Why Relationships Cause Us Pain: Karma, Grief and Freedom

The scene is Florence, and a teacher is standing in front of a wall of paintings. Asha Nayaswami tells the story in her talk "Why Relationships Cause Us Pain": she and her teacher, Swami Kriyananda, walked through the Uffizi and found painting after painting of Jesus on the cross, rendered in countless ways. When they came out, Kriyananda offered his verdict with a shrug and a smile: he thought it was time for a new theme. The laughter in the room is the point. Her argument, across roughly thirty-nine minutes, is that the suffering we bring on each other through love, loss and disappointment is real, but it is not the purpose of being alive, and that the heart we are trying to protect is being purified rather than punished. Drawing on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda and Kriyananda, she argues that relationships are among the most effective teachers we have, that we cannot hand our happiness to another person, and that grief, when met honestly, can turn the heart toward God.

What Is the Higher Self, and Why Does It Keep Steering Us Into Trouble?

The talk opens with a claim that reorders the usual picture of the self. We are, Nayaswami says, operating on many levels at once, and the small part of us that feels in charge is badly mistaken about its own authority. "We're extraordinarily misguided in thinking this tiny bit that we're conscious of is actually the captain of the ship," she says in the opening minutes. Beneath it is a part that "knows what our true destiny is and will not rest until we reach it," and that destiny, she says, is "purity of heart so that we can see God."

The word purity is the one she stops to defend. She reaches for a metallurgist's image: purifying gold. Pure gold is not gold mixed with a little of something else; the other material is simply not the essential substance, and the gold shines better once the impurities are gone. Our essential nature, in her account, is divine, blissful, free and not compelled, able to live by divine law "joyfully and effortlessly." The impurities are the endless internal refrain, "I would be happier if," which we tend to call "me." Her point is that this refrain is not the self we actually are, and that life keeps pressing on it because a higher part of us is trying, whether we know it or not, to scrape it away.

This is the frame for everything that follows. If relationships hurt, they are not evidence that something has gone wrong with love. They are part of a process of refinement, and the friction is doing work.

Why Do We Waste So Much Energy Fighting What Is?

One of the most practical passages in the talk concerns energy. Nayaswami observes that we have only so much capacity to change, learn and expand, and that we need "every ounce" of it for the work. Yet a great deal of that energy goes into rebellion against the very circumstances that are doing the teaching. "How much energy do we spend just saying I want it to be different?" she asks. The question is not rhetorical. It is an invitation to audit one's own inner life.

She illustrates this with her own early heartbreak, one of what she calls a "parade of disappointments." She describes the experience as total, and says she spent many weeks in deep sadness before a realization arrived. What had been true had ceased to exist, because everyone in the story had "turned the page." No power in heaven or earth, she says, could make the past present again. Her grief did not vanish when she understood this; she was still griefstricken. But the question changed from "why is this happening to me" to a far more practical one: how do I want to live?

"You can be as mad as you want about reality, but reality always wins."

(Asha Nayaswami, "Why Relationships Cause Us Pain," roughly the first six minutes)

She tells a second story that is as much about delivery as about doctrine. A friend and healer, listening to Nayaswami describe what she had been thinking and doing, simply looked at her "with all her loving heart" and asked: "How is that working for you?" The answer, Nayaswami admits, was "not very well." Her friend followed with the obvious next question: how much longer do you want to keep doing it? The moment is a small model of the talk's method. Acceptance is not a surrender to misery. It is a plain look at what resistance is actually producing.

Why Do the People We Love Hurt Us the Most?

Nayaswami's most striking claim about relationships is almost blunt: "nothing breaks our heart as much as each other." The reason, she argues, is that we arrive with a fundamental misperception about why we are here. We imagine life as a setting in which we can sit where we are and have everything "arrange itself around me," with everyone fitting neatly into our shape. We were made for joy, but that does not mean everything must match what we want.

