Be willing. Be thirsty. Your teacher too will appear!

 Anyone can be your teacher. Or, simply, you can learn from anyone in Life provided you are “willing and thirsty”.

Several years ago, when I was frustrated with the losses in my business, and was particularly agitated over a client's refusal to pay us a large sum of money that they owed us, I sank heavily into the chair at my favorite hair dresser's. Those were times when I had a shock of hair adorning my head that need frequent tending. Ramalingam, my hair dresser, taught me a lesson that afternoon, almost intuitively without my even asking for him. “You look disturbed. Life’s success lies not in how much money we earn. But is in being able to live in this world and yet be above it.” He went on to substantiate this lesson with profound story-telling, sharing nuggets of wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita and from some Puranic tales.

Ramalingam: My Teacher

I have become Ramalingam's humble student over the years even as he has remained my favorite hair dresser. I don't have much hair left on my head anymore, but I still go to Ramalingam every once in a while. He has lost his son to a hit-and-run accident and says he still remembers the boy passing away in his arms on the road. He leads a simple Life__anchored in prayer, doing great quality work and sharing his experiences enlightening others. He talks to me each time on a different dimension of Life offering a learning which no textbook can teach.

On a recent visit, I asked him what does he think when he is working. It must be a monotonous job, I reasoned, to cut people’s hair. Ramalingam replied, “I don't think of anything else when I am cutting hair. When I cut, I cut. When I am talking to a guest, who chats me up, while cutting his hair, I am talking. When I share a philosophy, I just share. Thinking spoils the doing.” I asked him once, with his experience, didn’t he want to set up shop of his own instead of being an employee at a branded salon? He replied with astonishing wisdom: “We must not just work towards being the best in the world Sir, we must work towards being best for the world. I believe I am best for the world I live and work in. That gives me immense pride and joy.”

There’s a Buddhist proverb that says, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Be willing. Be thirsty. Your teacher too will appear! And hold your hand to walk alongside you to help you to be the best for your world!

Don’t kill beautiful minds with poor parenting and poorer leadership

Don’t restrict your child’s natural curiosity to explore the world. Be an empowering parent – let go and watch your child grow!

A friend of mine from my college days reached out to me. He lives in Mangalore. He wanted me to “inspire some confidence” into his young, 16-year-old son. We met for coffee last evening. I found the boy to be very cheerful, very positive and extremely clear about what he wanted to do. He said he loved science – all three subjects, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. He aspired to study medicine (when he finished his 12^th/Junior College in Mangalore) at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune. He wanted to be a doctor and wanted to continue sketching (his hobby) all his Life. Now, what do you tell a child who’s got all his plans mapped out? I told him this: “Be curious always. Never settle into a comfort zone. Keep seeking, keep learning, keep enquiring. Nobody can motivate you. Motivation is an inside job. Whenever you feel distracted, think of what will happen to your long-term goals. Understand that distraction is not a sin. It will only delay your journey to your dreams and goals. When you refocus on your goals, you will let go of all that which distracts you.” The young lad smiled back at me. He appeared to have understood what I had to say.

“Are you on facebook,” I asked him.

“No,” he replied sheepishly, while looking at his dad questioningly.

My friend piped in: “His (Junior) College principal has made him sign an undertaking, an oath actually, saying for the next two years he will not get on to facebook or use a mobile phone – neither at College nor at home. The principal wants to ensure that his College’s success rate to get students into premier “professional courses” is never diluted. And I support the principal’s stand wholesomely.”

I disagreed with my friend. I said that both facebook and mobile phones are enablers. They are both tools, a way of engaging with the world, I suggested. But my friend cut me short. He was clear his son should not be “corrupted” with a view that “encouraged being on facebook”. I decided not to force my view. That ended my conversation with the young chap; for the rest of the evening, my friend and I went on to talk about our lives and times…

On my auto-rickshaw ride back home from the cafe, I reflected on the myopic perspective that both parents and teachers have that inhibits the natural curiosity that children have. In today’s world, when there is so much information available on fingertips, why would anybody want to deny their children access to that information? Yes, the internet can lead you to porn sites as much as it can lead you to wikis on various subjects. Being on facebook can connect you to friends and family who share experiences and learnings that can enable you to gain an insight into how the world thrives. Yes, you can end up adding avoidable people as friends on facebook if you are not prudent. But I feel a parent’s job is to help children develop this discerning point of view. Empowering with choice, while explaining consequences, is much better than restricting children from doing things that they will be naturally curious to do. This whole view that facebook and mobile phones will corrupt a child and ruin his or her Life is reflective of the parent’s/teacher’s poor quality of thought. In my humble opinion, the moment you restrain a child, you are planting the seed of rebellion or are encouraging the child to operate with deceit. Because, whatever you bluntly deny – without adequate logic and conviction – children will find the means, one way or the other, to access it. A better approach would be to allow the child freedom of choice, have continuous conversations and if there is an over indulgence from the child, only then take restrictive steps. To employ a blanket judgment that all children will get “distracted” from academics or that they will go “astray” if they are on facebook or if they use mobile phones is poor parenting and poorer leadership.

