AVIS Viswanathan's Blog, page 44

You are not your problem

Don’t identify yourself with your problems – face them, solve them but don’t ever think that you are them.
Yesterday a friend called me. She was on the verge of tears. Her husband has been battling a chronic skin ailment causing both pain and low self-esteem. Their business has been struggling. And her job at a multi-national has been fraught with challenges. “It’s been very, very, very tough AVIS. We have even considered dying,” she said.
I can relate to and empathize with her situation. But thinking depressively about Life and contemplating ending one’s Life does not, and will never, solve problems. Sometimes Life will push you to a corner and it may appear to be a no-go situation, it may seem like it is the end of the road; but you must not give up. It is at such times that you must remind yourself that you are not the problem you are faced with. You may be having a relationship issue, you may be a divorcee. But you are not the divorce. You may have psoriasis. But you are not psoriasis. You may be bankrupt, penniless – like me. But you are not the bankruptcy. You may have a quadriplegia condition. But you are not the quadriplegia. In summary, never let the definition of your problem become a label that you stick on yourself or allow others to stick on you. Each of your problems is a manifestation of Life’s challenges that populate different phases of your Life. These problems will arrive when they must and they will leave you when they must. The moment you think that your problems are permanent, the moment you think that your problems define you, you have lost the game of Life. Depression will set in and you will merely exist – and not actually live!
I learnt this lesson in 1998 from a man named Ashok, who had a HIV +ve condition. My work with YRG CARE, a pioneering center for AIDS research and education, led by the legendary Dr.Suniti Solomon, brought me in contact with Ashok. I was initially very wary of him. Although I knew how one contracted AIDS, I did not want to shake hands with or even sit next to Ashok at meetings. He sensed my discomfort and accosted me with a broad smile one day. He said: “Brother, I am HIV +ve. But I am not the disease. I cannot transfer my condition to you just because you spoke to me or shook hands with me. I know I have limited time left on this planet. And I don’t intend on living that time worrying about my condition. I am not my condition. I am just another you – perhaps with a different physical condition compared to you! Just as you have diabetes, I am HIV +ve. Please, please, feel comfortable in my presence!” What he told me hit me like a ton of bricks. Ashok passed away some years back, but the lesson I learnt from him has stayed with me.

Whatever you may be faced with, don’t ever let it get to you. Death, divorce, cancer, career crisis, bankruptcy, loss of reputation – none of these, or any other, can affect you if you don’t identify yourself with the problem. Instead face your problem, deal with it daily, but never believe that you are your problem. This is the way to inner peace when faced with any of Life’s inscrutable designs! 

Simplify your Life: Trust only when and who you can

Each person who comes into your Life is a teacher.
Everyone is teaching you through not just what they know, but through their behavior. Some people teach you why you must never trust them. They have taught you this by repeatedly refusing to live up to the trust you placed in them. Eventually, you may have reached a point when you would have said that you can’t trust this person anymore. And yet you would have given this person one more chance. When your trust was betrayed one more time, you move from the can’t -trust to the must-never-trust zone. Please know, there is nothing wrong with you if you come to this conclusion. And there is nothing inhuman about this stance. To trust humankind and Life is indeed the best way to live. But to have your self-esteem trampled upon__that’s precisely what happens when your trust is betrayed__is foolishness. Remember if that person is a teacher, just as each person in your Life is, then you are being a bad student if you are not learning from your teacher! You don’t have to hate the person though. Just don’t trust.
When you don’t trust, there can be no relationship. You can still know the other person and not be in a relationship. Now, even if this is a parent, sibling, child, or spouse, it is imminently possible to stay this way. Because at the end of the day, the person is not trustworthy. And the person has taught you, given the empirical evidence you may have gathered through repeated patterns of behavior, that she or he is not trustworthy. Additionally, let me tell you, from my own experience, that it is also fine to let the other know that you don’t trust him or her.

So, please simplify your Life. If you have been let down repeatedly, know that you have a right to choose not to trust someone anymore. Exercise that right. Live your Life in peace and not in grief. Yet live leaving that person alone. Don’t fight. Don’t provoke. Just live and let live! 

