Girish's Blog

  Photo Credit: Golden Present Don’t Get Intimidated Humans evolved to be fearful, since anxiety helped keep our ancestors alive. Consequently, we are vulnerable to being alarmed, manipulated, and even intimidated by threats, both real and imaginary ones. This vulnerability to feeling threatened has effects at many levels, ranging from individuals, couples, and families to schoolyards, organisations, and nations. Whether it’s an individual who worries about the consequences of speaking up at work or in a close relationship, a family cowed by a scary parent, a business fixated on threats instead of opportunities, or a country told it’s under assault by “them” – the same human brain reacts in each one of these cases. Therefore, understanding how your brain became so vigilant and wary, and so easily hijacked by alarm, is the first step toward gaining more control over that ancient circuitry. Then, by bringing mindful awareness to how your brain reacts to feeling threatened, you ...

  Photo Credit: Sustainable Bliss Misconceptions About Meditation People have many different ideas about what meditation actually is. The meditator needs to understand the nature of the mind, rather than keep fighting it. Most of us for most of the time are dominated and run by our thoughts or feelings. As a consequence, we tend to think that we are those thoughts and feelings. Meditation is the state of simply being, just pure experiencing, with no interference from the body or the mind. It's a natural state but one which we have forgotten how to access. There are several meditative techniques which help to create an inner ambience that helps one disconnect from the body-mind and thus simply be. Methods of meditation are only needed until one attains a state of meditation – of relaxed awareness, of consciousness, of becoming centred – has become so intrinsic to one as, say, breathing. There are several misconceptions about meditation. People think that meditation is only for...

  Photo Credit:Dreamstime.com Meditate Regularly Swamiji keeps telling us to meditate regularly for half an hour in collectivity. The time of meditation should be fixed and so should the place. If you can do that, then with continuous meditative practice in a fixed place your energy gets established in that place and over time you will find it easier to slip into a meditative state because of that energy. This early morning meditation is done in union with the Guru-energies who are continuously transmitting their support from the Himalayas – this is done alone. Later in the day if you have meditation centres close by, you should also meditate in collectivity for half an hour. This, as Swamiji says, is necessary because like driving a car, when you meditate alone you are driving at speed and when you meditate in collectivity you get to control over the car, in this case yourself. So solitary meditation helps you in driving fast and collective meditation helps you control the car. ...

  Photo Credit: Fractal Enlightenment Why Jealousy Hurts The feeling of jealousy is aroused when we compare ourselves with others. Since childhood we have been taught to compare. Look at your brother, he always comes first, look at so and so he is so well dressed and so on and so forth. Somebody has a better house, better car, more beautiful body, more money….. Compare, go on comparing yourself with everybody and the only outcome will be great jealousy! If you stop comparing jealousy just disappears. Then you are just you and nobody else. We don’t compare ourselves with nature, else we would be jealous all the time – why are we not green, why don’t we bear fragrant flowers – why has existence been so hard on us? It’s good we don’t compare ourselves with birds, mountains and rivers – if we do, we will suffer more. We compare ourselves only with human beings, because we have been conditioned to do so since childhood. Comparison is very foolish, simply because each individual is...

  Photo Credit: Mindfulness Meditation Institute The Present Moment Myrko Thum - “The present moment is the only thing where there is no time – it is here and now! It is the point between the past and the future – it is here and now! It is always there and it is the only point we can access in time. Everything that happens, occurs in the present moment. Everything that happened and will ever happen, happens in the present moment. It is impossible for anything to exist outside of it.” 99% of human suffering, mental issues, exists only because we are living in the past or in the future. When we are living in the past, we experience things like resentment, regret, shame, guilt and grief. When we are living in the future, we experience things like anxiety, fear, worry and self-doubt. And when we are living the present moment, there’s no such thing! Meditation and mindfulness practice helps you stay in the present. The body is always in the present moment, it is the mind which vac...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest | Citation Spirituelle Beyond Time & Space When we are in the present moment, we transcend both time and space. We are truly in the now. The present moment is beyond time. One can live in this no-time, no-space paradigm while fully breathing the present in its totality. Almost all of us live our lives either in the past or in the future as we are never in the now. We go back in time and pick up a few nostalgic memories wrapped up as happy moments. Even if there are happy moments in our present we tend to go and chew on the past as a matter of habit, or go on hoping for something nice to happen in the future. We hardly ever think of the present moment at all as our mind keeps vacillating between the past and the future. If we manage to let go of the past and future, the present moment will appear in its immense beauty as eternity. This moment – this very moment – is beyond time. Through deep practice of meditation one can live continuously for month...

