Letting go of your wants can magically transform your Life

Choose what you need, drop your wants, and you will always be happy – despite the circumstances!

There was once a time in my Life when I did not know the difference between what I wanted and what I needed. I was driven by an urge then to gratify myself every single time that I thought of acquiring something. I wasn’t a spendthrift exactly, but yes, I indulged myself a lot in acquiring material stuff that enhanced the quality of my Life’s experiences. Then, Life’s Master Plan pushed me and my family to a state when we could not, on our own, even afford what we needed – bare necessities like food, clothing and a roof over our heads. Yet, with amazing grace, we always got what we needed. Our needs were eventually fulfilled, each time, in the nick of time. One moment it would appear as if we did not have something and suddenly someone would walk into our Life and give us what we needed at that moment – this never happened in ways we could have imagined, but it certainly did happen unfailingly. This experience of being cared for and provided for by Life has helped me understand the difference between want and need.

To be sure, intrinsically, all of us are simple folks. We know what we need. But it is when we start confusing our wants as our needs that we become dis-satisfied with the Life we have. In the days when we owned cars, I ensured that our Hyundai Accent and Santro were maintained in top-notch condition. Every time the cars got dented beyond an acceptable level or the upholstery got worn out, I would just sell the cars and buy new ones. I did not buy luxury cars. I simply bought the same models – Accent and Santro. And when I felt my cars needed to be changed, I was restless until I actually did that; a process that often took weeks. Over a 7 year period, I had changed my cars four times. This prompted one of my friends to quip: “Hey AVIS! You change cars as if you are changing your shirt!” I realize now that it was my want, my desire, to have gleaming new-looking and great-smelling cars that I was confusing in my head as a need to maintain them in “top-notch” condition. Today, I am car-less. The last car we had, a 15-year-old Mitsubishi Lancer, a gift from a friend in 2009, had to be disposed of in January 2014 because its maintenance costs were huge. Having got used to living without a car, using auto-rickshaws, Uber or Ola, to get around, I understand now that I don’t even need a car! Life is far simpler without one. I am not saying I will not acquire one. I well may – when I feel the need for it, surely not because I want it!

Our wants actually enslave us, holding us hostage. Clearly when something is possessing you, like your want will, how can you be happy? The way to ring in happiness and inner peace is to understand what you need and be content with it. Even if you don’t have what you need, always trust Life to provide it for you. Letting go of your wants can magically transform your Life. Here’s a Zen story to illustrate the point. Someone asked the Buddha: “I want happiness. Please teach me how I can get it.” The Buddha replied: “Drop the ‘I’, drop the ‘want’, you will be left with ‘happiness’!” Beautiful, isn’t it?

Your Life is more precious than your misery

To overcome betrayal, forgive and just wish the other person well. It is not difficult. It is simple.

Think of a situation when you have been let down, back-stabbed and left to feel like trash. It happened sometime surely in your Life. What was your response? Anger. Outrage. How-dare-you?: your mind keeps throbbing with this question. You sulk. You rant. You brood. At the end of it, your Life goes on. So does the other person’s. And what was the outcome of all that struggle? Pure misery for you.

Was all of this avoidable? Yes surely. All you needed to do was to wish the other person well and let that person be. You can also call this forgiveness. The person’s choice to betray you was their own. Why do you have to react to it violently? It is only when you react this way that you encounter misery. If you were to just accept the situation as is, wish that person well, I am not saying you will feel good, but definitely, you will not feel like trash or be miserable.

Know this: YOU WILL BE BETRAYED IN LIFE. Not ONCE, Not TWICE, but ‘n’ number of times! Yet, each time if you wish your detractor, your back-stabber, your betrayer, well, you can be peaceful. Ultimately, it is ONLY your peace that matters. When you are peaceful, Life in your circle of influence will be peaceful. When people see you peaceful they will retract from their positions of designed or happenstance hostility. Being miserable you cannot make the world a better place. Being peaceful you can make YOUR world better. You don’t have to be a martyr to do this. You just have to be human to see value in this proposition. Wish well, forgive and move on. The rest of your Life is more precious than you clinging on to your misery! 

