Feeling Unfulfilled in Your Duties
The dawn of spirituality in your life
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My current duties
I have been an intense spiritual seeker and my primary duties and responsibilities lie in my practice. I have a strict discipline of waking up early in the morning and beginning my routine of breathwork, meditation, asanas, etc. I have a responsibility to sustain my humble living by doing some work and to feed the animals that keep visiting me. I have the duty of spreading peace, love, and knowledge wherever I go and through my writings.
Background
I had a very comfortable and decent life in one of the most convenient cities. I was earning good enough to afford all the amenities of a modern life. My professional life was rapidly progressing and my personal life seemed settled. Knowledge, wealth, and power were definitely on the rising trend. I believed my life conditions were extremely favorable to lead a perfect life.
Back then the idea of a perfect life for me was defined by the following criteria:
- Enough money to spend on acquiring things that I and my family like.
- Free from the pain of frequent disease and the constraints of an unhealthy body.
- A good partner to fulfill the emotional, sexual, and intellectual needs.
- Like-minded friend circle to hang out.
- A conducive professional environment where I have freedom, and the opportunity to showcase my ability and potential to grow.
Under this context, my duties and responsibilities were pretty clear to me. I didn’t feel a major dissonance between what I was doing and what I was supposed to do. Whatever the situation, I always had this clarity of my role and involvement. Also, I rarely got major complaints from the concerned stakeholders in any facet of life be it personal, professional, social, etc. There was no inherent feeling of fear for getting committed to my obligations. In other words, nobody had to remind me what I needed to do.
My longing for freedom
Until now mental health was an alien concept for me. All I sought, I had achieved through effort. When I couldn’t succeed, I accepted that to be beyond my limits. The toil of mental pressure of the means to get to an end was the extent of mental strain that I had experienced and thus known. I never fully understood why someone would take his/her life away for mental pressure. My naive mind had no measure at all of the demons like stress, anxiety, and psychosis.
When I felt the finitude of my limits for the first time, I saw the invisible bondages tied around my legs. The unprecedented tall boundaries around me emerged. I realized that I was caged and there was no escape from it. It was like the rope around a cow’s neck that was allowed to graze in an open field. As long as I was delighted with the grass it didn’t matter but then eventually the rope started suffocating me.
The seeds of freedom in the deepest corners of my mind were sprouting and my constant thoughts were watering it. The first outgrowth knocked at the doors of my married life and delivered the gifts of ideas of a non-bonded life. The delivered ideas were bolstering the growth even at a faster rate. Then it invaded my professional life through the cracks of sub-conscious dissonance. And at last, the growth spread out to my personal life.
As a result of which every cell of me wanted to break free from all the bondage. I started envisioning a life free from the clutches of all societal norms, the clutches of marriage, the clutches of expectations, the clutches of transactional economy, and the clutches of a non-genuine life based on pretense. The longing for freedom was so intense that it took precedence over the associated emotional values of others around me.
Questioning my duties
For the first time, I questioned the duties of being a son, a brother, a husband, a son-in-law, an employee, a debtor, and so on. In whichever relationship I sensed the constraint to freedom, I became unconvinced of my commitment. The satisfaction with fulfilling the usual duties in all these relationships disappeared.
It became evident that all these acts were pointless when ‘I’ didn’t get satisfaction from performing them. The existence of duties in the first place depends on my existence. If ‘I’ am having an existential crisis then how do commitments matter? If ‘I’ am feeling caged in this entire act of performing all these duties then what’s the point of them? All such duties then became forced obligations and performing them was reduced to pretense.
Meaninglessness of duties: Dawn of spirituality
When the hard boundary between material life and spirituality cracks, then the first sign is the meaninglessness of your duties and responsibilities. You won’t have a clue of the underlying evolution but its manifestation in your daily life appears in the form of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, fulfillment, and feeling of bondage. It grows to the point of existential crisis and then follows an involution. Nevertheless, the feeling of the pointlessness of duties is quite natural for most going through this process.
Your mind gets occupied more with the bondage aspects of the activities rather than with the actual activity. At times they can render you non-functional by trapping you in its loops. The once independent, carefree personality within you starts to feel suffocated and want to get away from these compulsions. It builds in you a fear of commitment as you anticipate the more you put yourself in it the more you get sucked in it.
You become calculative in your relationships and duties. Your inherent intention to get involved in those responsibilities diminishes and ultimately you start to either withdraw or neglect those. You become unconsciously self-centered. You begin to take impulsive actions like resigning from the job, selling some of your assets, etc. to feel free. If there is a strong dependency that forbids you to withdraw or take impulsive actions then a huge storm in the mind takes a vibrant form.