Another point: for heaven’s sake, let’s stop obsessing over “professional” courses, “safe” careers and “95+ percentage strikes”. What we need teachers to do is to inspire the spirit of excellence in children and not to flog them to deliver grades. What we need parents to do is to imbue good values in their children and not to make academically-proficient nerds out of them. Finally, here’s the bottom-line: This is not a case for facebook or mobile phones. This is about raising beautiful, intuitive minds. Empowering children will nurture their curiosity and creativity, restraining them will only make vegetables and rebels out of them. 

Simplify your Life: Trust only when and who you can

Each person who comes into your Life is a teacher.

Everyone is teaching you through not just what they know, but through their behavior. Some people teach you why you must never trust them. They have taught you this by repeatedly refusing to live up to the trust you placed in them. Eventually, you may have reached a point when you would have said that you can’t trust this person anymore. And yet you would have given this person one more chance. When your trust was betrayed one more time, you move from the can’t-trust to the must-never-trust zone. Please know, there is nothing wrong with you if you come to this conclusion. And there is nothing inhuman about this stance. To trust humankind and Life is indeed the best way to live. But to have your self-esteem trampled upon__that’s precisely what happens when your trust is betrayed__is foolishness. Remember if that person is a teacher, just as each person in your Life is, then you are being a bad student if you are not learning from your teacher! You don’t have to hate the person though. Just don’t trust.

When you don’t trust, there can be no relationship. You can still know the other person and not be in a relationship. Now, even if this is a parent, sibling, child, or spouse, it is imminently possible to stay this way. Because at the end of the day, the person is not trustworthy. And the person has taught you, given the empirical evidence you may have gathered through repeated patterns of behavior, that she or he is not trustworthy. Additionally, let me tell you, from my own experience, that it is also fine to let the other know that you don’t trust him or her.

So, please simplify your Life. If you have been let down repeatedly, know that you have a right to choose not to trust someone anymore. Exercise that right. Live your Life in peace and not in grief. Yet live leaving that person alone. Don’t fight. Don’t provoke. Just live and let live! 

What an FM station producer taught me about compassion!

Among all the qualities that we human beings have – and are capable of invoking – the most precious one is compassion. When we are compassionate, we are truly human!

This morning I was on a live FM radio show. I was invited to share my views, and answers questions from listeners/callers, on “What do you do when you hit rock bottom in Life?” The FM station had set up this show around the enduring theme of my Book – “Fall Like A Rose Petal – A father’s lessons on how to be happy and content while living without money” (Westland, August 2014). One of the questions I was asked by a caller was how do you take decisions when you are in an end-of-the-road situation. I replied saying, there can’t possibly be too much strategic thinking when you are surrounded by darkness and you don’t know where you are going; and when you don’t even know if there is a way ahead. You simply keep doing what you must do. I cited the example of having to take an auto-rickshaw to the FM station’s studio this morning. I had barely a few hundred rupees left with me in Life and the auto-rickshaw driver was unreasonable and demanded I pay him fifty rupees more. I did. And I did it without anger, without exasperation and without anxiety (over the fact that I was going to be poorer by Rs.50 when I had only a few hundreds left with me in Life!). I said I simply did what I had to do. Period. One of the producers at the FM station was riding into work when my show was on air. She was apparently listening into my show while riding. She reached the station just as I was leaving the premises (I had almost boarded an auto to take me back home). But she came running down the parkway, calling out my name. When I asked her what she wanted, she requested me if I could spare five more minutes. I agreed, feeling a bit lost though. She took me back into the FM station’s office and said: “AVIS, I heard your entire show. I want to pray for you and your family. I don’t know what your faith is and how you pray, but I have to pray for you.” As I looked on, surprised, overwhelmed and humbled, she asked me, “May I?” I said that she may. She then closed her eyes and for the next five minutes she sought, what she firmly believed to be, a divine intervention to solve my family’s ongoing financial crisis. Her prayer had a healing energy. All of what she said was in English. And her words made great sense to me, they touched my soul and empowered me to believe – not in the power of prayer or religion – but in the power of compassion and the power we all have of being human. Both she and I had moist eyes at the end of her benevolent prayer. I shook hands with her, thanked and left the FM station one more time – thoroughly recharged and re-energized.

