दुःखमित्येव यत्कर्म कायक्लेशभयात्त्यजेत्।स कृत्वा राजसं त्यागं नैव त्यागफलं लभेत्॥
duḥkham ity eva yat karma kāya-kleśa-bhayāt tyajetsa kṛtvā rājasaṃ tyāgaṃ naiva tyāga-phalaṃ labhet
Word by word
The verse says
Whoever gives up work because it is hard, afraid of the trouble it will cost the body, has made the driven kind of renunciation. He gets nothing from giving up at all.
In plain words
The second kind. This one is not confused. It is just tired.
The work is given up because it is difficult, and the person knows that is why.
And the line at the end is unusually blunt. He gets nothing. Not punished, not condemned. The renunciation simply does not do the thing renunciation does.
Where you've felt this · in failure
A friend signs up to help at a weekend camp for children and drops out two days before, saying the dates do not work. The dates work. He has remembered how loud forty children are and how little sleep he will get. Nobody holds it against him. He also does not get the thing that the people who went came back with.
Going deeper
Avoiding difficulty and letting go are being separated here, and they are easy to confuse because they produce the same empty weekend.
The word used is bodily trouble. Not moral objection, not a reasoned change of direction. Just the anticipation of discomfort. That is an ordinary human motive and nothing in this verse says it makes you a bad person.
What it says is that nothing comes of it. Letting go works because something real is released. Skipping a hard thing releases nothing; it simply postpones it, usually to a version of yourself who is no better rested.
There is a plain test in this and it takes one question. If the task were easy, would you still be giving it up? If the honest answer is no, you have not let anything go. You have just put it down.