Ep. 13: How To Fight

Dear friends & family,

I hope you’ve all had a rejuvenating and productive week! ☀️ 

After the passing of a family member (my uncle), we Hindus remember our loved ones with 13 days of readings and songs from The Bhagavad Gita, originally written ~3100 BCE (>5,000 years ago).

With that in mind, I wanted to share my notes from a text I’ve mentioned before, 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty, which draws on lessons from The Gita.

Specifically, regarding rule 6: Win or Lose Together.

With everything going on in my family and surely in the world, I just can’t help but dwell on the parallels on all fronts of these dilemmas.

So, I wanted to share some insights that have helped me find some inner peace.

Shetty opens with the story from The Gita, of a conversation that Arjuna (analogous to Jesus) has with Krishna (God) on an epic battlefield.

Arjuna, being the representation that is good is reluctant to fight at all. Being good, he wants to continue negotiations to avoid casualties.

The backstory goes, that Arjuna has been betrayed by his cousins who have attempted to kill him multiple times through their lust for power and greed. The cousins even go so far as to undress Arjuna’s wife to humiliate her. The lesson is, that there are times when the damage is irreversible, and that is why why we should learn how to fight.

Krishna’s lesson to Arjuna is that god affirms that even good people must fight sometimes to protect our health and future.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the enemy is not Arjuna’s cousin, per se, but the ideologies of ego, greed, and arrogance, that the cousins symbolize.

In this light, Shetty argues that we should dissociate ourselves from the enemy, and approach them united. Imagine that the enemy, or challenge, is not your partner, for example. Let’s say the problem is symbolized by a wave in the ocean, that slowly builds momentum and size as it approaches a couple.

Turning away from this wave will inevitably swallow you both. If you both look toward the wave and paddle in synchrony, side-by-side, you have a better chance of surviving.

The key here is that your partner is not the enemy, the wave is, and how you approach the wave together determines your fate in the water.

Reframing problems this way is the first step in learning how to fight. 

In the chapter, Shetty shares great self-reflection assignments that help determine what kind of fighter you are so it’s definitely a worthwhile book if looking within/self-development is your intention (as is mine!).

My big takeaway has been, that either we both win, or we both lose, there are only win-win or lose-lose scenarios.

I’ll sign off this week by sharing Arjuna’s fate and one of The Gita’s many lessons:

The results of any battle reflect the warrior’s intentions.

Deepak

Currently: 📖 : Reading | 👀: watching/listening | 🎵: song of the week | 🥷: Team messages

📖 : The Creative Act: by Rick Rubin

👀 : James Webb Telescope: Infrared Astronomy

🎵 : Versus - Russian Circles

🥷: Executive Functioning | Mentoring lessons with me going LIVE Nov 2023 : 📤️ : [email protected] for more info ⚡️