AVIS Viswanathan's Blog, page 20

If you learn well, you will live well – happy and peaceful

Life is teaching you something every moment that you are alive.
It’s up to you to learn or to discard or ignore the learning in that moment! And almost always Life’s lessons arrive at a time when you have no intention or interest in learning them! Yet we can’t escape the experience even if we don’t see the point just then to learn from it.
The experiences we have in this lifetime are our real education. So, clearly, our education does not cease with an academic qualification! And the more the experience, the greater your expertise. There’s no point in having all the academic qualifications that the world can offer, be brilliant with your GPA (Grade Point Average) but be a poor human being, who has no time for others, who does not see value in the moment, who merely exists, and who does not live! The tragedy with our world is that all assessments are materialistic. To most people, how much (wealth and material assets) you have is more important than how well you have lived. So, you are evaluated basis your income, your car, your clothes, your neighborhood, your club and such. And when some of these do get taken away, as they will possibly be, on one side you grieve their loss, but on another side you are discarded as worthless. The person who has seen Life’s upheavals, who has been battered and bruised by Life’s hard knocks, and who stays grounded, compassionate and humble when success comes calling, which it surely will, is far more evolved than someone who has made his millions and has seen only comfort and no pain.
One of the most important lessons that Life is teaching all of us is that each phase of Life is a guest, albeit an unexpected one, in our lifetime. If there is a lot of wealth in the beginning, know that it is a guest. It will have to leave you some day. If there is a lot of pain and suffering, it too is a guest. It too will have to depart. If there is a lot of debt, that too will stay for as long as it must and wants to. Then it too shall be gone. We must treat each phase with the same dignity and compassion that we accord to guests in our homes. Just the little extra we may like to do with Life’s guests is that we may want to learn from them. If we refuse to meet the guest and learn from the guest, there is no chance that this guest will leave. He or she will still be at the door – knocking. Don’t you think it is more prudent to just greet the guest, learn what you must and then see him or her off? This continuous inviting, greeting and learning (and unlearning) from each guest, from each phase in your Life, is what intelligent living is all about.
If you learn well, you will live well – happy and peaceful. If you resist, or refuse to learn, you will be miserable and agonize over the way things are! So, who’s your guest visiting you in Life presently? And what are you learning from your guest?

Unless we know when we worry, we will never be able to quit worrying.

The key to being liberated from worry is to be aware. Being aware requires only being. Just being. Nothing else.
There’s a perception, as a follower of this Blog commented the other day, that simply being is tough. No, it is not.
Examine yourself. Most of the time you worry without even applying your mind. It is a mechanical affair going on in your head. What will happen to this? Or that? Will I get what I want? Will my child be happy? Will my spouse survive? What if something terrible happens and what I want done is not accomplished? It is an incessant chatter. A cacophony in your head. And one worry sparks off another and another. Often times, this becomes uncontrollable. And you seek remedy. Someone tells you to lean towards meditation. Someone else tells you to propitiate the Gods. Someone again tells you to meet an astrologer or soothsayer or a tantric. Why? Because your mind refuses to listen to you.
Kabir, the 16th Century, weaver-poet, says this so beautifully in his couplet!
“Maala To Kar Mein Phire, Jeebh Phire Mukh MahinManua To Chahun Dish Phire, Yeh To Simran Nahin”
Translation
The rosary rotating by the hand, the tongue twisting in the mouth,With the mind wandering everywhere, this isn't meditation (counting the rosary, repeating mantras, if the mind is traveling - this is not meditation)
Meaning: Control the mind, not the beads or the words.
That ability to control the mind will come only from your awareness. Awareness can be inspired in you by practicing silence.
Spend an hour being silent every day. Just being. Read a passage. Write your thoughts in your personal journal. Do whatever you want, but remain silent and refuse to attend to anything that calls for you to disengage from what you plan to do in that hour. Don’t sleep. Don’t speak. Your hour of silence can make you super productive and aware during the other 23 hours in the day! So, it is good return on investment. This is the practice of ‘mouna’.
To be sure, it will not eradicate worry. Worry will arise, but your awareness will cut off that flow of thought. It will arrest the worry in its tracks. And help you come back to focusing on whatever you are doing in the moment. Practicing ‘mouna’or silence periods bring you to appreciate the power of now! Remember, there is precious little you can do about what you worry about by simply worrying! You can either act on a situation and succeed, or act on a situation and if you fail, accept that outcome. Or just leave the situation to Life to sort things out over time. Why worry? And then, worse, why worry about your worrying? The bottomline is don’t worry about worrying. Focus on where that worry germinates, sprouts, takes root. Go to that point and stem the flow of worry.