Choose joy over earning-a-living

Between making money and following your bliss, choose the latter. Because even if you struggle with that choice you will struggle joyfully!
To drop the pursuit of earning-a-living and following your bliss instead is always a dilemma for you, for me, for all of humanity! It is only through trial and error, through endless experimentation, that you will find both joy and money coming from the same pursuit or profession. Very few people actually get it right or know it well and therefore benefit from both the joy and the money. Now, if you belong to the majority that doesn’t know yet or knows it but does not know how to choose, then first know that you are perfectly normal. If you are making good money in whatever you are doing and are happy (not comfortable, please note the critical difference here!) then there is no issue. But if you are part of the rat race, rushing off this morning for another stress-filled, meaningless, day ahead, and you grieve every minute of your Life thinking, “why am I doing this?” or “there’s no more joy in what I do”, then you seriously need to review your Life. You need to ask yourself: 1. Can I live with lesser income than what I am getting just now? 2. Can I confer with my family and make them share my vision for me and them? 3. Can I find a good platform to launch myself and work to a plan to restore my earning to match my joy factor in doing what gives me joy? The answers you get will determine how you proceed. Anything in Life requires planning, thinking through and excellent execution. Grieving, pining and cursing your fate is not a solution.
Prof.C.V.Chandrasekhar
Photo Courtesy: Ganesh/www.purpleganesh.com A couple of years ago, I heard the maestro of Indian art and culture, and Bharatanatyam exponent, Prof.C.V.Chandraskehar, a Padma Bhushan awardee, reminisce about his years in Benares. He said although he had an MSc degree while starting off his career in the 1950s, he was not getting a job or salary that matched his qualifications. His heart, he said, was in the arts, particularly in dance. So, he made a decision: “If I must suffer, let me suffer in joy and bliss, doing what I love doing.” He dumped his Msc-based options and plunged into the world of art. That choice, he reminisced, led to a lifetime of joy and bliss, in the pursuit of learning and living his art, his dance, though money did not arrive in as much proportion as he would have wanted. “Money is incidental. In later years, it did come, and it did go. But that is the way money is. Joy, however, can be permanent if you embrace it,” he told us in his soulful, evocative, candid style.
There is a lesson here for all of us strugglers, climbers and rat race runners. If you choose making money, and therefore comfort yourself with a false sense of security, then please don’t complain about Life or pine for joy! If you choose joy, over money, remember that money will take its own time coming into your Life. If you find both in one pursuit, brilliant, just be content with it! In any case, be happy! Because it is only one Life that you will live. Live that Life well and happily!

Budhhahood is a great pain reliever

Every pain, every unresolved relationship situation, every wound, is a disguised opportunity for enlightenment.
There’s a Buddha in you, in me, waiting to awaken. And extraordinary pain, believe me, is not a sign of your past sins and retribution happening to you, as some would want you to believe, but is a sign of extraordinary grace waiting to enter your Life. This entering of grace is what is called enlightenment. It is a state of being and not an event that happens at a specified time at a specified, glorified venue, like,  under a tree. For Gautama, it happened under the Bodhi Tree. For you it can well happen on a potty or at 30000 ft. while you are flying! Buddhahood is a state you will realize, you will awaken to, when you look deeply at what is causing you pain – and understand your pain. Whatever is, look at it intensely. Your first, human and normal, tendency is to resist pain. Instead embrace it. Invite it to tell you why it has arrived in your Life. And it will always tell you why. Be honest. Because pain is not like worry. It is not an imposter. It is a teacher. Initially, you will find external reasoning very powerful to the cause of your pain. As in, he cheated me. So I am in pain. She led me up the garden path, hence I am in pain. My competitor chose unethical means and so my business couldn’t cope and I lost all my money. Instead of apportioning the blame to an external agent, a foreign hand, ask yourself what have you done to have invited this situation? When you know how you invited pain into your Life, your learning will be complete. Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th Century, Persian poet says, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” When this awakening happens, you will be able to live with your pain, yet without suffering from it!

In reality, pain is powerless. If you look deeply at whatever is causing you pain at the moment and stay in this moment, in the now of reality, your mind will not even report the pain. The mind always exists in a past grief or a future worry. In the face of reality, the mind is inactive. Which is why people champion the power of now! So, if you want to profit from your pain, it is possible, by choosing to be aware. Something or someone is perhaps your source of pain, but by not understanding your pain, you are inviting it to stay over longer. All you need to do is look at it intensely, ask what have you done to have invited it over, internalize the learning and watch the pain just leave you alone! This state is called Buddhahood. And Buddhahood, indeed, is a great pain reliever! 

