cucumber but something definitely wrong with you! There is something very fundamentally wrong with you when you do not understand the significance of what you have on your hands.

Before you touch or involve yourself in anything, you must see what level of involvement you wish for and where do you want to take this. You must also see what are the different impacts it will have upon you. You must consider whether this will work well for this life or work against this life. Otherwise you will become a loose life. I am not using the word “loose” in terms of morality. I am just talking about loose in terms of not being able to fulfill the direction in which you wish to go in your life. Bringing some intellectual, emotional and physical integrity to your life is very important.

Become a Complete Life

If you come out of a relationship, give yourself sufficient time. You can fix a minimum of six months or one year where you are just going to be by yourself. Because whatever went bad, you definitely have 50% contribution for everything that went bad, isn't it?  Use these six months or one year to fix that 50%.

When life knocks at your door like this, it is time you look deeper. When your illusions are broken and you are disillusioned right now, it is a very good thing. If your illusions are broken, that means life is bringing you closer to reality. This is an opportunity for you to sit down and see, “What is the nature of my life?”

When someone is pushing you towards ultimate reality from an illusory state, you must thank that person. They are opening up a spiritual dimension for you by making you realize how fragile all these things are. They can cheat you or run away or something else, but essentially you got denied. You can be denied only because you are in a certain illusory state of believing that you are half a life and need another half from somewhere. No, this piece of life that you are is a complete piece of life, packed with the Creator and creation together - a great combination. So why is it that it feels so incomplete that it needs another person to fill this life? Somewhere it has not realized the fullness of its nature. Right now, you have made it in such a way that this cannot exist without this one and that one. If you have blossomed as a complete life, you will see that relationships will be of a completely different nature. It will be more of coming together and sharing, not of extracting something from someone.