Life lessons from a cab ride on Teachers’ Day

There’s so much goodness in our world. We must pause from running the rat race to notice it though!
Picture shot on mobile camera with available light
Kalam in the red circle
Karthikeyan, the Uber cabbieYesterday, when we were riding on Uber, we noticed something interesting on the car’s front inner display shelf. There was a picture of former Indian President Abdul Kalam, who died last month, along with miniature statuettes of Shirdi Baba and Ganesha on the shelf. Kalam smiled back at us, waving charismatically, from an acrylic stand – in fact his presence was more prominent than even that of the Gods’ (who normally adorn car/vehicle interiors in India)! We asked our cabbie, Karthikeyan, who was in his early thirties, “Why Kalam?” And Karthikeyan replied, proudly: “He is my teacher that I never met. He taught me the value of muyarchi (hard work/disciplined effort) and naermai(integrity/honesty) through his Life.”
In a dog-eat-dog world, where even the “safe and secure” Uber cab aggregation service has been mired in crime and controversy – with at least two instances of rape by its cabbies being reported from the National Capital Region in the last 12 months, Karthikeyan’s originality and genuineness made a difference. Besides, yesterday was Teacher’s Day. And what better way to be reminded of two values that can never fail us in Life – hard work and honesty – that too through the Life of Kalam, a great teacher himself and an apostle who lived by and practiced those values till his last breath. The other learning is also this – it is said that if your work can inspire even one soul in your lifetime, you would have led a Life of meaning. And Kalam touched so many, many lives. Will you ever find an Indian cabbie sporting any other Indian President’s picture in his or her vehicle?

Our inspiration: we must live our Life in such a way that people will think of us when they want to be reminded of goodness and beauty in the world. Kalam lived this way. Karthikeyan is living his Life this way. Will you too?

Denying the problem does not make it go away

Refusing to look at a problem, or denying its existence, cannot make your Life any simpler.
All what you suffer from comes from what you deny. Facing Life and taking a problem head on is what can make you solve it and live in peace.
But we invariably don’t like to exorcise our demons. We somehow have become comfortable suffering, feeling tormented, preferring to stay debilitated than feeling liberated. Because continuing to be miserable seems far easier than having to work hard to rid ourselves of what makes us miserable!
I met someone recently after a couple of years. He, in his own opinion, was financially ‘very well off’. Yet he found his Life ‘incomplete’. He spent entire days, daily, in a prominent five-star hotel’s bar, literally being there from the time it opened to when it closed! He lamented to me that his wife no longer loved him and all she wanted was ‘his credit card and a certain sum of cash monthly for her shopping sprees’. His 24-year-old son, though married, was not exactly doing anything significant and ‘lived off’ his dad. His daughter was the only one who understood him but their relationship too in recent years had come under stress. She wanted to go overseas for higher studies but he was insistent that she marry now because that was the norm in his ‘community’. He said to me, in a tone reflective of a defeated man, “I have lost it in Life. I have done no wrong. Yet everyone around me has let me down. I am suffering. I wish I could die.”
I laughed at him and looked him in the eye. I told him: “My friend, you are the problem. For, as far as I know you, you have been drinking entire days for years now. You have a drinking problem – spurred by a lack of Purpose in your Life. You have enough and more money. So, because you don’t know how to be useful and productive, you are indulging in something that has already ruined your family Life and is on the verge of consuming you.”
My friend suddenly turned hostile. He ended our meeting and drove away drunk in his car, despite my request and protests to engage a taxi leaving his car behind.
I wish he understood that unless he faced the brutal reality of his Life, he may really be unable to make it any better.
Just as my friend has a problem, each of us has a problem too. All of us like to deny whatever is our problem__ranging from a relationship to a lousy job to a ruinous habit__hoping that time will take care of it! This is one area where no one can help you than you, yourself! 
But facing the truth is scary. How does one see the reality?
Good question. And so, it is with all situations, with all of humanity, with all aspects of Life! Fundamentally, if you know what you want out of your Life, you can go find that Life and recreate, reinvent yourself. But if you don’t know what you want, how can anyone help you? This question is not as profound as many people make it out to be. It is a dumb question. Even a person with low IQ can answer it __ by approaching Life the other way, by knowing, for starters, what you don’t want in your Life! Because the truth is that nobody wants to suffer. Since you don’t want to suffer or be miserable why do anything, or accept any situation that accentuates your suffering?

