Inhale Your Portion of Wellness

It’s a lush green forest around you. Birds are chirping. It’s early morning and a cool breeze is blowing. Nearby, gurgling waters of a brook add music to the stillness around. You feel better. It feels good. The external orderliness, peace and calm raise the bar of your better feeling. With the same set of your own individual, internal, self-specific problems, worries and concerns, you feel better if the surrounds are better.

The desert sand is burning. It’s noon and forget about trees, you cannot see even a blade of grass for miles. You feel horrible. You feel bad. You find yourself worse than your self-specific set of worries make you feel normally. You feel bad if the surroundings are not convenient.

We cannot inhale in isolation. Or put more simply, we cannot exist in isolation in this universe. We are just put somewhere in the chain of interdependence. If there is misery in the air, it will enter your lungs. Use air-masks and air filters, do whatever. Life still will be stifling and genuine efforts just a struggle because we cannot help inhaling our share of the miseries prevailing around. The solution lies in cutting down on the pollutants. Not in wearing masks. When it comes to our struggle to increase our happiness, the efforts are almost as useless as wearing masks when the air is polluted.  Fighting the consequences is never the durable solution, fighting the cause is.

Our own set of factors that make life either good or bad are not the sole deciding elements in making us happy or unhappy. If we are happy, then we are just sharing a fraction of the overall happiness surrounding us. Our lungs are safe just in proportion to the purity of the air around. If the quality of air is good, only then the individual battles like quitting smoking, eating healthy food and doing yoga to keep your lungs safe will be meaningful.

If we are unhappy, that also is a fraction of the overall misery spread around. Individual is just a constituent of the whole. Happiness is drawn from the overall pool. How long the frogs will sing songs of self-gratification in a vanishing muddy pond? Its waters vaporizing. Its shoreline decreasing. Stanching green mossy puddle. What can be drawn out of it? Only death and misery, not life and happiness.   

A talented software engineer, with his tools of prosperity and happiness, is of no use at a place like Somalia. There is no surrounding prosperity to help him nurture his talent. There is no supportive economy and companies to help him contribute to the overall wellness and get a fraction of the happiness in return. A software engineer prospers in America because using his skills he can contribute to and earn back a fraction of the happiness spread around.         

The surroundings set the stage for either make or break.

“Love thy neighbor!” By loving others you are loving yourself. By caring for others, you are caring for yourself. By contributing to others’ happiness, you are adding to your own happiness because your share of happiness and prosperity will be just a fraction of the overall happiness around. With your effort and skills, you draw a big portion if the social forest around you is healthy like the natural forest where each breath installs new vitality in you.

Long before you really start doing something to add to the overall wellness around you, start with a simple practice. You might be busy with scores of neck-breaking responsibilities, leaving you with very little time for real action on the goodness front. Start thinking good of others. Think good for your surroundings. Be happy over others’ victories. Smile over somebody’s stroke of luck. Feel bad for somebody’s loss. Say some sympathetic words as well. Over the years, the goodness in its womb will get healthy. It will deliver a healthy baby. And sooner or later, you will definitely ‘do’ something to add to the overall goodness around you before you finish your journey.

You will then have a larger share from the pool of wellness. When the sun will be setting and you preparing to enter the night for long deserved rest, you will walk into the forest with well-meaning steps. It will be a far happier retirement than it would have been otherwise.

A well-cooked love recipe

"The trouble with falling in love is that, unlike death, love kills you every moment, robbing you, at first, of reason, and then, slowly, consuming you bit by bit until you lose the sense of time, of the true nature of things, and of all other precious relationships."_Siddhartha Gigoo in Mehr: A love story.

No wonder they say one "falls" in love!

PS: ..and no conjecture plz...about me ‘falling’...haa haa... My version of love is ‘rising’. There is abundance of love around, of family, nature, birds, animals, flowers, clouds, honeybees, insects, beetles, crowded bazaars, isolated vales, springs, summers, winters, autumn, everything in fact. If you have the eyes for it, everything is saturated with love like luscious honey oozing from fat honeycombs hanging over wild rose thickets and the nectar dripping. And the honeybees tasting their own fruits as they buzz around collecting pollen from the flowers!.  