Why do you insist on making your Life miserable?

If you are feeling miserable about something or someone, you are causing that misery in yourself.  

Whenever you feel miserable it is natural to blame the circumstances or the people that are causing you grief for all your misery. This only accentuates your suffering. Instead if you examine your feeling of misery closely, you will realize that whatever is upsetting you, whatever is making you sad and depressed, is just there. It is either an event or a person – and how and why they are there in your Life is beyond your control. The truth is they are there. And the other irrefutable truth is that they are causing you pain. You invite misery by wishing that they are not there in the first place. Now how can that be possible? Because they are already there. They have already arrived. Your wishing is not going to alter the reality of their presence!

This perspective is applicable in all situations. You have lost your job and you are trying hard but you are not getting another one. The job loss event has happened and the job search is presently futile – these are two events, two realities, that are causing you pain. Neither reality was or is in your control. But if you keep wishing why you lost your job, or why you can’t find another one, you will be miserable. It’s like asking why someone is dead, why someone is no more. What’s the point? Death happens. If there is birth, death will follow. So it is with all situations. Things just happen – and some of them end up bringing you pain. Or people around you behave insensitively causing you pain. Why things happen the way they do or why people behave the way they do – both are not in your control. Drop all expectations that your Life must conform to your wishes. Then there will just be pain, and you will not feel miserable.

Pain, in fact, is beautiful. It is always warning you that there’s something wrong with your Life. Now, when you hate the presence of pain, you feel miserable. In misery, you cannot think clearly because you are always wishing that your Life is different from what it is. Instead, if you drop all expectations and decide to simply deal with the pain, and whatever is causing you pain, you will not suffer. Make your efforts to eradicate the source of pain. But again without expectations that the pain will cease just because you have worked on it. Chances are it may cease. And chances are it may linger on. So, just make the effort and leave the result to Life. This is the principal message of the Bhagavad Gita too – do not worry about outcomes, just focus on the effort!

Remember this: whatever happens in Life, you cannot change any reality by merely wishing it away. Either you have to work on changing things and hopefully you will succeed. Or you are going to have to accept your Life for what it is. In either situation, misery and suffering are not what Life delivers to you. These are what you invite into your Life when you resist whatever you are faced with. Surely, feeling miserable is not something anyone can enjoy or live with. So, why do you insist on making your Life miserable in the first place?

Zen in a torn curtain

There’s great beauty in imperfection. Celebrate it!

The normal human tendency is to strive for perfection. We like things to always work fine. We like it when Life goes to a plan – our plan! We love it when everything is in its place – the way we want it to be. The way we live, the way we dress, the way we decorate our living spaces – all of this happens while we strive for perfection. But Life’s imperfect. In its own, unique way. Things often get messed up, plans go awry and nothing ever stays the way we want it to. While we will naturally tend to get frustrated with the way Life operates at such times, if you pause to reflect, you will still find Life beautiful!

This morning, I notice that one of the curtains in our living room was torn. There were guests visiting us and I noticed the tear when I was sitting with them. I kept wondering how the tear had happened and after the guests left, I spent a fair amount of time trying to understand what may have caused the fabric to tear! Then, because we don’t have a curtain to replace this one immediately, I tucked away the torn portion deftly, so that it wouldn’t show! As I finished this “mini-salvage mission”, I smiled to myself. I thought that even the way the torn curtain was now, with a forced wrinkle that hid the tear, it looked good. I concluded that we didn’t have to work toward replacing the torn curtain immediately.

That’s when I was reminded of an old Zen story.

A priest was in charge of the garden within a famous Zen temple. He had been given the job because he loved the flowers, shrubs, and trees. Next to the temple there was another, smaller temple where there lived a very old Zen Master.

One day, when the priest was expecting some special guests, he took extra care in tending to the garden. He pulled the weeds, trimmed the shrubs, combed the moss, and spent a long time meticulously raking up and carefully arranging all the dry autumn leaves. As he worked, the old Master watched him with interest from across the wall that separated the temples.