She is equally firm that the opposite error is also false. "We are not here to suffer." She criticizes the tendency to read suffering as a path to holiness, saying that treating the crucifixion as the defining image of Christianity, rather than the resurrection, led to the notion that the more you suffer, the more you are like Jesus. That, she says, was a "super bad mistake." The alternative she offers is that we are here to learn, and whether that learning feels miserable or merely challenging depends on how we regard it, not on the circumstances. "It's not has nothing to do with the circumstances," she says in a line that captures her teaching compactly. "It's just how we regard it."

The mechanism she describes is forced cooperation. In the early stages of the soul's development, we are compelled to be with one another, and in that compulsion we suffer from each other because we have to find out what is true and what is not. Only a highly advanced person, she suggests, can continue that inner work without the external pressure of obligations and demands. Relationships, in this reading, are a narrow channel through which we scrape away misunderstandings "so that we can embrace who we really are."

Can We Make Another Person Responsible for Our Happiness?

The talk's most useful practical teaching concerns expectation. Nayaswami frames attachment and expectation as the places where freedom leaks out. When we believe another person's love, presence or behavior should supply our happiness, we are asking them to do a job that belongs to our own higher self. The lesson is not to stop loving. It is to stop placing the full weight of our inner life on someone else's shoulders.

She extends this to parenthood with unusual clarity. A mother and father, she says, create the physical vehicle through which the soul expresses its destiny, but they do not create the soul or its destiny. The child, though it may not yet have the means to explain itself, is "a fully formed consciousness" with its own intelligence and spiritual realization, expressing it "in an age appropriate manner." Parents have a huge responsibility to guide, she insists, but "you don't own it." The same principle, she suggests, applies to spouses and friends. Each soul is on its own journey, even when two people make vows to one another.

This is where the talk's insistence on "every soul has its own spiritual destiny" becomes concrete. If you cannot own another person's path, then heartbreak when they leave it is not simply a betrayal to be avenged. It is a moment in which their destiny and yours diverge, and the work is to release the story you had written for the two of you.

What Do Karma and Reincarnation Have to Do With Heartbreak?

The talk's chapter list signals a substantial turn toward karma and reincarnation, including segments on "unfinished karma," on why not every chapter of life has a happy ending, and on forgiveness and releasing anger. The excerpt available for this article ends before those arguments fully unfold, so it would be a mistake to paraphrase them in detail here. What the surviving material does establish is the frame: relationships recur because the soul still has lessons to learn, and forgiveness is presented as a release rather than a verdict on the other person. Viewers who want the full reasoning should watch those sections directly, beginning at the chapter marked 31:16 in the video's timestamps.

How Can Grief Bring Us Closer to God?

The talk ends its arc on grief and the mystery of divine love. The chapter list points to Yogananda's own experience of grief, to the story of Sri Ramakrishna and the nature of divine love, and to the call to embrace our humanity on the spiritual path. The closing chapter, "Praying for strength to meet life's challenges," suggests the speaker's resolution: that prayer for strength is itself a practice of letting the heart be refined rather than hardened. Within the excerpt, Nayaswami stresses that the river of life carries us forward whether we resist or not, and that the more we can feel it moving, the less we need to fight it.

That is the quiet argument beneath the whole talk. Grief is not a detour from the spiritual life. It is one of the places where the gold shows through.

Where to go from here

If this talk has landed hard, begin where Nayaswami begins: with the gap between the self we think we are and the higher self she describes. Over the next week, notice one moment when you catch yourself saying "I want it to be different." Ask the question her friend asked: how is that working for you? Then return to the later chapters of the video, especially those on expectation, forgiveness and grief, and watch them slowly rather than as a single sitting. The teaching is less a set of rules than a set of questions meant to be lived with, and that is exactly the kind of reflection Nayaswami invites throughout.

Quotes in this article are drawn from the speaker's talk as transcribed on her YouTube channel, and paraphrases reflect the material available at the time of writing. The video runs roughly thirty-nine minutes and is worth watching in full for the context and tone that a written summary cannot carry.