Life & Mortality Quote by Swami Sivananda

Sivananda’s admonition is less a self-help pep talk than a piece of spiritual engineering: stop feeding attention to what drains the mind, and redirect it toward disciplined change. The first sentence makes a blunt psychological claim - rumination doesn’t produce wisdom, it produces a mood. “Brood” is doing a lot of work here; it frames replaying mistakes as an active, almost indulgent habit, like keeping a wound open because it proves you were hurt. By naming “grief, regret and depression” in a tight sequence, he turns the past into a pipeline: one error, endlessly revisited, becomes an identity.

The subtext is pragmatic, even austere. There’s no invitation to excavate your childhood, no romanticizing of suffering as depth. The past is treated like karma in its most actionable form: consequences exist, but the mind doesn’t need to live inside them. That’s a distinctly yogic posture. Sivananda wrote from a tradition that sees mental states as trainable - not merely expressive, but formative. Attention is currency; spend it on self-torment and you buy more self-torment.

The second sentence sharpens the intent: don’t confuse “moving on” with amnesia. The point isn’t to deny failure; it’s to extract the lesson quickly and refuse the narcotic of self-reproach. In modern terms, he’s separating guilt (information) from shame (a loop). The ethical demand is forward-facing: the only acceptable relationship to yesterday’s mistake is a different choice tomorrow.