When he had finished, the priest stood back to admire his work. “Isn't it beautiful,” he called out to the old Master. “Yes,” replied the old man, “but there is something missing. Help me over this wall and I'll put it right for you.”

After hesitating, the priest lifted the old fellow over and set him down. Slowly, the Master walked to the tree near the center of the garden, grabbed it by the trunk, and shook it. Leaves showered down all over the garden. “There,” said the old man, “you can put me back now.”

The learning here is that, when Life goes its own way, often turning all your plans upside down, flow with Life. Don’t crave for clarity on what’s going to happen next or seek predictability. Simply live with and celebrate the imperfection. Wanting things to be different than what they are, than the way they are, is a sure way to invite misery and suffering. Instead live with Life as it is. And enjoy its beauty the way it is!

Choicelessness is a blessing that leads you to bliss!

If you have no choice in Life, it is a good thing. Then you can just be, with what is!

The other day I was delivering a Talk to a group of young managers. I spoke to them about learning to be happy and content while living with whatever circumstances Life has placed you in. The Talk was autobiographical in parts as I shared anecdotes and learnings from my Life to illustrate how I had made the transition from running the rat race and earning-a-living to simply living – accepting whatever Life offered me. One of the managers, in his late 20s, observed that perhaps I had lost the “aggression” in me because of the experiences I had been through in Life. He said: “Maybe because you were left with no more choices, because Life dealt with you ‘unfairly’, you had to accept whatever came your way.”

Interesting point the young man made. What do you do when you don’t have a choice but to accept whatever Life offers you? Simple. You learn to live with what is there, whatever is available, and through this acceptance, you are happy and peaceful. Well, in reality, there are no choices. Our education, our intelligence, makes us believe that we have a choice over what Life offers us, over the way Life deals with us. So we keep on resisting or avoiding the Life which is happening to us. In doing all this, we end up suffering. What causes us misery is not what is but our wish that it wasn’t there in the first place.

Spirituality is not about religion. It is about the flowering of inner awareness in you – the one that tells you that it is what it is. And that you will do well to accept what is. So, over time, and from experience, all of us evolve. Some of us evolve through a crisis. Some of us evolve through resisting, fighting, avoiding and then learning to accept Life. Some of us evolve by understanding the scriptures and applying our learnings to real-Life contexts. Each of us evolves though for sure – at our own pace and time. The evolved person does not ever say no to Life! He or she is never looking for choices. Sadness comes and it is accepted. Tragedy comes and it is accepted. Opportunity comes and it is accepted. A moment to celebrate comes and it is accepted. This person does not impose conditions on Life. And therefore this person is happy and content despite the circumstances he or she is placed in.

It is only by being happy and content with the Life you have that you can anchor in inner peace. And, to that end, having no choice in Life, whatever be the context, is a great blessing. A blessing that leads you to bliss!

Ridding yourself of comparisons and envy

Comparing yourself with others is what ruins your inner peace. Drop all comparisons. You are unique. Just as everyone else is.  

A participant at one of my workshops recently asked me, “How do you not envy someone who has everything that you don’t?”

His question was as profound as it was candid. To compare, and often times, even subconsciously, feel jealous of someone is a normal human quality. But if you are aware, you will find that jealousy does not help in any manner. In fact, it ruins your inner peace. It is only through your awareness that you can drop comparisons and stop feeling jealous of someone!

I remember reading a story. A man was sitting peacefully on a mountain top. He was taking in the scenery. It was a beautiful morning. He had had a very rough time in the past few weeks. So, he had decided to trek up the mountain just to get some quiet time to himself. His girlfriend had deserted him. And he had been heart-broken over that incident. But coming here, up the mountain, had helped him greatly. He must have been sitting there for over four hours. And he did not once think about his ex-girlfriend. He did not feel anger or grief. He was able to see how beautiful Life was – just as it was, despite whatever he was going through. Around noon, a young couple arrived at the mountain top. They were happy to be with each other. The man saw this couple and his thoughts went back to his girlfriend and he started pining for her first. Then he was soon angry with her. And in some time, he was jealous of this other man for being able to have a girlfriend when he did not have one himself! The scenery and nature’s pristine beauty did not matter to him anymore. He was angry with Life. He left the place in a huff.