Photo Credit: PopSugar Go With Full Confidence There is a beautiful saying which I had once read somewhere, “Sorrow is nothing but what you borrow.” Nobody is going to give you sorrow, so you go and borrow it! Another way to look at confidence is to appear to be aggressive and a fiery badass all the time. I feel learning to access your inner strength and inner power is a far more important part of confidence, because it leads us to courage and courageous actions often bring good opportunities with them. But there is far more to confidence than our inner fire. Our fiery attitude is only a tool that is needed for the different forms of success that we are after – good relationships, enjoyability, self-expression and professional achievement. Self-confidence is nothing but a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities and judgement. A simple way of experiencing this kind of trust in one’s self is through your inner guide. Access to the inner guide is through meditation under th...

  Photo Credit: New Morning Devotionals |Wordpress.com Worrying Doesn’t Help It’s natural to worry about what people think of you. But I feel it is more important for one to know who and what you yourself are. The worrying about what other people think about you happens when you yourself are not sure of who you are. This problem becomes acute when your sense of well-being is tied up in the opinion of others. You’re effectively giving up your own power and letting others dictate your life! We worry about our family, our job, how to earn more, our home, what vehicle to buy, what dress to wear, about latest gadgets and so on only to abandon them when we reach our destination. That is because we cannot take them with us. We don’t realise in our life’s journey that these are just burdens we are carrying with utmost care for fear of losing them, only to find that at the end they are all useless as we have to leave them behind. If you take a close look at spiritual Masters, none of ...

  Photo Credit: University of Metaphysics What is Truth? There is a saying, “What the mind believes is true or it becomes true.” This is exactly what has been happening through time – it is like auto-hypnosis. Is what the mind believes is true reality? Actually, it appears to be true. Also, “it becomes true” – it can never become true by believing it to be true, it starts appearing to be true. For the believer it can become true, although it is not true because belief begins in ignorance. Belief cannot create truth, truth exists – it is already there – only we cannot see it, we live in ignorance. Truth is truth, it cannot be denied and nor does your believing or not believing change reality – it makes no difference to the truth! But if you start believing in something it appears to be true to you at least. When we say believe, what we are saying in reality is that we do not know the fact, but we believe it to be so, indirectly you accept your ignorance but rely on your belief t...

  Photo Credit: The Threshold Society Imagination and You Sant Kabir says, “Put all imagination away.” We think we are poor; we have everything and even then, we imagine what will happen if we lose everything. Imagining in a negative manner will only give us stress. The idea that you are a beggar is also nothing but your imagination. Suppose you get fed up with the idea of being poor, your begging, your desires and your ambitions you start turning towards spirituality and you imagine – “I am God.” That too is imagination, it will not take you anywhere. Instead of imagining things, drop all your imagination and go into a state of no-imagination. With imagination, you are not yourself, you are traveling in your mind and are moving away from yourself. You fall asleep and go into a dream-state and in your sleep, you find yourself in New York and in the next moment you are in Paris. For the full night you were stationary in your bed, but in your imagination, you had travelled to New...

Photo Credit: Crosswalk.com   Friendliness & Love Friendship is a relationship. One can be in that relationship with a few people. Friendliness is a quality not a relationship. It has nothing to do with anybody else, it is basically our inner quality. One can be friendly even when you are alone. One cannot be in friendship when one is alone - the other is needed - but friendliness is a kind of fragrance. A flower opens in the jungle; nobody passes by - still it is fragrant. It does not matter whether anybody comes to know of it or not, it is its quality. Nobody may ever come to know about it, but that does not matter; it is rejoicing. Friendship can exist only between one man and another man or at the most between a man and an animal - a horse, a dog. But friendliness can exist even with a rock, with a river, with a mountain, with a cloud, with a far-away star. Friendliness is unlimited because it is not dependent on the other; it is absolutely one’s own flowering. Love som...

  Photo Credit: Enter the Stargate There Are No Problems Some people love to make mountains out of mole-hills – that is because their ego is not satisfied with mole-hills, the ego does not feel good – so the mind blows up every little issue! Even if such person is feeling miserable – it should be the Mount Everest of misery, nothing less will do! People go on and on, creating big problems where none existed. If one listens to someone else’s problem, on analysing it we realise that it is not really a problem and there are umpteen ways out of it. People create problems to gather sympathy and self-importance – because without problems they feel empty, there is nothing to do, nothing to fight over, nowhere to go. The ego can exist only when it struggles, remember – when it fights. If you tell someone if you kill three flies you will get self-realisation, he will not believe you; but you tell him that if you kill a hundred lions, he will believe you – 100 lions, what a challenge! Th...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest || Abraham Hicks Nothing Serious About Life Life is not serious, the individual is serious, man is serious. In life great achievements have taken place because of man’s intensity and strong desire to achieve certain goals. Intensity is very different from seriousness – if you are serious, you can never be intense, you can only be tense. With seriousness you can never be intense and deep, you will always be shallow. Life is not at all serious – it is just a play with nothing to be achieved and nowhere to reach! Seriousness is objective-drive, it is always end-oriented. This means that you are living in order to achieve something and if you don’t achieve it, then life is meaningless. That is seriousness – the means lies in the end, not in the present moment, not in the here and now! The end has to be achieved. If you achieve it, great, if you don’t, then one feels everything is lost. One becomes serious because one has established conditions in one’s mind th...

