Ishan Shivanand, a Shiv yogi, argues that helping others requires saying no confidently. Listening endlessly to complaints traps you in someone else's negative karma. Instead, redirect them toward spiritual practices like sadhana, meditation, and community gatherings that encourage self-help.
So do you really want to help people? And if you really want to help people, learn to say no with confidence. Helping people does not mean karmic entanglement for yourself. Behavior pattern reinforcement for them. Listening to a sad person cry again and again is called the process of enabling, where you are enabling a person's tears to come on the surface so that the person cannot deal with the real issue. So if you really, really want to help a person, Then never ever listen to a person cry or moan about their life. You want to help them? Tell them to join the forum, because God helps those who help themselves. You want to actually help a person? All that time that you wasted about gossiping about that problem Or all that time you wasted about them gossiping about their family could have been time utilized on their body, on their loved ones, or on making themselves better. So you want to help somebody? Babaji has given you tools. Teach them sapsati. Make them join a forum. Arrange and organize a live shivir because remember, God help those who help themselves. No guru listens to negativity. And if somebody is telling you that, tell me your negativity, then understand that is not divinity. That is just the neural pathway confirmation mission, the pattern becoming stronger. You are a Shiv yogi. You must walk on the path of Shiv Shiva. You must walk on the path of your Guru. So the next time you get a WhatsApp message telling you, I am so sad, do you have time to talk? Remember, learn to say no with confidence. Because once you listen to all that, trust me, even your mindset will not be good. You are now getting tangled in their karma. You will take a part of that pain, you will process it, and you will even put it to your husband or to your wife or to your children. You deserve so much more. Nobody got helped, and so many people got hurt. The next time somebody calls you and says, oh, listen to me, I have so much pain to talk about, learn to say no with confidence. And ask that person, do you want to come out of it? Okay, then we will think about it. We will meditate, or we will exercise, or we will do Sadhana, or we will do forum, or we will do satsang. Because I was taught we shall reap what we sow. And if we are talking negativity, we are getting negativity. We are talking positivity, we are getting positive. If a person is saying, oh, I want to talk to you about some— ask yourself, what is the point? That person wants happiness. So if That person wants happiness. What you have to do? Organize a BBS in your house, Babaji's bhajan singing. Put a nice bhajan, call that person, sing, dance, release those emotional blockages. And trust me, the real Shivyogi is the person who helps the other person.
