What is victim mentality, and how do you let go of it?

The SPH describes victim mentality as holding on to the belief that you have been wronged. Dropping victimhood means sacrificing that pattern, along with the pain and the reasons you keep for carrying it. He calls this sacrifice tyaga.

In this satsang, he gives the pattern familiar words: life could have been better. It could have been more sympathetic. Paramashiva could have been more compassionate. These thoughts all return to the feeling that life has treated you unfairly.

For The SPH, that belief reduces the quality of your existence. He calls it a delusion that keeps you seeing yourself as an ordinary person defined by suffering. His invitation is to recognize Paramashivatva: the highest state, which he presents as your real nature.

The SPH also says that society's ideas about what is wrong can be pushed on you. You may then view your past through those ideas and come to believe you were wronged.

The SPH places the sacrifice of victimhood at the center of his work. If he can help you release the pattern that life should have been kinder, he says, his job is done. He asks you to let go of the identity built around having been wronged and recognize the possibility he sees in you.

The SPH says sacrificing pleasure is easy compared with sacrificing pain. Guilt, the feeling that you are not competent, and the sense that you are a failure can be much harder to give up. Releasing them is what he calls the real tyaga.

He uses Krishna and Abhimanyu to challenge the demand for a perfect past. In his telling of the war, even Krishna missed things. He could not protect Abhimanyu, because he too was working within a frame.

The SPH says even Arjuna's undeniable strength could not wipe out every weapon on the other side. Krishna had to choose whom he could protect. Strength and skill did not make every loss avoidable.

He brings that point back to your own decisions. You may have succeeded and still look back at one or two places where you wish you had chosen better. A winning strategist is not a perfect strategist. The pain of thinking you should have been more intelligent, or should not have missed something, is also yours to sacrifice.

The SPH gives a smaller example too. You can forget that you completed a PhD, yet still carry the pain of an examination you missed. The achievement fades from view while the painful moment stays. He asks for tyaga of that past-related pain, including the guilt attached to your own choices.

The SPH says the past is not dead, and the future is not as unborn as you think. He pictures past, present, and future as three cupboards. You can choose what you take from them now.

His past cupboard holds a thousand good things and a thousand bad things. Pick the good things, and you can feel strong and full of energy. Pick the bad things, and you can fill yourself with pain, guilt, and suffering. The cupboard contains both.

For the future, The SPH offers another choice. You can look toward a thousand good things and keep busy bringing them into your life. Or you can dwell on what might go wrong: a broken pen, a punctured tyre, a red signal on the road. These setbacks might happen while you are on your way to something great.

His lottery example puts those worries beside something much larger. You have won a billion dollars and are driving to deposit the ticket and collect the money. Then you reach a red signal. Your attention can stay on that stop, leaving you worried and insecure. Or you can celebrate the billion dollars you have won.

The SPH uses the same freedom of choice for looking back and looking ahead. You can form an opinion about your past and create possibilities for your future. He says this freedom becomes clear when you decide to do tyaga.

For The SPH, completion means seeing that your pains are not justified, even factually, when you examine the past from many dimensions. He asks you to look at the actual happening from all angles and question the reasons you have given pain to remain.

He connects this understanding directly with tyaga. The sacrifice includes the idea that many wrong things were done to you, as well as the explanations that keep that idea in place. In his view, looking at what happened in full can lead you to a different conclusion about your past.

The SPH returns to the cupboard image, this time describing diamonds covered with dirt. The diamonds are already there. The pattern of feeling wronged covers them up. Looking at the past from more than one angle, he says, allows that covering to fall away.

The SPH calls carrying a false account of your past incompletion, and coming to an understanding of the reality completion.

The SPH also gives completion a spiritual meaning. After sacrificing pain and its justifications, he says, you can understand that you existed as Paramashiva even in the past. That recognition gives you confidence that you can express Paramashivatva in the future.

The SPH knows you may hear this teaching and feel that he does not know your life. He voices the objection himself: you have pain, you have had pain, and you believe it is justified. He acknowledges a gap between what he is saying and what you experience as your reality.

The SPH says he could sit with each listener, take up each incident, and examine every time they felt wronged. Looking at each situation from many dimensions, he believes, would show them that they had not been wronged. He also says that even the facts may have been understood wrongly. This is his view; you can weigh it for yourself.

Later, The SPH describes another response: someone feels that victimhood is the only thing they have left. They ask him to leave at least that with them. Giving it up feels like losing the last thing they can still hold.

He answers with his offer of Paramashivatva. He asks for the release of victimhood and holds out that possibility in return. The exchange is direct, even while he recognizes that listeners may resist it.

The SPH describes the idea of being wronged as taking away your inner space. Completion, he says, gives it back with confidence. His answer to the pain that feels justified is to examine the very incidents behind it from more than one angle.

The SPH says the belief that you were wronged in the past can leave you expecting an insecure future. If life should have been better before, you may expect to be wronged again. You become stuck seeing yourself as an ordinary person prone to pain and suffering.

He also answers the thought that life could have been more compassionate. Life is still alive in you, he says. You are still breathing. He calls that the ultimate compassion life can offer, and says the greatest gift Paramashiva can give is Atma Tattva, your soul, which he has already given us.

The SPH makes the contrast vivid with two lost pennies. Imagine Paramashiva giving you a billion dollars, yet your complaint is about the two pennies you lost yesterday. You went walking with 100 cents in your purse and came back with 98. Now you wonder why your money was not kept safe. Why could Paramashiva not have protected those two coins?

He then offers two ways to value your existence. Valuing it with vision is enlightenment; valuing it with pain is incompletion. The cost of holding on, in his teaching, is that pain becomes the measure of your life. The same pattern that keeps the two pennies in view also leaves you looking toward the future through insecurity.

The SPH describes the person who sacrifices pain as a tyagi. When you stop tormenting yourself with it, he says, you can have much more love for yourself and every being.

His image is gold: pure, positive toward life, and shining. He says tyaga burns away blind spots. Love for yourself and others is part of the change he describes when those blind spots fall away.

The SPH speaks with confidence about his own decision. He declares himself freed from suffering connected with both the past and the future because he decided to do tyaga.

Near the end of the teaching, he says a new life can be built when you decide to do tyaga. New possibilities can be built too. He also describes enlightenment as a juice already inside you, which you can drink through tyaga.

The SPH asks you to make a conscious decision to do tyaga. The sacrifice has two parts: the pain you carry and the justifications you hold for keeping it. He asks listeners to declare their integrity to him and promises to help them make that sacrifice.

The SPH puts his promise plainly: "I will empower you." He asks for the declaration today and offers his help with the sacrifice. The integrity he asks listeners to declare is directed to him; later, he explains the integrity from which tyaga itself comes.

Later, someone asks whether tyaga comes from integrity to your own goal. The SPH says it comes from integrity to your own soul, and he places more weight on that than on any goal.

Earlier, he even asks listeners to sacrifice their ideas about goals, saying the real goal will then appear in their inner space. So his call to begin rests on a conscious choice: sacrifice the pain, sacrifice the reasons you hold for it, and stay true to your own soul.

If your pain feels too heavy to carry alone, or someone is still hurting you, talk to someone you trust or a qualified counsellor.