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It is when you start to look for ways to make time to be with yourself, with your practice or art, to dance barefoot in a different reality where your mind and heart are one, that you begin to grow spiritually, from a dithering sapling to a strapping young tree.
Your discipline becomes your guardian of peace and composure. Is it any surprise then that the famous proverb, ‘Work is worship,’ is found in different tongues and dialects around the world, that work is considered a service to God?
There is a confidence that stems from being under the spiritual shower of grace; you are soaked to the skin in bliss and focus. Life feels fuller, situations and people less intimidating and struggles feel like dead leaves that the soft breeze will surely blow away.
Everything that we experience is just a series of present moments. When lived right, they take away the despondency from our lives. We don’t have to live in constant stress and anxiety when we can live a life of meaning by following a certain discipline, an inspiring ideology, cause or person, anything that makes us less self-centred and self-gratifying.
Gracefully manage your time on earth.
We all have this relationship with certain issues in our life. They are a rotting, decaying but inseparable part of ourselves.
The solution came to me in the guise of a beautiful rendition of Devi Bhagavatam by Ramesh Menon. The more I read about the glories of the Devi and rejoiced, the more at ease my mind felt. In quiet moments, when negative thoughts lurked in the corners of my mind, I would quickly switch my attention to the stories I had been reading. I realized that to distract myself from a barrage of negative thoughts, I had to equip myself with good-quality content on a daily basis, at least in the beginning. I began feeding my mind inspiring quotes from my guru and his writings, devotional hymns and
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Soon, my mind started to identify triggers, situations and reactions that made me feel sad or angry. It started to know how certain responses, people or events might make me feel. This knowledge was gold, for my mind could now anticipate potentially risky situations and either steer clear of them, or come up with pre-decided responses that would help me cope better.
I realized then how much garbage each one of us is carrying in the mind, from situations, conversations, incidents and tragedies that happen to us and around us every day. The mind keeps processing and throwing it all up on the pristine shore of our consciousness, polluting it. Like clueless idiots, we think about things that we don’t wish to think about, playing the same old tape, making similar mistakes and then wondering why we are unhappy or discontented. Does it all not stem from the mind?
There is nothing greatly wrong with me or my life, or most people’s lives. We have all just been living with an untrained and untamed mind, conditioned to be unhappy.
The mind has known negativity, pessimism and unhappiness for so long that it keeps returning to this familiar territory of its own accord. Unless we train the mind to change its perspective, it will continue to drag us down. Despite our best efforts, it will continue to behave irrationally. Two things, however, will act as your ...
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A guilt-ridden mind will only slow us down. Before we begin to train our mind, we must be clear that there will be disappointments and mistakes along the way. We must face them bravely and march ahead.
Insecurity
The seed of insecurity, in most people, is sown quite young. In my experience, the more stability you have been exposed to in the formative years of your life, the more secure and fearless you will feel as a grown-up. A childhood marked by a dysfunctional family, a troubled parent or unrestful circumstances has a deep impact on our psyche. The security an...
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Stare at your insecurity hard and long, and remember that one day, we are all going to die; so, is it really worth holding on to this harrowing feeling of anxiety and constant fear? Analyze it and come up with your antidote to feeling less alone. The answer must lie somewhere in you.
My insecurity does not allow me to feel happy or free for long periods of time. It wants to cling to the other person and make unacceptable demands on their time and space. The more I wish to mould myself in their mould, the more troubled and sorrowful I feel. It is as if this restlessness is in my blood. Sometimes, it disappears for months altogether, giving me hope, only to be triggered out of the blue by an innocuous event.
That is because their mind is not tamed. A restless mind and its modifications (citta vritti) drive them towards experiencing and enjoying the world through their body alone. Purity of discipline, whether in bhakti or in dhyana, can help you tame your mind.
His impairment is not the result of any intellectual malfunction. Therefore, it cannot be fixed with any intellectual comprehension or correction.
Similarly, your distorted view of the world or your deluded mind (citta) is not an intellectual problem. Subscribing to any philosophy or believing a certain theory to be the truth—both of which are functions of the mind—is not going to help you uncover your true self, let alone any samadhi or darshan of your deity. The most beautiful thing is that you can experience your true nature and you can experience that incessant flow of bliss by taming your mind.
A mind that is not settled and under complete control will render you unable to perform devotional service (bhakti) or meditation...
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Watch-It: Filter your thoughts. Feed-It: Follow a deliberate practice of reading, listening to and speaking good, inspirational material. Filter-It: Constantly question what you are thinking. The shortest path to self-improvement is selfpurification, says my guru. Tame the dragon, Train-It.
Just as this never-ending cycle of day and night, work and rest, highs and lows is the basis of life, similarly, the path of self-improvement and self-purification is a constant cycle of ups and downs, learning and unlearning. No matter what an adept you become on this path, no one is exempt from the challenges that life will continue to put your way, until you breathe your last.
My master’s life is the most humbling example of a man’s union with the Divine. His unearthly persistence in meditating on the divine form of the Devi, to manifest Her as you and me, is indeed the most miraculous occurrence of our times.
