Nobody Belongs to You, Attachment Is the Root of Heartbreak - Gita Explains Why
Riya Kumari | Apr 17, 2025, 23:36 IST
( Image credit : Times Life Bureau )
Let’s get one thing straight: You’re not heartbroken because he forgot your birthday. You’re not crying over a girl who left you on "read" for four hours. And no, the universe isn’t conspiring against your love life because Mercury moonwalked into retrograde. You're heartbroken because—wait for it—you got attached. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
There’s a kind of silence that hits you after heartbreak. It’s not the loud kind with tears and playlists and typing bubbles that never turn into replies. It’s the still kind. The one where you sit with the realization that someone who once made your world feel full is now just... gone. And it’s in that silence that a question starts to rise—Why does it hurt this much? The Bhagavad Gita answers quietly. No drama. No blame. Just this: “From attachment comes desire. From desire, anger. From anger, delusion. From delusion, loss of memory. From loss of memory, destruction of intelligence. And from that, one is lost.” Sounds ancient. But it’s not. It’s now. It’s every time we held on to someone too tightly, convinced they were ours. It’s every time we believed love meant possession. The Gita doesn’t tell you to stop loving. It asks you to stop clinging.
1. Nobody Belongs to You—And That’s Not a Sad Thing
This isn't a cold truth. It’s a freeing one. People come into your life. They love you, they leave, they change, they stay for a while. But they never belonged to you.
What belonged to you was the experience. The love you gave. The growth you earned. The lessons that shaped you. Not the person. We suffer not because love ends—but because we think we were entitled to it forever.
2. Attachment Isn’t Love. It’s Expectation in Disguise
Love says, “I wish you well, even if your path moves away from mine.” Attachment says, “I need you to behave a certain way to feel whole.” The Gita makes this distinction with razor-sharp clarity. What we often call “love” is a web of expectations—return my feelings, choose me back, never leave.
But people aren’t scripts to follow. They are souls, like you, moving through a journey you don’t fully understand. Expecting someone to orbit around your need is not love. It’s control dressed up as romance.
3. Pain Is Inevitable. Suffering Is Optional
The Gita doesn’t promise you a painless life. Even Krishna, the divine speaker of the Gita, does not save Arjuna from war. Instead, he teaches him how to stand inside the storm and not lose himself. You’ll love people who don’t love you back. You’ll give more than you receive. You’ll be left without closure. That’s life.
But suffering comes when we believe it should’ve been different. That belief—that resistance to what is—is where we break. Freedom comes from accepting the moment without needing to own it.
4. Let Go, Not With Bitterness—But With Awareness
Letting go doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you stop trying to grip what was never in your hands to begin with. It means you trust that what’s meant for your growth will stay, and what leaves was never part of your path for long.
There’s peace in surrender—not the weak kind, but the wise kind. The kind that says: I will love again, but I won’t mistake love for possession. Because true love holds with open hands. Not clenched fists.
5. You Are Enough, Even After They Leave
Perhaps the most radical thing the Gita teaches is that you are not incomplete. You are not missing pieces that someone else has to fill. The soul, it says, is whole. Unchanging. Beyond harm.
The heartbreak feels like loss—but nothing essential was taken from you. Your ability to love remains. Your integrity remains. Your path is still here. You are not someone’s ex. You are not someone’s almost. You are a soul who happened to meet another soul—and now must walk on.
Final Thought:
We chase permanence in a world built on movement. We attach to people, moments, feelings—hoping they’ll stay just as they are. But everything shifts. And that’s not a flaw in the design. It is the design. The Gita invites you to live fully, love deeply, and release gently. To remember that nothing and no one belongs to you—but everything teaches you something.
The next time you find yourself mourning what left, ask not why it left, but what it gave you. The real heartbreak isn’t that things end. It’s that we forget how much they gave us while they were here. And maybe that’s where healing begins.
1. Nobody Belongs to You—And That’s Not a Sad Thing
What belonged to you was the experience. The love you gave. The growth you earned. The lessons that shaped you. Not the person. We suffer not because love ends—but because we think we were entitled to it forever.
2. Attachment Isn’t Love. It’s Expectation in Disguise
But people aren’t scripts to follow. They are souls, like you, moving through a journey you don’t fully understand. Expecting someone to orbit around your need is not love. It’s control dressed up as romance.
3. Pain Is Inevitable. Suffering Is Optional
But suffering comes when we believe it should’ve been different. That belief—that resistance to what is—is where we break. Freedom comes from accepting the moment without needing to own it.
4. Let Go, Not With Bitterness—But With Awareness
There’s peace in surrender—not the weak kind, but the wise kind. The kind that says: I will love again, but I won’t mistake love for possession. Because true love holds with open hands. Not clenched fists.
5. You Are Enough, Even After They Leave
The heartbreak feels like loss—but nothing essential was taken from you. Your ability to love remains. Your integrity remains. Your path is still here. You are not someone’s ex. You are not someone’s almost. You are a soul who happened to meet another soul—and now must walk on.
Final Thought:
The next time you find yourself mourning what left, ask not why it left, but what it gave you. The real heartbreak isn’t that things end. It’s that we forget how much they gave us while they were here. And maybe that’s where healing begins.