By: BK Surya
Source: The Daily Guardian 
Dated: April 26th, 2025

Rajyoga meditation is now recognised as a powerful and easy-to-use tool for personal empowerment. This simple method of communion with the Supreme enriches the self with inner powers, whereby one regains control over one’s thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

Such empowerment not only helps individuals deal effectively with challenging situations and overcome stress, depression, and negative ways of thinking, it also alleviates personality disorders and other conditions that, in extreme cases, can lead to suicide.

According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 700,000 people die every year by suicide. With life becoming increasingly complicated, the causes of suicide have multiplied. Many individuals choose to end their life when they are unable to cope with the pressures of the modern world. A soured relationship, academic failure, indebtedness, hopelessness, shame or guilt, and even bullying over the internet can push individuals over the edge. Ready access to drugs, toxic substances, weapons, and high-rise buildings makes it easier to take one’s life.

It is estimated that at least 90 per cent of all people who commit suicide suffer from one or more mental ailments such as depression, personality disorder, and schizophrenia. Depression is believed to account for a large number of suicides. The distorted thinking resulting from depression makes it difficult for individuals to figure out a solution to their suffering, and they see suicide as an easy way out of their misery. Depression is also known to activate the genetic factors and vulnerabilities that make some people prone to suicidal behaviour.

The practice of Rajyoga enables us to disconnect from damaging patterns of thought, feeling, and reaction, and instead use the positive qualities hidden in the soul. This improves the quality of our attitude, actions, and interactions, especially in challenging, stressful situations.

A person practising meditation fills up with inner peace and power, and their experience of happiness becomes less dependent on external circumstances. As a result, adverse experiences do not affect them as before. They develop the ability to think creatively, respond rather than react, and deal with situations on the basis of peace, love, and harmony rather than stress, conflict, and chaos. These positive changes can gradually remove depression and the influence of inherited negative traits, including suicidal tendencies. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world have benefited from Rajyoga, which the Brahma Kumaris have been teaching for over eight decades. Some doctors refer their patients to the Brahma Kumaris, to complement their medical treatment with a meditative lifestyle.

The loving acceptance these patients receive in the Brahma Kumaris community, without regard to their socio-economic background, makes a world of difference to someone thinking of taking their own life. Finding an empathic listening ear and the opportunity to express their feelings provides them relief from loneliness and pent-up negative emotions.

While such support offers immediate relief to a suicidal person, they have to make a personal commitment to recovery. Rajyoga helps in this by enabling the individual to develop tolerance, courage, patience, and a positive outlook, all of which build inner strength. The spiritual empowerment gradually changes their frame of mind, so that they begin to look forward to life, instead of seeking a way of leaving.

BK Surya is a Rajyoga teacher 
at the Brahma Kumaris headquarters in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.