You can brave any storm in Life if you find its epicenter – which is within you!

Life’s full of storms. Some are personal __ health-related or relationship-focused. You or someone you know is battling a deadly ailment or someone walked out on you, leaving you numb, alone and suffering. Some are professional __ your career just doesn’t seem to settle down, you get laid off or your business keeps making losses leaving you without clients, without cash and with a mountain of losses and debt. You lose someone dear. And you feel you can’t go on in Life. A friend once recounted how he felt when his father died suddenly, when he was barely 19. “It was like the roof over your head being blown away by a raging storm and you are there, alone, drenched to the bone, cold, lonely and scared!” he described.

Maybe you too have felt this way. This feeling invariably leads to anxiety and hopelessness and agitation. You desperately want the reality to change__and NOW! But why? Because you feel you will be destroyed, annihilated.

That’s such a naïve perspective. Let us understand how storms work. In the eye of the storm, the epicenter of a cyclone, there is no destruction. Because there is no chaos. There’s only peace. And the strength of a storm emanates from its core. The epicenter of the storm is also its power center. This is science. Apply the same logic to Life’s storms also. If things are happening around you__you lose a job, your health suffers, a relation dies, you lose money__know that they are not happening to you. You are not your job, you are not your body (and therefore not your health!), you are not losing a relation__you are merely losing the body in which the soul you related to was housed, you are not your money! At the core, you have the opportunity to be peaceful and feel empowered instead of feeling helpless. You are indestructible. So, why flap your wings and kick your feet in distress?

More often than not, we are operating on the surface of Life. The waves are on the surface and on the periphery of the ocean. They are never in the ocean. All that we are experience in today’s world, in this lifetime of running the rat race__protecting our incomes, securing our deposits, saving to invest in real estate and worrying endlessly about our children__are all surface level activities. To find peace__and our true selves__we must brave the waves, we must go beneath__and past__Life’s storms. Dive into the storm. Go deep. Drop anchor by practicing silence periods daily. ‘Mouna’ or the practice of silence periods will take you to your center, and to the real you. And the Life storm you find yourself in the middle of will blow over, leaving you unscathed, stronger, wiser, saner__and awakened.