When hate vanishes, love blooms and you ‘soar high’ with such love instead of ‘falling’. You love all, simply because you don't hate anyone. You don’t have any enemies because you are friendly to all. If you have only love to offer, you just cannot have hate around you. The hate that we see in our lives is just the multiplication of the traces of hate inside us. Kill it inside you, it gets killed from around you. You see light around, simply because there is no darkness inside anymore. You smile more, simply because a smiling face still contributes to the struggles of even a stranger coming across the street.  

Love for a man or woman is the first step in the ladder. Fall in love with your man or woman, and go all the way in pursuit of your passionate craving. Melt in it like butter in the frying pan. Lose your identity, break the walls and surrender your self-driven cart to the free wheels of airy jaunts. This is the fire which melts the outermost stony ramparts that hinder you from the freest flight. No wonder, to rise you have to fall first. It’s a rebound. All natural laws say so. Your rebound is just in proportion to your ‘fall’ for your man or woman.

Only after touching one summit you feel like going for the other. So give all you can in your love for your man or woman. Touch your peak. There is no chance for half bakes. Cook it full. Boil it well. Lukewarm things keep you in a vague haze. Bake it full. Boil it. Vaporize with the heat of your passion. Then you feel like soaring high, instead of crawling in the cauldron.

But don't just stop at this point. It's just a beginning. It’s the path to a bigger destination. From particular to the universal. With your categorized love for your partner, you get a glimpse of the bigger possibilities. The limited love, the so called love for your partner, is simply a window to help you have a glimpse of the infinite potential of bliss, the universal love.

Do you know, why do you feel like falling again and again? Simply because you don’t fall completely. You go with insecurities and fear. You love your man and woman with lots of apprehensions, fears and insecurities. You are partially into it. No wonder, the delicacy of your affair is always under-cooked. And you always feel dissatisfied, craving for more and more. Then you proceed to cook another half-cooked affair. We rarely complete the recipe. It’s my promise, if you cook one relationship well, you will not be left with any appetite to run for more along the avenue.

So guys keep falling in love. But just falling forever doesn't define you as a human being. Rising will. And rising occurs when you start loving all. When you use your full potential to love. And the path to hitting the full potential starts with your full love for your partner without any roadblocks of fear and apprehensions. The destination of love is to be all inclusive. Your love relationship with the man or woman in your life is simply an apprenticeship to help you become an all-loving person. So keep falling, but learn to rise and love all.

As you enjoy the ecstatic grip of love chains of your partner, slowly learn to wipe away the names of the people you hate from your little black book. Take a sip of love from the petals of your partner and forget and forgive one name at a time. The honey of love should be sweet enough to make you forget all the bitter tastes driven in your memory at the mention of certain irritating names in your life.  If your life’s bitterness isn’t swiped away by the sweet cherry of your love bites, then you have to objectively assess your level of dive in the love pool. If you are sufficiently deep in the pool of love for your man and woman, you won’t have any reason to be hateful of even the worst beings who have hurt you.

So here I rise high and see all people good in their unique ways.

Love you all!

Sufi Meditation

Music for Sufi Meditation

My father named or nicknamed me as Sufi. As a Hindu I rate it as a great syncretic sentiment. And why not, probably I am the only Hindu in Haryana who is called Sufi.

Coming to Sufism. It’s the best mystical offering by Islam to the overall humanity. The strands of unity, oneness, universal brotherhood and love for all waft around from the esoteric incense of Sufism. So I am happy to be called Sufi.

Sharing a musical piece for Sufi meditation. Play the music on a higher volume so that it swathes you in its gripping, haunting pools of melodious surrender to the ultimate. This meditation is best done in a spacious room or hall because it involves swirling around.

Listen to the initial notes and you will feel some spiritual haunts spreading from the central Asian lands. It is about connecting to mother earth, and from her to the solar system, galaxy and the ultimate. So perform it on naked feet, or be in socks at the most if the climate in your part is too harsh.

