Suicide on your mind?
I know why you are planning to end your life.
I get it.
You don’t have a job. Nobody loves you. The circumstances are less than promising. And your future looks bleak, like a dark, nasty, haunted forest with no exit in sight.
In other words, your life sucks.
And so, you think committing suicide is the only viable option.
No more hungry stomach. No more teary eyes. And no more dying inch-by-inch. Farewell, cruel world!
Pretty neat, huh?
But what if you’re wrong? What if suicide is not the answer? What if killing your body does not kill you?
Doesn’t make sense?
It will.
Just stay with me.
Let me give you a glimpse into my life and how I realized that one cannot kill oneself by killing their body.
1995: When Life Began to Collapse
My family was in our native village.
And I was living in Delhi, all by myself—doing a computer course. Since money was a challenge, things were hard for me. In fact, it was so hard that after paying for the course fee, stationery, and other basic utilities, I had hardly any money left.
My institute was 4 kilometers from my place, and since I couldn’t afford bus tickets, I had to use a fake ID card of a B-grade college to pretend to be a student. Some bus conductors believed me, while some others didn’t. And the days I had to buy a ticket were nightmarish because spending money on a ticket meant sleeping hungry that night.
In other words, my life was a freaking ugly mess.
The days began to blur into each other.
Morning no longer felt like a beginning—just a continuation of the night before. Hunger wasn’t dramatic anymore; it was ordinary. Stress stopped shouting and learned to hum quietly in the background. Even misery grew familiar, like a room you keep walking into because there’s nowhere else to go.
I was exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t touch.
Not tired of effort—but tired of hoping.
Each day asked the same question: What now?
And each evening returned the same answer: Nothing.
I didn’t wake up one morning wanting to die.
What crept in was subtler than that—a slow sense that continuing had stopped making sense. That enduring felt heavier than ending. That maybe, just maybe, stopping everything would finally bring relief.
And somewhere in that quiet erosion—without drama, without certainty—the thought formed:
What if this is the only way out?
When I Decided to End My Life
I won’t dress this up.
When you reach that point, you’re not chasing drama.
You’re chasing silence.
You don’t want attention. You don’t want sympathy. You don’t even want answers.
You just want the pain to stop asking things of you.
That’s what that decision really was.
Not courage. Not weakness.
Exhaustion.
I didn’t feel brave. I didn’t feel afraid.
I felt empty—like life had already loosened its grip on me, and I was simply agreeing to let go.
And then something strange happened.
Not hope.
Not a miracle.
Just… a pause.
Something interrupted the momentum—quietly, almost accidentally—before the decision could finish unfolding.
A Book That Interrupted the Spiral
Nothing dramatic happened.
No voice. No sign. No sudden burst of hope.
I simply came across a book.
It was by Osho—Rajneesh Dhyanyog. A slim volume, almost unassuming. It spoke about meditation. About awareness. About techniques meant to be lived, not believed.
Most of it passed through me without friction.
But one method didn’t.
It spoke of separating oneself from the body.
Not metaphorically.
Not philosophically.
Literally.
“You are not the body,” Osho said. “Nor are you the thoughts or emotions. You are beyond them—you are the soul. With awareness, one can come out of the body and see it from the outside, just as others do.”
I remember pausing there.
Not inspired.
Not convinced.
Suspicious.
I asked myself the only honest questions I had left:
Seriously? Could this be true?
Is there really something inside me that isn’t broken?
Or is this just another layer of spiritual nonsense for people who can afford hope?
I didn’t arrive at an answer.
But something else happened.
For the first time in a long while, I didn’t reject the idea outright.
I sat with it.
I let it irritate me.
I let it stay.
And after days of turning it over—without faith, without certainty—I did something small but consequential.
I decided to try.
The Experiment
My institute announced a two-month break.
I had nowhere to go.
No plans. No money to travel. No one waiting. So I stayed where I was—and, almost by default, began with the first level of the technique.
Living with total awareness.
There was no ceremony to it. No posture I had to master. No special hours. Just a simple instruction: watch. Whatever you’re doing—watch it.
At first, nothing changed.
Days passed in ordinary motions. Eating. Sweeping the courtyard. Bathing. Walking to the market. Reading. Breathing.
And then, gradually—so gradually I can’t point to a single moment—a strange thing began to happen.
I noticed a distance.
I could see my body eating.
My hands sweeping.
My feet walking along the road.
The actions were happening—but they weren’t happening to me.
I was there, unmistakably present, yet slightly behind everything. Watching. Observing. As if life had moved a step forward and I had stayed back.
I didn’t feel enlightened.
I didn’t feel peaceful.
I felt… curious.
Fifteen days passed like this.
Then the book moved to the next instruction.