Reasonings: Infinity’s initial ways of self-discovery
The initial stages of spirituality are quite exhausting as your mind is in a constant battle owing to the dialogues between your inner moral voice and the voice for freedom. The moral self strongly reprimands the thoughts of fleeing your obligations. It vividly shows you the immense negative effects of breaking away from your assigned responsibilities on your family and life. It tries to trap you in the guilt of not being able to provide your family with what they want. It brings in you the fear of uncertainty from trodding into the unknown.
Your voice of freedom is also gaining its strength gradually. It doesn’t take a strict no from the moral voice. Rational reasoning comes to an aid for it. It establishes that every act you are doing is based on expectations. For example, you are unsatisfied with a job but have to pay for a certain lifestyle of your family members. After analysis, you conclude that this act of doing this job is simply out of the expectations of your family members, society, and yourself. You now understand that these expectations have been imposed on you or you have self-imposed on yourself.
Slicing and dicing this component of expectation reveals far greater truth. Continuing with the same example, sustaining a life with a continued income of ‘x’ is an expectation of your entire family. This expectation is derived from individual expectations. Each individual expectation is derived from a societal expectation of living a particular way. This expectation is based on your capability of body and mind. The capability is an indication of health and the health of a mind is an extension of its ability to feel fulfilled, satisfied, and free.
Consider a scenario in which you were a motor mechanic who enjoyed his work. You were earning enough to support a good middle-class lifestyle for the entire family. Due to an unfortunate mishap, you lost both hands and could not work. In such a case the family members have to be more independent in earning as little as they can and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. Similarly, if the mind is becoming incapable of something then changes are necessary.
Such or similar reasonings are bound to originate in your minds. This is a healthy mechanism for your mind to cope with gigantic waves of suffocating thoughts. Your finite body and mind have limitations and when your consciousness is slowly opening towards infinity then these stages are quite natural. Through these rational thoughts of reasons to free yourself, the infinity is trying to reason itself to be found.
The path I chose
With the discontent from life, I chose to maximize my satisfaction by heavy consumption. I assumed that by pursuing my sensory pleasures in the form of food, drinks, amusements, sex, addictions, stimulations, etc. I would compensate for the feelings of bondage in my duties and relationships. In the initial few years, I attempted to break free in the outer world.
Then I decided to listen to the voice of freedom within me. I left my well-paying job in the city and sold off my assets to begin a minimalist life by the mountainside. I changed my consumption habits to a bare minimum and possessed 6 pairs of clothing, a laptop, a yoga mat, and a flute. I cooked all my vegetarian meals. To sustain this life, I started writing and conducting online meditation sessions.
After going through a few meditation sessions, I got a glimpse of calmness after many years of struggle. The clarity of reasons for my unhappiness in my regular life however came with the continued and dedicated practice of yoga and meditation for some years. During this phase of life, I turned my attention inward rather than searching outside. The path is long but the discipline and consistency in my practice keep feeding me small dosages of insights about myself to keep me going.
Conclusion
My decisions have certainly affected my family but fortunately, I could take such an extreme decision because my family members were at least financially independent of me. There is no escape from the emotional or mental suffering that my close ones had to undergo but ultimately all of them have a basis because ‘I’ exist. If ‘I’ ceased to exist then there would be no one to experience all of this. Discovering the absolute became the sole goal of this life and ‘I’ had to align.
Everyone need not take extreme measures in this journey of spirituality. Understanding life by taking help from reliable mentors and slowly correcting life to get it tuned to the absolute is also an equally effective practice. These are just two different approaches and each individual has an inherent propensity toward an approach. Who are meant to take the extreme measures they eventually would. The exploration of infinity is nothing less than an adventure and to jump on it there would be a calling from the infinity itself.
It is also true that not every instance of feeling unfulfilled in your responsibilities and duties is the onset of spirituality in your life. It could be due to a mismatch of your skillsets, over-pressure, mental illness, or psychological reasons. However, introducing the components of meditation or mindfulness can indeed have a great deal of positive effects on your life.
When you have an invitation from infinity, life is supposed to become difficult because your finiteness is slowly breaking into it. When you have found a clue that you are entering into this adventure for truth and the obstacles in the form of questions about duties and responsibilities come, then make a choice that takes you closer to the absolute truth.
If you seek help in improving your mental health or spiritual practice, please check my mindfulness/meditation sessions.
Check my book Boxing Thoughts: A Technique to master your mind and Get into Meditation.