This story is very relevant. For it helps us understand the sequence of events that lead us to feeling miserable about any situation in Life. When the man was “present” in the moment, when he was taking in the scenery, he had no problems. For several hours he had no problems, no thoughts about his past. But the moment he allowed thoughts of his past, of his ex-girlfriend to creep in, he first started feeling uncomfortable, then angry and finally, miserable. This is the way the mind leads you to misery. When you are in the Now, when you are present in the moment, it is actually the state of no-mind. This is when all you are doing is that you are engaged in whatever is happening. If you are watching a movie, you are “in” it. If you are singing, you “are” the song. If you are reading a book, you “are” the book. There’s no past. There’s no future. There’s just you – in the Now!

The mind comes into play only when your attention wavers. Now awareness cannot stop your attention from wavering. But awareness can help you rein in your mind and bring your focus into the present moment. How do you build a higher level of awareness in you? Simple – by constantly training the mind to not interfere with the present. The mind thrives in debilitating emotions like guilt, grief, anger and worry – in the past or in the future. It is powerless in the present. To be sure, you too can train your mind through daily practices like meditation or mouna (observing silence periods).

So, don’t worry about your tendency to compare yourself with others or feel jealous of them. Those are the effects. Go to what’s causing the effect. Which is the mind. Work on training your mind. The more you train to not let your attention to waver, the more you will be present in the moment. And as long as you are present, no painful past or anxious future, can ever touch you. When you reach this state, through repeated practice, your Life will be blissful. Untouched by the scourge of comparison and envy!

On why hopelessness is not a bad thing

To be hopeless about a situation in Life is, after all, not a bad thing. It helps you gain great clarity about living Life – fully, in the now!  

I recently read the story of a lady who was diagnosed with last-stage cancer. She talks about how, when she first heard the diagnosis, she went from one specialist to another, hoping fervently that she would hear a different diagnosis and the prognosis would be positive. She continued to work at her job – and the stresses of both her health situation and a demanding job began to take their toll on her. Finally, when she met a very eminent oncologist, he told her that she had “only six months more”. The lady recalls that she was shaken awake from her “hope-filled reverie”. She says she had been hoping badly, madly, that she would be told that she would live longer. But when she was told of her possible expiry date, coming up in just the next few months, she decided to “live” fully – in the time that she had left with her! She quit her job, made a list of all the people and places she wanted to visit, took to painting (something she loved doing but never found the time when she was working) every day and chose to be happy over feeling mournful about her health. She explained that “as long as she was hopeful of being cured she was clinging on to a Life which she was hardly enjoying, but the moment she realized her health situation was beyond hope, she began to live her Life – intensely, joyfully!”

This lady’s experience teaches us something invaluable. It helps us understand that while hope is a good thing, in certain situations in Life, it may hold us hostage and blind us from seeing reality. Reality, however, cannot be escaped. So, while you live through certain unchangeable phases with unalterable realities in Life, being hopeful in a hopeless situation can indeed make you feel miserable. Your intelligence will tell you what the reality is. But hope will make you delusional – vainly wishing that the reality did not exist. This conflict will cause you to suffer – day in and day out. There’s a way to break this jinx. And that way is to simply accept a situation to be hopeless – when it really is so. For instance, if you lose someone to death – it’s pointless to hope for that person to come alive. Or if someone loses their limbs or eyesight or hearing or speech – it is futile to hope that it will be restored without a specialist medical intervention or, perhaps, a cosmic miracle!

Hopelessness is not about giving up. It need not only be about feeling desperate or despondent. It can, if you allow it to, help you see the reality as it is and can teach you how to face it. For, whenever you are hopeless about some situation, you can always ask yourself “what does this mean” and “what must I do now”. The answers you get for these questions can inspire to move on, in acceptance, and in peace.

Your ego obstructs your living Life fully

If you are not living Life, fully, freely – it could be that your ego is coming in the way!

Humility is the key to your spiritual growth. But your ego is a big deterrent. It has to first be expunged.