We have become ‘wanting’ beings

Give up all that you don’t need, don’t have or keep pining for. Life then, most certainly, will be bliss.
You – and I – thanks to instant gratification in a facebook and SMS era, have become obsessed with wanting things now and urgently. You try to reach someone and the lines are jammed. You get irritated. You get a mobile phone but you are not satisfied. You want an iPhone. You have a roof over head, but you want to own a property. You want to buy gold because prices are up now and you want an investment backed-up. You have a child, but you won’t leave the child alone; you want the child to be doctor, engineer, class-topper, cricket player, and such, never pausing to think what the child wants to do! Wants. Wants and more Wants! This has made your Life miserable. You have become a wanting being. Than being human! Which is why you are running from pillar to post. Trying to earn more and more thinking you will be happy some day in the future. Now, if you get all that you want it is fine. But Life doesn’t work like that. So, when you don’t get all that you want, you become desperate; you sulk, brood, and plunge your Life into an abyss of worries. Then you attend therapeutic programs and read spiritual books to ‘cleanse’ yourself. The feeling of oneness with the Universe lasts only as long as the programs do. Soon you have resumed the wanting in you and have lost yourself again.
Know that you will always get what you need and never always what you want!  If you have all that you need, just be happy with it. And stop pining for what you don’t have. Only then will you be in bliss!

You can’t enjoy a sunrise if you think about your nightmares

Don’t avoid worry. Understand it.
In the time that you spend worrying, you are missing living! You cannot do both at the same time. You can either live. Or you can worry. If you are worrying, be sure, you may be alive, breathing, seeing and doing, but you are not living! The nature of the human mind is that it will keep churning thoughts incessantly and most of them will be about your worries. If you want to stop worrying, then that want may now become a new worry!
Instead understand why you worry in the first place. You worry about things, people, events, money, health, relationships, jobs, because you want them in your control or you want to know more about them or both. And when you are unable to do any of that, you worry. You say that you want a job. Is that a worry? Hardly. Will you get that job? Now, that’s a worry: because you want to control the outcome of your want and you want information about the future. My wife has gone to meet a friend. Is that a worry? Not really. But who is that friend? It is this greed for the detail, for that information, that will spawn a worry. And then the issue is no longer about the wife meeting the friend, it is about the gender of the friend and then it morphs into another, new, horrific worry: Is my wife cheating on me?
How do you contain this human urge to want to control what’s going on and/or keep seeking information on what’s going on? The simple truth is, you can’t. So, wanting to stop worrying is an improbable vision to begin with. What you can do, however, is to attempt living. When you are filling out your job application, for instance, why do you worry about the outcome of the effort? Focus on the application you are preparing. Pour your heart into it. Don’t let your mind wander. Bring it to attend on the only, supremely important, singular task at that moment in your Life, the job application. You will never enjoy a sunrise if you keep thinking about your nightmares. Even if you are at the most beautiful resort in the Pacific, you will not even see the sun rise if you are not present in that moment.

The cure to worrying is like the cure to diabetes. Once a diabetic, always a diabetic. At best, you can astutely manage your diabetes with your strict diet and exercise regimen. Even a day’s, or even a meal’s complacency or indulgence, can spike your sugar levels. So it is with worrying. You cannot stop worrying. Period. But you can always start living. When you live, in the present, no worry can plague you! Will you please live, worry-free, today, a day that has been crafted exquisitely for you? 

Your Life doesn’t need any fixing

“Oh! God! Can you bring along your toolbox? My Life needs fixing!” __ Anonymous.
Interesting thought that. But in reality our lives are all, perhaps, pre-fixed. Like a pre-paid SIM card. What you are, what you are going through, is part of a larger, inscrutable cosmic design. The best you__and I__can do is to accept the design as it is, for what it is, and live fully, peacefully, happily! The truth also about your Life is that you have always been what you are, except when you awaken spiritually, you know who you are and who have been so far! This awakening will lead you to understand and appreciate that despite whatever you may want fixed, Life will do exactly what it pleases and when it pleases.

So, let’s stop arguing with Life and battling it. Instead live it! It is still beautiful. And it is so only because of its unpredictability and its seductive mystique! The truth, therefore, your Life doesn’t need any fixing. What you bring to your Life, your attitude, most definitely does! 