Remember: There are no two ways in which you can change your current realities or end your suffering! So, if you are feeling miserable about anything__or anyone__in Life, sit down and introspect. Diligently make a list of actions that you must take to end your misery. Resolve to do it. And just get down to doing it. Don’t give yourself the license to make excuses. My good friend Andy Law, maverick creative thinker and head of The Law Firm, says, “Unless you are prepared to give up something valuable you will never be able to truly change at all, because you’ll be forever in the control of things you can’t give up.” What he is reiterating is this: t he only way to solve a problem is to first accept that it exists. 

If you don’t feel good being with someone, don’t be with them. Whoever they may be.

Respect the way you feel before you respect how others feel about a situation or about you.          Yesterday a friend called to say that my father was unwell. He said my brother-in-law was trying to reach me. I spoke to my brother-in-law and inferred that my dad indeed had not been keeping good health. However, I excused myself from visiting him.
My family – parents and siblings – and I have been estranged for several years now. In the recent past the estrangement has been acute – a lot of it has to also do with the money my wife and I have borrowed from my parents in the past to resurrect our business. Naturally the money still remains due to them because our business has not picked up enough to enable us to repay anyone. (I have talked about this forgettable family saga in my Book – “Fall Like A Rose Petal – A father’s lessons on how to be happy and content while living without money” ; Westland, August 2014.)
But my decision to distance myself from my parents and siblings has a deeper context. I feel there is complete mistrust between all of us. Besides, I don’t find any of them true to who they are making themselves out to be. So, like I have done in the past, I chose to stay away from the present situation concerning my dad. And I prefer to remain this way in the future too.
My stance, without doubt, is debatable. In the world’s view, what I am doing may be seen as dereliction of duty. Some may term it as total abdication. Others may view it as lack of compassion: “A 76-year-old is pining for his oldest son, but the son obstinately clings on to his ego!” Yet others may believe that because it is a short Life, we must let go, bury our differences, and move on. My siblings have, for their part, on more than one occasion, pointed out to me that since I have been unable to return the money I owe to the family, the least I can and must do is to be a “dutiful” son and look after my parents physically. Indeed, there are these and several other ways to look at the choice I have exercised.
But I have not been driven by any of these considerations. To be sure, I hold no grudge against my family for the way my wife and I have been treated by them. I also recognize that I have, in the past, contributed unwittingly to the fractious environment in the family. Even so, after much reflection and soul-searching, my realization is that I don’t relate to any of them anymore. I can’t trust any of them and I feel there’s so much “untruth” and “pretension” on the rare occasions we have met. I believe they feel this way about me and my wife too. So, therefore, I have decided to refuse to brush aside this intense discomfort within me and pretend everything is normal by “showing up and being seen”. I feel that by staying away from each other we are all anchored in our own peaceful states. For everyone, including my ailing father, this is the best place to be in. This is my view. And I am peaceful living my Life with this view.
Yes, my wife and I owe my family, just as we owe 178 other creditors, money. And we believe, when things turn around for us financially, we will repay every rupee to everyone, with full interest due.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with my view here. But I will still share the learning I have gleaned from the experience I have had of being a “member” of my dysfunctional family! Sometimes when relationships become very messy, when there is no more relating among the people in the relationship, it is just best to let go of the relationships. Or, if you can’t, then let them simply be. Trying to get people, who are hell bent on misinterpreting you, to understand you is a waste of your precious time and energy. Trying to fulfil your familial obligations or filial duties at acute discomfort to you, while letting your inner peace be disturbed, is absolute hara-kiri. The past does not matter anymore. The future no one has seen. In the present, if you can’t trust someone, if you don’t feel happy being in someone’s presence, simply don’t pretend being comfortable and suffer in the bargain. Nothing is worth more in Life than your inner peace. If you cannot feel good being someplace with someone, don’t go there, don’t be with them. Whoever they may be. It is important you respect how you feel before you even respect the way others will feel.