A Japanese king sent his minister to meet the Zen Master Lin Chi. The king had a question. He wanted to know the difference between hell and heaven. Lin Chi told the minister to ask the king to come personally if he really wanted to learn the answer to his question. The king arrived to meet Lin Chi and bent down to touch the Master’s feet.

Lin Chi reacted violently to the king’s gesture: “You idiot! You don’t even know manners?”

The king was shocked. And in a rage, he immediately drew his sword to attack Lin Chi.

Lin Chi said: “Wait a minute! This is the door to hell”

The king was surprised. He put his sword back in its sheath.

Lin Chi now said: “Good. Now that is the door to heaven.”

The king said he did not understand what this was all about.

Lin Chi explained. “Hell is not anywhere else, in some after-Life, but is in your ego. How does it matter if I called you an idiot? Why did you get so angry that you were ready to take a poor man’s Life? Who was hurt? Think carefully – it is your ego that was hurt. And when you abandoned the hurt – in your quest for learning from me – you put the sword back in the sheath, you expunged your ego and so rose in your heaven. Heaven is where there is no ego.”

Lin Chi’s wisdom is so pure. So beautiful. The biggest hurdle on the spiritual path is the ego. How does it matter whether people call you an idiot or a great mind? At the end of the day, it is what they think, it is their opinion. You cannot concern yourself with people’s opinions. You cannot live your Life based on them. Know who you are. That’s enough. You don’t really need to depend on what society thinks of you. It is your ego that depends, that thrives on societal opinion! Your ego keeps you enslaved in a social context. To live Life fully, freely, that context does not really matter.

The ego is what causes all your misery. So, to rid yourself of your suffering, get rid of the ego. A simple way to expunge the ego is to drop the “I” in every context in Life. A friend of mine came to me to share his feelings over a messy divorce that he was going through. He said, “I have been betrayed, I have been trampled upon and I am being accused. I feel so stupid, so used. I must get rid of this feeling of injustice and shame. Is there a way?” The Buddha has taught that one way to be free is to drop the “I”. I shared that learning with my friend. And asked him to say the same statement again without using “I” anywhere in it. My friend tried and this is how it sounded: “Have been betrayed. Have been trampled upon. Am being accused. Feel so stupid, so used. Must get rid of this feeling of injustice and shame.” And that’s an interesting method, isn’t it? Without the “I” the statement is without a personal context. It is just a reporting of fact and feeling. And therefore, a solution to the situation, appears almost instantaneously! With the “I”, a resolution, or an escape from that hurt, would have been unthinkable!

Osho, the Master, points to what a beautiful Life await us if we can drop our ego. He says: “The ego is preventing everything. Your ego is making you a beggar, while you are an emperor of a vast empire. Of course, that empire does not belong to the outside world. It is in your own being. Which has the vastness of the whole Universe.”

Don’t give a heap of words the power to injure you

What others think of you is none of your business! Seriously!!

A common trap we all fall victim to is to grieve over the perceptions that others have of us. For some strange, inexplicable reason, what others think of us, always, matters more than what we think of ourselves. And while these opinions, that others have of us, cause us untold hurt and, often, suffering, we still continue to give them the importance that they absolutely, simply, don’t deserve.

There are only two kinds of opinions. One that creates value – which is, when you heed them, they help you become a better person, professional and human being. The other kind debilitates. It hurts. It is the second category of opinions that we must be wary of. We can’t escape them. But we sure can choose not to let them affect us when they are thrown at us!

I learnt this lesson the hard way in Life. For a long, long time, well into my late thirties, I would hurt from others’ opinions of me. Which, predictably, varied from the banal to the absurd. I would work hard at clarifying to people who had read me wrong or strive, even harder, to change their opinion of me. In trying to do all this I would grieve and suffer endlessly. Then, one morning, I read this quote by the famous philosopher and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurthi (1895~1986): “The ability to observe oneself without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.” I remember that I was in the middle of my daily practice of mouna – observing an hour of silence. My business had collapsed. There was no money to even support the family. I had to deal with a lot of creditors – each of whom were driven by their urgency to recover their money that was stuck with me/in our business. So, each one employed a different method to force me and my business to pay up. A common approach many used was to accuse me of being a cheat. It was humiliating at one level and very, very painful at another. Soon the perception that I may be faking a financial crisis spread to my own family. And when I was called a cheat among people with whom I shared a blood relation, I was devastated. That was when I came by Jiddu Krishmamurthi’s quote. I read it a few times that morning. Then it struck me that if one had to ‘rise’ above judging oneself, in order to stay anchored and peaceful, what purpose did it serve to worry about others’ opinions of you? In a flash I awakened to the pointlessness of it all.

