KARUNA RASA

Understanding Karuna Rasa

Karuna Rasa is an essential energy source within us that allows us to feel and experience the wide range of emotions life offers, enabling us to bring these feelings into conscious awareness. It is rooted in grief and inspires us to understand suffering and develop compassion. Through Karuna Rasa, we become more mindful of our own and others' pain, which helps nurture empathy and compassion.

The Root of Karuna Rasa

The root emotion of Karuna Rasa is grief, sorrow, or heartbreak (shoka)—the deep feeling of suffering. All too often, we get stuck in grief, not realizing this is a stage for transformation, not an emotion to identify with and settle into while building other depleting emotions like anger and depression. Yet, as we develop our understanding of Karuna Rasa, we come to know that the feelings of suffering are an opportunity to awaken our consciousness and open our hearts.

Living the Essence of Karuna Rasa

While feeling our own grief or the grief of others, we have the opportunity to breathe deeply and focus on softening the muscles around our hearts, throats, and chests, creating space for compassion and empathy. Now we are living the full essence of Karuna Rasa. It is in understanding and knowing the cause of suffering that we create a space for healing through compassion. This is Karuna Rasa.

Breaking the Cycle of Suffering

Sadness and suffering are born from ignorance and attachment—the ignorance rooted in the lack of understanding and the self-centeredness of clinging to our desires. In suffering, our ego is driven by its need for attention and approval and relates to the dualities of right and wrong or good and bad. While it clings to these, it manifests an addiction that throws us into a habit of suffering. It is a cycle that is seeded in unconscious, habitual attachment. We break that cycle when we become aware, recognize and understand the pattern, move into compassion (kindness)  or empathy (sensing what others are feeling) , and then empower ourselves to break the pattern by choosing compassion.

The Boundless Nature of Compassion

Compassion is an infinite kindness. Boundless kindness knows no difference in our own suffering and the suffering of others. It sees all living things as other and cares for plants, animals, insects and other humans. There is no limit by gender, race, color of skin, sexual preference or religion. Wide open compassion is the fullness of our experience with Karuna Rasa. This is not a limited practice but an endless journey of self-growth and human enrichment.