Rajiv Parti's Blog, page 3

Sharing the Stage

I shared the stage with Anita Moorjani and Eben Alexander during the August 2013 IANDS Conference!

Dr. Rajiv Parti with Anita Moorjani

 

Dr. Rajiv Parti with Eben Alexander

 

 

Falling in Love Again with Life, Part 2: Gratitude

One of the most healthful of all attitudes toward the world and our experience of the world is gratitude. To view being alive as a kind of miracle, to consider our ability to experience the world in all its variety as a blessing, is itself a blessing. The development of my own

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Falling in Love Again with Life, Part 1

The idea of someone coming to a new appreciation of life after having a close brush with death has become a cliché. That’s probably partly because the idea has been central to the story lines of popular movies and books. And also because it’s easy to understand how thinking we are near

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Being Near Death and Acceptance

All of us will experience a time in our lives when we are very near death, but unfortunately we won’t live to tell about it. Before those final moments arrive, however, some have an experience of being near death and yet find a way to survive. Some even go on to live

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Values: Where We Live

There seems to be no end of lessons that can be drawn from my near death experience (NDE) a few years back. In other blogs I’ve written about how the experience helped me understand the value of caring for and respecting others, the selfless service called seva, and emotional acceptance. These are

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NDEs and PTSD

Near death experiences (NDEs) often give rise to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), a condition that affects millions of people in our country. Just as the name implies, PTSD results from experiencing a traumatic event or events. Here are some common signs of PTSD:

Flashbacks to the traumatic event, including reliving the

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The Spiritual Ego and Seva

There are different ways to interpret what I encountered in my near-death experience several years ago. In a recent blog I suggested an interpretation of the dark and frightening part of my experience, the part in which I saw demons all around me

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Seva (Service with Gratitude)

Nowadays, the Indian Sanskrit words “karma,” “mantra,” “pundit,” “dosha,” and “chakra” are becoming very mainstream. There is one such word, however, that is not as well known—but needs to be. The word is “seva,” which in Sanskrit means “service.”

Seva is not just any kind of service, but rather selfless service performed

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My Stroke of Insight

I first came across Jill Bolte Taylor PhD, a Harvard-trained neuro-scientist, after a video of her speech at TED went viral. (TED is an annual conference devoted to Technology, Entertainment, Design). In her speech, Dr. Taylor described how in 1996 she witnessed herself having a stroke and the subsequent feeling

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NDE and the Dark Side

“To appreciate heaven well, it is good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell.” -Will Carleton

We spend our early lives creating our ‘dark’ side, our shadow. Everyone has one. It is instinctive and irrational and prone to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived deficiency in someone

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