Ever since, I have let my awareness build a protective shield around me. People still opinionate about me, my actions and my Life. These opinions come flying at me. But they bounce off my awareness – unable to touch me or affect me.

A few weeks back, a close friend, called me a ‘coward’. He called me a ‘coward’ because I was not willing to debate a point of view with him. He shared this opinion of me over facebook chat with me. I simply pasted a smiley emoticon as my reply to his unsolicited opinion. I am not sure what he made out of my benign response. It doesn’t matter to me at all though. But another mutual friend, who heard of this other friend’s effort to “chat” me up, called me and asked me not to take the latter’s actions seriously. This is what I told that friend: “Choosing not to enjoin in a pointless debate is not cowardice.” I was only expressing myself. But my caller friend summed it up brilliantly: “As long as we are sure of what we are doing and are at peace with ourselves, it shouldn’t really matter how people perceive us.”

That is so true. And that’s all there is to it! Let people keep judging and opinionating. If their opinions are constructive, take them on board. If they are aimed at only causing you insult and injury – beware! You can’t stop them from coming at you. But you can well choose to ignore them! An opinion that you don’t allow to affect you is nothing but a harmless heap of words. You give that heap the stature of an insult and the power to injure you by taking it seriously!

The crippling BOGO Offer – Self-pity and Suffering!

Self-pity can cripple and suffocate you unless you are mindful and aware.

We all love to pity ourselves for our conditions and plights. First, let’s accept it, pitying yourself is so, so comfortable. Because to be depressed, to moan and to dwell on what is not is so convenient. Say someone is rude to you, hurts you, then all you need to do is to have that sullen look on your face. And the whole world will come and pamper you, will cajole you, give you all the attention that your ego demands. And you, like the famous McDonald’s line – ‘I’m lovin’ it!’ – will love all that attention. Suppose you get over your hurt, your pain, people will soon stop referring to it. Your ego will then lose its sense of importance. So, your ego will force you to cling on to this debilitating emotion of pitying youself, because it wants to control you. Once in your ego’s stranglehold your suffering is complete.

But while you may wallow in self-pity, know that no change can happen unless you break free from that state. You cannot be pitying yourself, resultantly, take no action about what’s causing you pain, and expect to be free from your misery. Self-pity and suffering come as a BOGO offer – Buy One, Get One Free!!!

Look at yourself. Look around you. You will find so many people living miserable lives, only because they simply love pitying themselves. Poor things, they don’t understand their pain. Pain really is a cosmic wake-up call. It is a call for you to be alert. What happens, for instance, when you jam your fingers in your car door (ouch!!!) – don’t you instantaneously become alert? Until that moment you were not bothered. Driving, speaking on the phone, losing yourself to music, you were not even aware you were in your car. But the moment the fingers got jammed, you were shaken out of your stupor. You became alert. Now you can use that wake-up call and snap out of your reverie or you can choose to stay aloof, writhing in pain and then lament about how everything’s wrong in your Life. If you lament, you will be stuck in the door of your car – metaphorically. And the physical pain will translate into considerable anguish and suffering. But if you heed the wake-up call, become alert, vigilant and choose to move on, your pain may be there, but you will break-free, unstuck. This applies to every situation in Life.

The truth about Life is this: Self-pity is comforting but crippling. Awareness is liberating. When you keep on pitying yourself, you keep prolonging your suffering. When you stop pitying yourself, you not only end your misery, you make progress!