This lifetime is a limited period offer

Value the opportunity in (and of) this lifetime. There may not be another as far as we know it!          I met someone recently who said that while he valued being an Indian, he valued owning an American passport more. He said, “With an American passport you can travel to most places in the world. With an Indian passport, you have to keep seeking visas to enter many countries.”
I don’t disagree with his logic. Of course he has a point. But I guess to be born human is the biggest opportunity that we often fail to recognize, let alone value. This human Life is the most valuable passport we can ever ask for. Wayne Dyer, one of the most profound thinkers of our time, passed away last week at 75. I have learned a lot from him and have benefited immensely from imbibing his philosophy. He often used to say: “Stop acting as if Life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.”   

Think about this deeply. We have all been created, we are born, without our asking. For all we care, we may well have been created as the swine that gives the flu than be created as the human that gets the flu from the swine. So, to be human, to be alive and to be able to read this post means a lot. It means that you are more blessed than several million other people on the planet – who don’t have vision, education, literacy, a computer or access to internet. Your lifetime is a limited period offer. Value it, avail of it, use it, live it fully while it lasts.

Junk the curse and conspiracy theory – celebrate Life’s magic and beauty!

None of us is cursed. If we count our blessings, no matter what we are facing, Life will be magical and beautiful.          A friend wrote to me, in a bout of depression perhaps, that he felt his Life was cursed – he was faced with a lot of hurdles in his business and career. He was hopeful though that eventually things will work out for him. “But it is the waiting that chews you up! That’s when I feel cursed and let down by Life,” he lamented.
I have felt like him before. But over years of waiting, like him, and quite like many of us do, for Life to deliver what I have envisioned, I have learnt that being impatient with Life is of no use. Life is not conspiring to fix you or me. None of us is cursed. Things just happen. Things just are the way they ought to be. It is our wanting our Life to be different from what it is that causes us to imagine that there’s a conspiracy, that we are cursed – this wantingis the root cause of all our suffering too. The best way to respond to Life is to just go with the flow. Drop all expectations. Don’t react to Life. Respond to it with acceptance. This does not mean inaction. This means learning to act with what is than demanding that the situation, the circumstance, the context be different.
Osho, the Master, explains this so beautifully: “Life is a curse if you are not aware.” The awareness he is referring to is about the true nature of Life. Which is that there is no Life any of us has other than what is happening to us in the now, in the moment. It is because we are imprisoned by the past – by guilt, grief and anger over what has happened – or by the future – by worry, anxiety and fear over what we imagine may happen to us – that we miss living in the present moment. When we are living this way we are physically present but we are not aware of nor are we in the moment.
A man was sitting on the beach brooding over his Life – his wife had deserted him and he had lost his job. It was about 4 am in the morning. Morning joggers filled the beach. Soon children, who were vacationing in summer, started to arrive. By 5.30 am, there was lot of activity. Laughter and joyful screams rent the air. But the man was nonplussed – he kept staring blankly at the horizon. He looked lost, sad and beaten. A jogger paused by him to admire the sunrise – it was a magnificent sunrise, a spectacle to behold. The jogger took a deep breath and, to share the moment with the brooding man, more out of courtesy, than with an intention to intrude, exclaimed: “Amazing sunrise, eh?” The man was shaken out of his stupor. He sounded irritable as he barked at the jogger: “What sunrise? Just leave me alone, will you?” Most of us are like that brooding man. And because we constantly keep finding reasons to bark at Life (the jogger’s but a metaphor), we miss its magic and beauty.
To deal with and overcome this mind-made theory of curse and conspiracy, just follow Osho’s prescription – be more aware. Stop and smell the roses, pause and cherish each sunrise and sunset, celebrate the waxing and waning of the moon, and feel the raindrops on your face. Each dinner that you miss with the family, remember, is an opportunity of a lifetime lost. There’s so much that Life’s offering on its menu for you. You will see and experience all of it, only if you are there. Hello, where are you?

Shaandaar! Zabardast!! Zindabad!!!