  Photo Credit: Free Press Journal Soul is Pure Consciousness ‘I am that’ – Nisargdatta Maharaj. This quote is what defines us human beings. I am the soul, minus my mind and body. We are all souls in our current state of existence, but we are not aware of this reality. To find the soul or to attain soul-realisation or self-realisation one has to become free from ignorance and delusion about oneself and only then can we know our own true nature. We can only become aware of ourselves by gaining knowledge about ourselves. Liberation truly means becoming free from our ignorance and delusion and returning to our original state of freedom and pure consciousness. This happens once we realise that the mask and the costume represented by our ego and body are not who we are. Birth after birth we keep changing our costumes, our roles, our masks. While enacting numerous roles and living them, experimenting with numerous choices and preferences, likes and dislikes, we temporarily forget who...

  Photo Credit: Success Consciousness The Door is Never Closed In spirituality the door symbolises the famous philosophical concept of two worlds that exist in our Universe so faithfully, and that Doors represent the clearest picture of eternal life. You die and then you go through the Light Door and enter another world as they say. There are Universal Doors which we can open with our mind when deep in meditation, that is when we lose sense of time and space, we enter into different dimensions which we never knew existed. It is even said that the Doors are boundaries in the intersecting spiral galaxies. As humanity progressed and evolved both materially and spiritually the path of the Doors became clear. The Doors became more and more important. There are two aspects in each one of us: the first leads to the tangible, the naked eye, the visible, the material and which places emphasis on our Ego – this personality of ours is accessible to the whole world. The other, however, rem...

  Photo Credit: Parade No Loss in Giving We are seekers after Truth and for that purpose we follow various religions since birth, which kind of become our schools of thought. Some of us may be atheists, nevertheless truth is not the exclusive right of any particular creed, or place, or age. It is a every man’s birth right. Just as every man has the right to breathe air, and bask in the rays of the sun, we are all privileged to draw divine energy from Universal Consciousness, as also, strength, and wisdom, which is within each of us. That infinite supply cannot be exhausted. Anyone belonging to any religion can delve it out from within with the help of somebody who is competent — call him by any name you like. Take all that you can. Not only will it suffice for you, but through it you will become instrumental in helping your fellows. Your smile will inspire another to smile. Your strength will impel another to be strong. A noble soul always draws forth the noble quality in others....

  Photo Credit:Familes|LovetoKnow A Helping Hand Helping others has been ingrained in me since my childhood. As I grew up, I saw the example of my grandparents and then my mother (father passed away when I was a child) helping those in need in whatever way they could. We were not economically too well off, but we were rich at heart. In the kitchen we always had extra food cooked for any surprise visitor, plus food for the maids and cooks who came for daily work. My mother was a great cook and people called her ‘Annapoorna’ (Goddess of food and cooking) and tea and food was always available at very short notice. With the passage of time as our economic condition improved providing financial assistance, clothes etc was a kind of norm at home and this sense got conditioned in all our brother’s psyche. Helping selflessly kind of became second nature. I’ll narrate a couple of incidents in my life, which in hindsight, I feel were the stepping stones to turn towards spirituality. A ...

  Photo Credit: QuoteFancy| Marianne Williamson Journey From Fear to Love There are two motivating forces which are fundamental to our existence – fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we feel love, fall in love, we open our hearts to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. First, we have to learn to love ourselves with all our imperfections. If we are unable to love ourselves, then it becomes very difficult to love others. While meditating I realised that the opposite of love is not hatred, but fear. Fear with its sense of contraction, isolation, tension, diffidence and coldness towards others and towards life, and Love with its expansion, inclusion, trust, relaxation, empathy and compassion towards each other and towards the planet. Fear wants to control and makes you more easily controlled, and love gives freedom and makes you realise that you are free. The biggest fear that man has is the fear of death. While this fea...

Photo Credit: Daily Pioneer   Dying Consciously When one talks of dying consciously one is talking about the state one reaches through meditation and living every moment in conscious awareness. Swamiji has said that liberation is not something which one reaches after death, it is that state which one reaches while living – a state of void, nothingness. Sadhana, either a specific practice or your overall spiritual transformation, begins with you as an ego and evolves into your being a soul, who you really are. The ego is identified with the incarnation, which stops at the moment of death. The soul, on the other hand, has experienced many deaths. If you’ve done your sadhana fully, there will be no fear of death, and dying is just another moment. To die consciously apart from doing one’s spiritual practice in complete awareness, one can also take certain steps to approach your own death in complete awareness. You have to accept that death is the ultimate reality, there is no poi...