No point in ‘DISLIKING’ anything in Life

A friend lost her close friend. And she shared her grief on facebook as a status message. 15 people ‘liked’ her status in a matter of seconds. People ‘liking’ someone’s grief? Doesn’t it seem odd? But when I thought about it deeply, I saw that facebook for all its quirks teaches us something very spiritual. By not allowing a Dislike button it forces us to (only) Like a status. If you examine the absence of the Dislike feature on facebook closely, you will find that many people end up clicking Like on their friends’ tragic statuses. This has often led to arguments on facebook that people are must rein in their sadistic instincts.

                                                        

But I see this slightly differently. Not so much in the context of a facebook Like, but in the context of Life itself. Even when terrible things happen to us, truly, we don’t have any other option than to accept it – and to move on! Indeed, we may not like the situation. But we have to live with it. So, in effect, we might as well like it. Because if we dislike it – and so wish that the situation did not exist – we are inviting misery into our Life!

The message here is simple: Happiness is wanting what you get! Or liking whatever happens to you – being in total acceptance. You may want to change the situation. No harm with that thinking. But make your plans and attempt the changes while accepting your current reality and while moving forward peacefully, happily. Disliking or hating a situation is not going to make a situation better. To be sure, nor is liking it going to change it immediately. But when you proceed with acceptance and joy, any journey becomes worthwhile – however arduous it may be!

A few villains cannot ruin your Life's script

It takes all kinds of people to make this world. Some of them will make your Life miserable causing you untold agony and suffering. It is natural to obsess with them thinking about why they do what they do, how to get back at them or how to get out of their stranglehold.

Sometimes, it may be friend. Or a colleague or boss. Or a family member. Even a spouse, child, parent or sibling. Or perhaps a neighbor. In each of our stories there will be, if you are lucky, one, or otherwise, a few villains. What may start off as a single instance of poor behavior by someone will slowly assume the tone and tenor of harassment. Pretty soon, unless you do something about it quickly, you will graduate from shock to suffering.

So, the question is, how do you deal with such people?

• Take them head on: When you must speak up, please speak up. Establish the contours of your relationship. Or revisit them if the relationship is an old one. Say what you must say without fear or favor. What is it that you want to protect when you cannot get along with this person anymore in any case? This is not an advice to make the conversation acrimonious or convert it into a fist fight. Focus on the issue that you disagree with __ which at most times will be about how you are being treated __ and don’t necessarily focus on the person. So, don’t return hits below-the-belt with more hits below-the-belt. Instead, be firm __ with reason, with respect and refuse to accept what’s not acceptable per your view. Difficult conversations are difficult only till such time that you have not had them. The moment you have the conversation, it stops being difficult to have. It actually makes things better. It may not resolve a conflict, but it makes both parties feel infinitely better! Please know that there is no easy way out here. If you fear the consequences of speaking up, please remember then that you must forfeit your right to grieve over the person, subject or relationship. You can’t not want to speak up and still want the situation or relationship fixed.

• Send them positive energy: Yes! Send the person in question positive energy. And give her or him all your understanding. Remember that if someone is behaving with you in an unreasonable and often despicable manner, then that person may actually be suffering a lot within herself or himself. That person’s attitude to you is actually a projection of intense inner agony. Forgive the person if you can. But if you can’t get up to forgiveness, at least, send all your positive energy that person’s way! Put yourself in that person’s shoes and see the situation from her or his point of view. If someone is so prejudiced to give you a hard time, and you surely know yourself the best, then imagine how convoluted that person’s thinking must be at the moment? Such thinking needs positive energy to heal. Give of it freely!

• Stop obsessing over them: For every villain in your Life, there are at least 9 other great souls who make it beautiful. But you miss the majority completely! Your mind’s tendency to obsess with people who don’t care for you__because if they did, you wouldn’t be experiencing them this way!__is ironical. In fact, it is cruel! Look at your Life. So many others make your each day happen with their compassion, their patience and their understanding. Yet you don’t even as much as want to thank them for being there for you. Instead you want to spend all your time grieving over those who have been unkind, unfair, unjust and unavailable to you, when you needed them most? Isn’t that weird? So, focus on the angels in your Life than obsessing over the demons!