Stand still as you listen to the build up of the Sufi melody. Just relax and look within, taking the enchanting trilling of the music seep into you. Now spread your right arm by your side, raise the arm to the level of your shoulder, elbow turned at an angle and the hand raised up, palm facing upwards . Your elbow shoulder and chest being in a line. Spread the left arm to the other side, keep it comfortably straight, without putting strain to straighten it. The palm spread out and pointing to the ground. The hand dangling at an angle from the horizontal.

And start swirling, go round and round on your feet in anticlockwise direction. Just slowly build up the momentum. There is a difference between exercise and meditation. In the latter your spirit is involved. The body is just the starting point. Keeping the hands as mentioned above, as you start swinging, swirling, allow the divine forces to take control of your body. If you really do it, believe me you won’t fall, because there are balancing forces all around you.

When we stand we think we are in control of our body and only we are managing the stand of our body. Little do we realise that our apparent control is just illusion. The all balancing forces of eternity are what which maintain our standing. And look at the eternity’s grace, it allows us to think that we are solely responsible for maintaining our standing.

Your body will be swinging in circles, like a swinging top, but that is just the outer periphery of your being. After a time you, will realise that just the matter or food body is going in circles. The real you, the axis of your being, the consciousness, remains immovable. Just like a swinging top swirls around a central nail, you will go within to the immovable point of your being. The externalities will be swung out by the centrifugal forces of divine realisation. The centripetal forces will suck you into the core of your being. And the apparent objectives around you—and so will the illusions—will just merge into an all-pervading continuum, one layer of energy, which even quantum physics has verified.

The differences will melt. Going in circles around the point of your consciousness, you will realise it is all just one energy, spreading, transforming, altering, from here to there. If you maintain that equipoise of spirit, soul and matter, you can build up the momentum to continue for ever! Well, you need not do that of course. Haa Haa.

So continue as long as you enjoy the deep sips of solace. After that lie down on your stomach. Surrender to mother earth and the grandmother eternity. Just lie like a child. You will have glimpses of that cosmic security and protection when your mother carried you in your womb. Remain like this till the momentum of mystical oblivion embraces you.

Open your eyes later. Take a turn to lie on your back. But move very gently, without giving any jerk to the body. Be so soft as if you want to preserve the softest thing in you. Rub your hands. Place them gently on your face, smile, be thankful to the eternal law for the moments of peace. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-J1hVGzWro&t=13s

Nurturing the seeds of goodness

The things which ought to be simply done, should just be done. Otherwise, their shadows linger in the mind. They grow heavier with the passage of time. This invisible weight is heavier than the stones we see around. Simple, harmless acts of appreciation, of enjoyment, of helping someone cross a stream are better done and closed with a full stop. It’s better for a healthy mind. Otherwise, they linger like conspiring shadows over our conscience.

A missed chance of being good will definitely cast a shadow on our mind. An effort to help the self in being good, on the other hand, will hardly leave any unbecoming imprint on our conscience for pinching reflections later.

Only goodness has a legacy and a future. Hypocrisy and meanness are just bad examples and leave repentance most of the time. To do good is instinctive for a human being, it’s however another matter that we stifle the urge most of the time. To be bad, on the other hand, is not intrinsic to our nature. It is wrongly reflective, a miscalculation, a tragic bypass of the instinct of goodness.

Nurture the seeds of the instincts of goodness. It’s a simple practice. It gives peace of mind, clear conscience and makes the journey enjoyable. Avoid it and you carry the burden in your mind.

Happiness: as simple as breathing

It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some grains, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness. And happiness keeps on getting more and more distant from us. I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. And then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Relentlessly we just push on. Happiness stays thus a distant goal. Never to be achieved. We make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we die. Huge immortals they are. In pushing for them, we die. Separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.

The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like we store some grains for the harsh winters, near us, in the safest part of our house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being and living for a day. Separate being from becoming. You can be happy if you set your happiness free from the chains of your lifelong dreams.

You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness which could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.

Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.

So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, instead of slogging it out to become happy later. Fellas, kindly decide to keep happiness as a routine, let it take possession of your present, like a monkey eating fruits and the birds flying. All in the present. Now. Just being. Simply being happy.