You are the peace that you seek

You cannot have the cake and eat it! The same way, you cannot cling on to things in Life and still want inner peace!
When you are clinging on to things in Life __ which is when you are attached to family, job, salary, EMIs, worries, problems and emotions, opinions, prejudices, you cannot live freely! You have been brought up to believe, just as I have been, and just as the way we are bringing up our children, that living equals ‘earning-a-living’. But does earning-a-living give you joy? It may give you comfort, but does it give you joy? And so, that’s how, in search of the true meaning of Life, your transformation from struggler and climber to seeker happens.
At the end of the day, everyone is seeking peace. But do you need to have worked so hard, not lived any of the 70 years of your Life, and then discover that peace is easy to find and easier to retain, if only you stopped clinging on to things in Life!? There’s a story that Swami Rama, the legendary Himalayan Yogi, used to say. It is the story of two monks. The two monks were on a journey by foot. And the younger monk asked the older one how detachment can be practiced. “By letting go,” said the older one. “But my worldly responsibilities refuse to let me to let go,” complained the younger one. The older one did not reply. They retired under a big tree for the night. The next morning, when the younger monk woke up, he found the older one hugging the tree’s trunk. Saying that it was getting late, the younger one respectfully invited the older one to continue their journey. But the older monk complained that the tree wouldn’t let him go! The younger monk tried pulling the older one away from the tree. But to no avail. Finally, disgusted at the older monk’s childish behavior, the younger one said, “Master, you are foolish. It is not the tree which is holding you. You are the one who is holding on to the tree. You have to let go to be free and go along on our journey.” The older monk smiled and replied: “But how can I? I am attached to it pretty much the way you are attached too, with your worldly Life?” The younger monk got the lesson. And hopefully you too have got it!
In reality, we are the peace we seek. We don’t have to find it, or seek it. We must just stop clinging on to all that which is an impediment to us feeling our inner peace. We must just let go of everything that we cling on to. What will then remain is only peace!

Acceptance means not resisting Life

Make Life simple. Do not question what’s happening to you. Don’t fret or gloat over anything. Just live with complete awareness and in total acceptance.
Imagine something grave has happened to you. Maybe someone you know died. Now, it is normal for you to be in pain, agony and also in mourning. But how long are you going to live being dead every breathing moment? On the other hand if you accepted that death will follow birth, as it has done ever since creation happened, you may miss the person, but your grief will cease. Replace death with any other context and do the same thing. Someone’s nasty to you, accept it. You lost your job, accept it. You don’t get business because the markets are in the grip of a recession, accept it again! Acceptance does not mean inaction. It doesn’t mean you should not strive to make things better again. You should. You must. Acceptance means choosing not to resist whatever is happening to you at any given time.
Acceptance replaces grief with bliss while still not solving the problem you may be confronted with immediately. Problems will go away exactly the same way they have come. They are a product of your time. But bliss is not dependent on what you are going through. It is a state that you are already in; you don’t feel it because you have complicated your Life by resisting Life! Simplify Life by accepting it for what it is

Nano-second ‘nirvana’: you are not what you think you are

The simplest way to bliss is to keep reminding yourself that you are not what you think you are.
My laptop crashed this morning. A wave of worry swept through me. My files, my data? But a few minutes into the worrying episode, a certain peace arose from within. I said to myself: "Hey! I am not this computer. I haven't crashed. Let's figure out a way to deal with this."
Responding to Life situations with such trained equanimity works very well. You can try this approach too. First begin with (re)-knowing that you are not this body. You have heard of this from millions of wise folk before. I heard this ‘pearl of wisdom’, one more time, from my friend who recently turned 50. When I sent him a mail wishing him on his fiftieth, he replied saying he still felt young, as if he was in his 20s. “The body is aging but the soul is timeless,” he wrote back. That’s the spirit! Even so, while you know that this is the intelligent way to live, you conveniently slip into the worrying mode over anything concerning your body. For instance, you know, just as I do and everyone else does, that the body will die one day. Yet you grieve over whatever happens to your body. You grow older, you grieve. You grieve if you lose hair, if your hair becomes grey, if you become fat or if your body is affected by cancer. Let's simplify this. When you feel hungry or thirsty, are you feeling so, or is your body feeling so? The body is like a car. And you are the driver. Can a car drive on its own unless the driver wills it, drives it and leads it? The car needs food and that's what fuel, oil, coolant and such are for the car. Clearly, the driver has more power, more control than the car. Similarly the real you , if you can get to know that person within you, is the one you need to be aware of and identify with.  
Once you get to that state of self-awareness, self-realization, when you know that you are not what you think you are, you will be able to handle any 'real world' situation. A computer crashing, a job loss, a break-up, betrayal, financial loss, anything! Realize that you are not your qualifications, job, social position, your bank balance, your worry, your anxiety or your fears. You are truly above all of this. When this realization dawns upon you, you are already liberated and a free spirit. You may not want to believe that you can immediately reach this state. But know that you can be there in a nano-second if you want to. Know also that when you get to this state, you can call it nano-second nirvana, you will be one with the cosmic energy. When you will be untouched. And be in bliss!