The Big Questions of Life

by Om Swami

Fill your heart with loving-kindness, your time with noble actions, your mind with good thoughts, and suffering will disappear from your life, like sadness from a content heart. You will realize your soul, your self.

‘the yoga of equanimity is to maintain your steadfastness in the face of both success and failure, it is to act with a degree of detachment.’

Detachment is not laziness or avoidance. If anything, it is razor-sharp awareness and a heightened state of consciousness.

In this conditional world, our attachments blind us and crush us, they don’t do us any good.

To quiet the mind when it’s raging with judgements and analysis, so you can see things as they are, is what meditation is about. It is what I mean by ‘right view’.

We dream of life giving us a necklace of pearls when it’s actually planning to give us the meaning of our dream. This mismatch is the chief cause behind why most people are forever riding an emotional roller-coaster. They want permanence, some guarantee, when there’s none. The truth is: absolutely everything is transient; a passing phase.

The real problem is with the unrealistic nature of our expectations, the greatest being our desire that anything good in our life should stay as it is.

Non-fulfilment of desires and expectations is often at the root of human suffering.

The price of freedom is responsibility.

There’s no one singular prayer, meditation or method that can help you keep your mind at peace under all circumstances. Life must be savoured the way it comes.

Our thoughts and feelings compose us, and our actions and words decompose us.

Denial or non-admission of our mistakes creates more baggage than anything else. The moment we gracefully accept our fault, we flush out of our system the emotions of anger (why did I have to be in that situation?) and guilt

It doesn’t matter who, how or what you are (or aren’t), each one will regard you according to their individual capacity. They will form their opinion based on their own perceptions and preconceived notions about you.

If, based on your actions, you see yourself a certain way and believe that with utmost conviction, the world will start seeing you that way too

And, by the way, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether one is seen as a thief or a yogi. In the end, both will go empty-handed. Everyone does.

Simplicity is the seed of inner peace.

Diseases of the mind and body manifest much quicker in the one who possesses an irate mind, a resentful consciousness.

The path to bliss and peace begins with responsibility.