Girish's Blog

  Photo Credit: Statustown | Ramakrishna Humility Comes From Within People with character may be bombastic or quiet, but they definitely have a level of self-respect. Self-respect cannot be considered the same as self-confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not comparative - it is not something that can be earned by being better than other people at something. One earns it by being better than one was before, by improving all the time, by being dependable on times of stress and tests, straight and honest in the times of temptation. This characteristic emerges in those who are morally dependable – self-respect arises through inner triumphs and not external ones! Humility appears when we don’t live for happiness but live for holiness. The best life is oriented around excellence of the soul – Swamiji repeatedly says this – raise your soul consciousness – this excellence is nourished by inner joy and a quiet sense of gratitude and one begets tranquillity and inner calm as a by-p...

  Photo Credit: Shutterstock Humility and Meditation On the spiritual path we all have to tackle our egotism, as egotism is nothing but a ravenous hunger restricted in a small space – self-concerned, competitive and distinction-hungry. On the other hand, humility is freedom from the need to prove one is superior all the time – being humble is very important! By being humble one is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship and gratitude. Being grateful and thankful, expressing one’s gratitude ensures that pride does not grow easily. With humility comes the awareness that there’s a lot that one does not know and a lot of what we think we know is distorted or plain wrong! Today, many of us see our lives as a journey, in fact spirituality is said to be the journey into the unknown – a discovery of the self. On the contrary, in the material world the journey of life is considered to be like a climb up the ladder of success, where we think we are making a difference...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Character and Meditation How does our character build up as we grow? Most of us focus on virtues which help in creating a good bio-data, which naturally helps us in getting jobs, contracts, etc in our professional and working life. There are other virtues which are not put on display but which people talk about when one passes away. These are the virtues which exist at the core of our being – kindness, bravery, honesty, faithfulness, what kind of relationships we created. Our education system is more focused on how to succeed in life thus giving emphasis to developing virtues which will look good on CV. We live in a society which encourages us to have a great career but leaves many of us dumbfounded about how to develop our inner life. Living in society we get used to hearing the shallow and fast communications and this noise makes it very difficult for us to listen to the soft that emanate from the core of our being. Today, where life on social media ...

  Photo Credit: Possibility Junction The Power Within Us We are so lucky to have found a living Master who has taken us under His wing and taught us meditation and how to become spiritually independent. He has taught us to ignite the spiritual fuel lying unused within us and fired us in such a way that soul-realisation happened, the divinity within has been awakened. The divine lies latent within each one of us but we live in a complete state of body consciousness. It takes a realised Master to awaken the divinity within us and make us embark on our journey to soul consciousness. The Master bestows us with the spiritual experience of self-realisation, with time we come to experience our soul and finally comes inner knowledge. This entire process takes a lot of time and complete dedication is required to be given by the seeker, to progress from self-realisation, to soul-realisation and thence to inner knowledge. With each progressive step we keep getting spiritual experiences ...

  Guru-Poornima - 2022 This year’s Guru-poornima celebration is online, even though Ashrams have opened all over India. The solitude which one enjoyed over the two-year pandemic period has resulted in the followers of Samarpan Meditation learning to connect with the subtle rather than the physical persona of His Holiness Swami Shivkrupanandji. For those on the spiritual path these two years have been a God-send for spiritual progress in spite of several people facing personal tragedies, but still maintaining their equanimity and poise – a clear indication of spiritual progress. No one to blame, just acceptance of the situation as life follows its destined twists and turns. Celebrations in the Samarpan family started from the 11 th itself, with early morning meditation followed by Swamiji’s discourse and answering several questions posed by children. The QnA session itself provided such wonderful answers to questions posed by children from 8 to 18 years of age. The spiritual ...

  Photo Credit: Addiction Centre Lies – An Addiction? We have heard about Chinese whispers, how gossip which starts at point ‘a’ and ends at point ‘z’ is completely transformed and has no connection with what was originally said. In a way the modern world is filled with gossip or news which is motivated in favour of certain vested interests. Finding the truth in the material world has become an investigative task, with social media churning out ‘news’ which has to be fact-checked; and the fact checkers turn out to be fake news spreaders being funded to malign certain people, communities and countries. It is a total war out there based on misinformation and lies masquerading as the truth! It was once said that there are liars, big liars and then there are statisticians! You just have to look at the TV news of politicians, and other people over say a two-three years’ time frame – where their lies are totally exposed as they keep rebutting what they have said earlier! Liars love...

Photo Credit: YouTube   Meditation Brings Steadiness Practicing yoga and meditation can bring the steadiness we desire in our life. With regular practice our entire approach to life changes first at a very subtle level and then with the passage of time, the results are visible to all people who are associated with us. Regular practice brings about a desire to keep on living life the way it was meant to be lived – in the present moment – regardless of what happens to us in life, we keep on pursuing our goals. The Bhagavad Gita talks about this in terms of a spiritual quality called dhriti . As Paramahansa Yoganand said, “Patience or fortitude ( dhriti ) enables the devotee to bear the misfortunes and insults with equilibrium. Outward events cannot shake him, nor can occasional inner turmoil serve to deflect him from his chosen path or goal: Self-realisation.” When we apply this practice of patience and fortitude to our spiritual practise of meditation and yoga, it produces a p...