Live Life fully alive. Be awesome. Be terrific!          My wife Vaani and I have been telling Dasrath Manji’s story, for eight years now, in all our workshops. We inspire and invite managers to learn from Manjhi’s tale of grit and focus no doubt, but we also help them connect with another key learning – living a Life of Purpose. Manjhi found his Life’s Purpose, to break down the mountain in the Gaya district of Bihar, which separated his native Gehlaur from the nearest town Wazirganj. Until Manjhi’s feat, his village-folk had to either climb the 25ft-high mountain by foot to cross it or had to go around it, taking a circuitous 55 km route. Manjhi broke down that mountain with just a hammer and chisel – he did it alone, over 22 years! A feat that is unparalleled in human history. The road Manjhi helped pave between Gehlaur and Wazirganj reduced the distance between the two places to 15 km!
Dasrath Manjhi (left) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui as ManjhiSo, when we saw Ketan Mehta’s just-released biopic on Manjhi – Manjhi: The Mountain Man (Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Manjhi admirably) – the story wasn’t new to us. In fact, we came away thinking that the film fails to do justice to the simple moosahar(one who eats rats; the name of a community of rat-eaters in Bihar) who chose to serve selflessly. His form of service was to pave a road through a mighty mountain that caused his wife Phaguniya’s death. While the film takes, naturally so, cinematic liberties, like the romance between Manjhi and Phaguniya or the evil acts of the Thakurs and the mukhiya, it somehow falls short of showcasing Manjhi’s purposefulness. He is shown as someone who remains rooted to his cause more from his tryst with the mountain. Perhaps that’s Mehta’s view and we must respect that. But what I liked about the film is that it delivers two memorable messages:
1.     Manjhi’s mantra of “Shaandaar! Zabardast!! Zindabad!!! – Terrific! Awesome!! Alive!!!” is very inspiring. This what Siddiqui’s Manjhi (not sure if Manjhi Original ever spoke those words) tells anyone who asks him how is he doing. He is shown soldiering on against a remorseless mountain in inhuman conditions, but every time someone stops by to ask him how’s he doing, he has only the mantra in reply – “Shaandaar! Zabardast!! Zindabad!!!” It is an infectious mantra no doubt. And something we can practice in our daily lives too. 2.     Mehta’s film shows us how Manjhi too faces his dark moments. When he thinks he cannot go on. When he finds the world out there is cold, its people beastly and inhuman and the mountain unrelenting. But then this is the time when Manjhi dips into his inner being. This is where he meets his Phaguniya who eggs him on to last one more day and to plough on. We too face our mountains. Our mountains are often mere molehills, when compared to Manjhi’s, but we imagine them to be insurmountable peaks standing obstinately in our way. So we too crumble. We too want to badly cry out of the game. We too say we can’t go any further. And that’s when, as this film points out, we must invest in Manjhi’s method of looking within. When we seek within, we will find the energy, the motivation and the reason to plough on – in any context or situation we may find ourselves. Remember: if we listen to what the world has to say, we will get nowhere. The world has only opinions. But the Universe is full of energy. And it is the same energy that powers the Universe that powers you – and me – too. So, when we dip into that energy, we will always find a way to move forward.
I am not sure you or I will have a chance to, or may even want to, break down a mountain like Manjhi did. But if we can learn from the Mountain Man’s Life to be terrific, be awesome, be alive to Life, every single day, and live a Life of Purpose, well, we would surely have lived this lifetime more meaningfully than we are doing just now!   

From what you learn from your Life experiences, you can only get better at the art of living

There is no success or failure in Life. There are just experiences and there are the lessons you learn from those experiences.
Yesterday, at a workshop I was leading, a manager asked me: “How do you retain your hunger for success while not getting too desperate with whether you succeed or not?”
That’s a very interesting question.
Success and failure, victory and defeat, win and loss – all these are social labels. In reality, all of us have only choices, to act in a given situation or not to act. When we act and the outcomes match our expectations, we call it success. When the outcomes fall below our expectations we call it failure. But the truth is that our choice of action – or inaction, as the case may be – is far more important than the outcome itself. Which is why the Bhagavad Gita invites us to focus on our efforts, on the action, and to leave the results, the outcomes, to Life.

So, I would simply rephrase the manager’s perspective. I would say that we must exercise our choice of action and learn from the experience that leads to the outcome. It is when you are attached to the outcome that you invite ego and suffering. You turn egoistic when the outcomes match or exceed your expectations. You suffer when they don’t. So why go through this up and down cycle? Why not simply be focused on the action and leave the outcomes to happen in their own way? And whatever is the outcome, the way it is, simply accept it – without qualifying it as good, bad or ugly. At the end of the day, nothing is good, nothing is bad, nothing is won, nothing is lost, no one succeeds, no on fails. Life is just a series of experiences that you learn from you. And through your learning, as long as you are continuously learning – and sometimes unlearning too – you can hope to get better and better, and better and better, and better and better, at the art of living! 