Importantly, how you look at people in your Life, counts for who makes up your world. Your experiences perhaps with a handful of people, in your Life’s context, may have colored your view of that world and your fellow inhabitants. Here’s a little secret though: if you actually can get into the minds of all the people you know, a great majority of them__this is shocking but true__are not just not thinking ill of you, they are actually not even thinking about you! So, stop giving your detractors so much importance and stop giving their machinations any attention. Celebrate instead those who make a difference to your Life every day. Remember, a few villains cannot ruin your Life’s script, especially when it has a multi-star cast of good souls in it!

Understand sadness to find bliss

Nobody likes being sad. We all hate it. So, the more we hate it, the more it haunts us. Yet as much as we hate it, we find a strange comfort in being sad.

Face it. It is easier being sad than being happy. Happiness requires a lot of work __ a lot of overcoming is to be done. Whereas sadness comes naturally. Every time something doesn’t go to plan, all you have to do is to be grumpy, feel sad and brood.

You may want to consider a different perspective though: the moment you understand sadness, you will find bliss! It is as simple as it sounds. But getting there, understanding, isn’t easy.

You feel sad when what you want isn’t there. But since sadness isn’t your natural state (in fact, happiness is!), your entire being resists your being sad. The mind feeds on misery. So, it tells you to fight sadness. It selfishly urges to fight for something which isn’t there, which is causing your sadness. The mind wants you to be sad because it needs fodder. It needs you to be sad for it to thrive! Think about it. When you are happy, you are actually mindless. Which is why, when someone is in a state of rapturous delight, we believe he or she has gone crazy, or has ‘lost his or her mind’. True happiness, bliss, is a state of ‘mindlessness’. So, if you are sad, it means your mind is in control. On the contrary, you can be happy only when you are in control of your mind! Understand that you cannot overcome your sadness by fighting it. You can overcome it only by tricking your mind. So, when you are sad, don’t resist it in future. Accept it. Accept the condition which is causing it too. In acceptance, there is no resistance. What you don’t resist, does not persist. So your sadness, through acceptance, transforms into a new, peaceful state of being. That state, simply, is your bliss.

Yesterday, we received a mail from a family friend who had lost her husband to lung cancer barely a week ago. She thanked us all for our prayers and offered to be at a memorial service that some of us were organizing later this week. In her mail, she wrote: “Thank you very much for helping me to keep everyone updated all through his illness and I know it is with great sadness but unanimous relief that he is finally at peace. I am still in limbo! Every morning I decide to ‘tidy up’ some of the things lying around, the nebulizer, all the tubes and masks, medicines boxes, cotton wool....still haven’t succeeded. I see his toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom and I feel if I remove it from there it’s like trying to wipe out memories.... so I don’t! I wish words like ‘dust to dust and ashes to ashes’ didn’t represent the finality of death  so accurately....”     

This is what acceptance of your sadness is all about. In this friend’s case, it was the death of a companion. In someone else’s case it could be a separation. Or a pink slip. Or, as my daughter shared an inspirational story of her senior at college this morning, the loss of mobility, and a semester, owing to a ghastly accident. Whatever be the causes for our sadness, unless we come to terms with it, both the cause and the effect, we cannot move on, we cannot overcome. But the moment we accept, we will encounter inner peace and be (in) bliss.

As the legendary Sahir Ludhianvi (1921~1980) memorably wrote for Guru Dutt’s all-time classic ‘Pyaasa’ (Thirsty, 1957), in the song, ‘Jaane Woh Kaise Log Thay Jinko…’, “….gham se ab ghabraana kya…gham sau baar mila…” The lyrics mean, “what’s the point in worrying about sadness and sorrow…we keep getting them (again and again) so many hundred times (in Life) in any case…”. Be clear and get this straight! The number of times your expectations will not be met in this lifetime will far outnumber the times they will be. So, theoretically, you will end up being sad, than happy, for much longer in your Life than you can possibly imagine. Do you really want to spend the rest of your Life being sad and sorrowful for circumstances that, well, are beyond your control? Isn’t it, therefore, better you embrace this simple, practical way to bliss?

Make peace with what saddens you today. And through understanding your sadness, find your bliss!