“You are not the physical body,” Osho wrote. “You are an energy form. You can expand or contract yourself with intention alone. Once you can see daily life happening to the body, take the next step: concentrate this energy—yourself—at the navel.”
I read that line more than once.
There was no thrill in it. No anticipation.
Only a quiet sense that something was being asked of me—and that, for some reason, I was willing to comply.
So I did.
The Day the Body Fell Away
It was a hot afternoon.
I don’t remember the date—and somehow, that feels right.
I began the experiment the way I had been doing every day. Nothing unusual. Nothing intentional beyond staying with the instruction—attention resting at the navel.
At some point, fatigue crept in.
I must have fallen asleep.
Only—I didn’t disappear.
After a few minutes, I became aware that I was awake. Not dreaming. Awake. Clear. Present.
But I couldn’t open my eyes.
At first, I thought it was just heaviness. Sleep lingering. I tried again.
Nothing moved.
Not my eyes.
Not my hands.
Not a single part of my body responded.
That’s when it registered—not as panic yet, just as fact—I had no control over the body at all.
And yet, I was unmistakably there.
I was inside the body, aware of it from within. The body felt vast—stretched out like a dark, unfamiliar landscape. Not painful. Just enormous.
I could sense everything.
The rhythm of my breath.
The steady thud of my heartbeat.
Sounds from outside the room.
Even the weight of the humid air resting on the skin.
All of it was happening.
But none of it was me.
The body was there. Alive. Functioning.
And I was somewhere else—present, watching, unable to intervene.
That’s when the word finally surfaced:
Damn.
If I Couldn’t Control the Body, Where Was I? What Was I?
I was inside my body.
That much was clear.
But I didn’t have a body of my own.
No arms.
No legs.
No edges.
I was something else—an intensely bright, navy-blue, fog-like presence. Dense, yet weightless. Moving freely from one end of the body to the other, as if distance no longer meant what it used to.
It was unmistakably real.
Not imagined. Not symbolic.
An experience so unfamiliar that excitement and terror existed side by side, without cancelling each other out.
I had begun the experiment with a vague hope—maybe something would happen someday. A subtle shift. A small glimpse.
I did not expect this.
Not now. Not so completely.
There I was—floating inside my own body like wind moving through an empty house. No name. No shape. No point of reference. And most disturbing of all—no control.
The body was there.
And I wasn’t it.
That’s when urgency set in.
I needed to return.
To re-enter.
To get hold of the body again.
Because whatever this was—however extraordinary—it was not something I felt prepared for.
Can I tell you the truth?
I was fucking scared.
Seriously.
Returning to the Body
And then a thought surfaced.
Not gently.
Not logically.
More like a lifeline.
If contracting had pulled me away from my body…
then expanding might bring me back into it.
I didn’t debate it. I didn’t test it.
I just acted.
I tried expanding—into my legs first, then my hands, then everywhere at once. There was no finesse in it. Only urgency. Only the need to return.
And within five… maybe ten seconds, I was back.
Inside the body again.
I opened my eyes.
My clothes were drenched. Sweat clung to my skin. My chest rose and fell wildly as I dragged air into my lungs, like someone who had been held underwater and released at the last possible moment.
The room hadn’t changed.
But I had.
Bloody hell.
I was terrified.
And at the same time—strangely, unmistakably—elated.
How could I not be?
I had seen myself separate from the body. Not as an idea. Not as belief. But as experience. Something most people only hear about in scriptures, or read in books, or half-believe from a distance.
They talk about it.
They imagine it.
But they don’t live it.
I had.
What That Day Changed for Me
That afternoon left me with something I couldn’t ignore.
Not a conclusion.
Not a philosophy.
But a deep, unsettling question.
If I could experience myself apart from the body—
if awareness could remain when control disappeared—
then what, exactly, was I trying to end back then?
I had believed, like most people do, that the body and I were the same thing.
That if the body stopped, everything would stop.
But after that experience, the idea no longer felt so simple.
Because what I had encountered wasn’t thought.
It wasn’t imagination.
And it certainly wasn’t comfort.
It was the unmistakable sense that something essential in me did not depend on muscle, breath, or movement.
And once that possibility enters you, it doesn’t leave easily.
I began to understand an old verse from the Bhagavad Gita in a way I hadn’t before:
The soul is not cut by weapons,
not burned by fire,
not drowned by water,
not dried by wind.
I had read those lines earlier in life.
This time, they didn’t sound poetic.
They sounded… descriptive.
What shook me most was this:
If what I am isn’t limited to the body, then destroying the body wouldn’t be the escape I once imagined.
It wouldn’t be an ending.
It would be a rupture.
And that realization carried weight.
Because when someone thinks of suicide, they’re usually seeking relief.
An end to pain.