Empty your cup to fill your Life with abundance

Only when you empty yourself of your ego will you understand the essence of intelligent living!
Unknown to us we__you, me, everyone__carry a rather unnecessary sense of self-importance than we normally should or even need. Self-importance is different from self-respect or self-esteem. Self-importance means you think your Life is being controlled by you! The more self-importance you perceive of yourself, the lesser you will be closer to realizing your true Self and the angrier you will be with Life and with people around you!
Theatre Nisha's V.Balakrishnan (in yellow shirt)
with AVIS Viswanathan on "The Bliss Catchers"I anchor a monthly Event Series called “The Bliss Catchers” which celebrates people who have had the courage to let go of “safe and predictable” careers to go do what they love doing. Earlier this month I was in conversation with one of India’s most talented theatre artistes and directors, Theatre Nisha’s V.Balakrishnan. Bala had given up pursuing his dream to join the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) to join the National School of Drama (NSD). I asked Bala how it was to be coached at the NSD in a craft that has come to define him and his Life over the years. Bala replied, “The teachers at NSD teach you to empty yourself. I went in with the notion that I had the greatest voice and that by throwing it I could be a master of the stage. But the teachers there taught me to first empty myself, they urged me to stop thinking I could master anything, they made me realize that above us all was the stage. And to be worthy of that stage, I learnt, you must empty yourself.”
So beautiful. This concept of emptying yourself is so beautiful. It is downright simple: only when you are empty, when your mind is open and empty, can it receive any fresh inputs. When you are so full of yourself, you can hardly learn anything new. Emptying yourself also means being willing to unlearn so that you can learn – anew!
Several years ago, things were going horribly wrong for me at work. My team was playing truant. People were quitting. They were sharing information with competitors. And there was a whole deal of negative energy flying around. The final nail in the coffin was when one member of my team, an office assistant, filed a police compliant against me for non-payment of a statutory due. It was a particularly ignominious moment. We had, as a Firm, picked up that kid literally from the street. We had supported his education helping him acquire a degree in Commerce and an MBA in Marketing through distant learning programs. I was heart-broken when he did what he did. For one there was no truth in his complaint. Second, he had done that to me !
Over a drink, I shared my grief with a very dear friend, Deepak Pawar, whom I will call Guruji!
“You know how much I have done for this boy,” I lamented. And continued: “I have helped him financially when his mother was in hospital and later when she died. I have bought him clothes every quarter. I have paid for his exam fees and his tuitions. I have enrolled him to a computer training program and helped him become tech savvy. And he still did this to me?”
Guruji smiled back at me calmly and asked, “Are you finished with your tale of woe, AVIS?”
“Are you finding something funny with my plight,” I shot back, quizzically.
“Indeed. I find it funny that you think your team is the problem. To me you are the problem!” said Guruji bluntly.
“What are you saying? I have been a good employer. I have led with care and compassion. I have uplifted the lot of my team. I have provided them with rewards, recognition and opportunity. And you say I am the problem?” I roared.
“Just count the number of times you have used ‘I’ in this conversation AVIS. You are so full of yourself. Empty yourself of the ‘I’ in you. Be humble and you will grow and glow!” said Guruji.
It was as if a ton of bricks had fallen on me. I was devastated. But over several days and weeks of introspection and rumination I understood what Guruji had meant. I realized that is we who come between us and our opportunity to grow spiritually by imagining that Life happens because of us. The entire principle behind Life is that it happens despite us and never because of us. I soon learnt how to empty my cup. But the interesting thing is, when you empty it, the cup doesn’t stay empty. You have to keep on emptying it. It is a continuous process.

Each time someone slights you, each time someone rubs you the wrong way, your mind will tell you “How dare he or she?” Immediately, remember Guruji, remember Bala’s teachers at NDD, and empty your cup. When things are not going according to your plan, and you are getting angry, irritable, disturbed and your inner peace is destroyed, empty your cup. The more you stay empty, the more grace you will receive. Because Life can only fill an empty cup with abundance. How can a cup that is full receive any grace or abundance?