How to deal with hurt in life?

Acharya Prashant
7 min readMar 23, 2020

Do not fear the thorns in your path, for they draw only the corrupt blood.

~ Kahlil Gibran

It is a surprise, how in the moment of hurt, we see only that which has been hurt and we totally ignore that which has been not. And both are always there. That’s the thing about humanness.

Never would come a time when a thorn would fail to prick you. Even your most impenetrable armors are vulnerable to be at least scratched by the impact of thorns and such things. One would always be susceptible to hurt, always. Prakriti (Nature) wants you to react to stuff. Prakriti wants you to take care of your physical and psychological self. And taking care includes in Prakriti’s language, getting hurt and reacting to hurt. As long as the body is there, there is bound to be at least a remnant, the faintest shadow of the psychological self as well. They are actually one, for the sake of discussion, we call them two. Whether one or two, what is certain is that they do get hurt.

Prick a thorn and the body bleeds, prick the ego and the mental body bleeds.

Why do we look only at the happening, why do we look only at changes? Why don’t we look at that which hasn’t changed, even after billions of awful and billions of awesome experiences? But there is something about our apparatus of perception. It is designed to perceive only change. So, you were feeling alright about yourself before you stumbled and injured your knee. Your apparatus of perception would register that. You are feeling alright about yourself till you saw something on social media and you are agitated. Again your apparatus of perception would register the change in your mental state. These would be registered, acknowledged, seem as happening, something happened. And all happening is a change, something happened. Equally, there was a tremendous something that did not happen. We fail to register that. And then we say, something bad has happened to me. I got hurt. Only the outermost, flimsiest skin of yours gets hurt. The rest of you didn’t. And beneath the thin skin, you are deep and deep and deep and unfathomably deep. All of that never gets hurt.

But since we look as the skin, all that we look at is the skin. So, skin gets hurt, you feel as if only hurt prevails. In your eyes, hurt becomes all-pervasive…

Acharya Prashant