An end to exhaustion.
An end to the feeling of being trapped.
But what if the pain doesn’t dissolve the way we expect it to?
What if the body is not the only place suffering lives—and not the only place awareness continues?
I’m not offering this as a belief to adopt.
Only as an experience that changed how I understood my own despair.
For me, it became clear that trying to destroy the body was not the same as understanding what was hurting.
And once that distinction appeared, even faintly, something shifted.
The urgency softened.
The story cracked open.
And for the first time in a long while, I paused—not because life had improved, but because the question had changed.
What I Later Understood About the Body
Later, as I read more carefully, I began to understand why that experience had shaken me so deeply.
Osho explained the body as having seven chakras—points where consciousness and the physical form meet. In his language, they were not abstract ideas, but places of connection. Interfaces.
And according to him, if one were to leave the body abruptly—even once—that alignment could be disturbed.
He used a metaphor that stayed with me.
The body, he said, is like a motorbike.
As long as the engine’s original seal remains intact, everything runs smoothly. The moment that seal is broken—tampered with—the balance changes. You can put the parts back together, yes. The bike may still run. But something is never quite the same. It begins to protest. It demands more care. Sometimes, it breaks down in ways that are difficult to explain.
He suggested the same could happen with the body.
Not as a threat.
Not as a rule.
But as a possibility.
That certain inner disruptions—especially those forced too early or without grounding—might express themselves physically. Fatigue without cause. Illness without diagnosis. A body that no longer feels entirely at home.
And then came the part that stayed with me the longest.
He said that every serious meditator must, at least once, experience that they are not the body. That this realization alone is enough to loosen the fear of death.
But he added something else—quietly, almost as a caution.
Such experiments, he said, are better left for later years. A time when family responsibilities are behind you. When the stakes feel lighter. When the loss of a few months—or even more—would not weigh heavily on anyone else’s life.
Not because life is disposable.
But because by then, the insight has already done its work.
You know what you are.
And what you are not.
Looking back, I can see why my fear stopped me where it did.
I reached the threshold—but didn’t cross it.
And perhaps that hesitation wasn’t weakness at all.
Perhaps it was instinct.
Or timing.
Or grace.
Either way, it left me alive—and questioning.
Which brings me to the question that followed me afterward…
What That Question Slowly Turned Into
After everything I had lived through, one question refused to leave me alone.
Can you end yourself by ending the body?
For most of my life, the answer had felt obvious.
The body lives—you live.
The body dies—you die.
That’s how we’re taught to see it. That’s how we learn to identify ourselves.
But after that experience—after sensing awareness without control, presence without form—that equation no longer felt complete.
Because what I had encountered didn’t disappear when the body stopped responding.
It didn’t fade when movement was gone.
It remained.
So the idea that destroying the body would end everything began to feel… uncertain.
Not wrong.
Just incomplete.
I started to see how suicide is often imagined as an escape. A final relief. A way to put an end to suffering that feels unbearable.
And I understand that impulse. I really do.
But what unsettled me was the possibility that ending the body might not end the one who is suffering.
That perhaps pain doesn’t belong only to flesh and circumstance—but also to unexamined fear, unhealed belief, unresolved identity.
If that’s true—if even partially true—then destroying the body wouldn’t be freedom.
It would be interruption.
A stopping of one chapter without understanding what the story is actually about.
I’m not saying this as doctrine.
I’m not offering a cosmic map or a spiritual rulebook.
I’m only sharing what shifted inside me.
What I came to feel—slowly, reluctantly—was this:
You can end the body.
But that may not be the same as ending yourself.
Because whatever it is that knows despair…
whatever it is that longs for relief…
whatever it is that asks for rest—
That part may not be the part that dies.
And once that possibility appeared, I couldn’t rush toward endings anymore.
I had to pause.
I had to stay.
I had to listen more carefully to what was actually hurting.
And that pause—small as it was—changed the direction of my life.
A Quiet Place to Land
If you’ve read this far, I want to say this gently: you don’t need to decide anything right now. You don’t need answers. You don’t need certainty. Sometimes, staying is enough. Sometimes, breathing through one more moment is already an act of courage.
Pain has a way of convincing us that everything must be resolved immediately. But life rarely asks for that. More often, it asks for patience—for a willingness to remain present with what hurts, without rushing toward escape or explanation.
If despair feels heavy today, let it be shared. With another person. With a quiet place. With time itself. You don’t have to carry it alone, and you don’t have to understand it fully for it to soften.
Nothing written here is a command. It’s only a reflection—one person’s lived pause in the middle of darkness.
And sometimes, a pause is enough to let something else enter.
Author’s note: This is a personal reflection, not medical or psychological advice; if you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsafe, please consider reaching out to someone you trust.