All of us are capable of compassion for all of humanity. All our energies can heal the worst of situations that we see around us. But we are so busy running our rat races, earning-a-living, fighting battles with imaginary situations that we conjure up in our minds, that we are simply not pausing to see how people around us are coping with their lives. Often, when we see them closely, we will realize that there are so many people out there who are stronger through their grave Life situations than we are through our petty scenarios. To be compassionate is to be able to see and think of someone, other than you, feel their pain and help them with your prayer and energy.

My enduring penniless, work-less situation has helped me understand Life and religion better. To me now, there is no greater God than a fellow human being and there’s no greater teacher than Life. When a fellow human being – like this producer who hardly knows me or who I hardly know – takes time to send me and my family healing, positive energy, I realize that we are indeed blessed. And she – this FM station’s producer – is not the only one. Barring my immediate family – who, for their own reasons, continue to imagine that my wife and I have cheated them – everyone I know of has always been compassionate with us and patient with our situation. This is the biggest asset we have – that we are drenched in the love of fellow human beings and all their compassion that carries us onward every single day.

If you can, and would like to, please invoke the compassion within you. And unlock its potential. Pause and reflect on the fellow voyagers through Life that are around you. Give them your love, your understanding and send them your prayers and your positive energy. Watch them heal and watch yourself feeling blessed!

Your pain is your teacher, your God

Pain is an important, necessary and sufficient pre-condition for your personal evolution. Don’t, therefore, hate any pain that you are put through.

Sometimes people around you put you through pain. A normal reaction would be to hate them. You may want to get even with them. Don’t. Oftentimes Life too will inflict pain on you. Don’t hate Life either! Because your hating Life is only going to make you miserable. What is the point? Who loses when you hate a teacher? Does the teacher lose anything? Or do you? Ultimately, if you don’t learn the lessons that the teacher is teaching you, you lose. Similarly, each painful event, caused by a fellow human being or by Life, is teaching you something. Don’t hate the teacher. Instead, learn the lesson and be grateful for the experience that taught you the lesson.

When you hate someone or hate Life, you are entrapping yourself in a quagmire of negative, debilitating emotions: anger, fear, bitterness, cynicism, self-pity. No event in your Life is going to make a difference to you as your Life comes to an end. Your awards, medals, successes, wealth, the career you built, all this and more will mean nothing. Your lost fortunes, the number of times you have been betrayed or let down, your lost health, your lost image – none of these will matter in the end either. When this lifetime is over, only your soul will prevail. And the soul thrives only when you are at peace. The more pain you undergo, in an accepting, non-resisting way, the more peaceful you will be. Peace is the grace that arrives when pain strikes you and you accept the pain. Most often, however, when pain strikes you, you recede into a shell, plunged in grief, letting the pain numb you. As long as you remain in the stranglehold of pain, you will feel debilitated. The moment you understand, accept and appreciate that pain is a great teacher, you will learn and you will grow. You will realize that you can live through pain, without suffering from it. You will find the world to be a beautiful place where you can be happy despite your circumstances.

You may sometimes wonder where is God when you are in pain? The truth is your pain is your God. Because the pain is in your Life to teach you the value of Life, the value of grace and the opportunity for your soul to grow into peace. What more do you want from your God anyway?

Pain is a great teacher, not a tormentor!

Pain is not Life’s way to torture you. Pain is not a tormentor. Pain does not cause you any suffering in itself. Your response to pain is what makes you suffer. By itself pain has an awakening tendency to it. When you accept it, you will awaken and not suffer. When you reject it, resist it, you will feel tortured and will wallow in grief.

To be sure, as human beings, all of us have an equal and natural ability to withstand any amount of pain. It is in acceptance that our levels vary and, therefore, so does, inversely, our suffering.

I recently heard the story of a lady__someone we know__who married a second time. It was a second marriage for both parties concerned. The lady has a daughter from her first marriage. Unfortunately, this second marriage too didn’t work well for the lady. She has been abused and victimized by her husband. They don’t live in India and this makes matters daunting because there are several legal implications of a separation and settlement. But she fights on resolutely for her rights as a wife, and for those of daughter’s, who had been legally adopted by her husband at the time of their marriage. Her basic existence is in question and it is a daily battle for survival. But she’s stoic and inspiring. She feels that while it is still difficult for her to come to terms that for the second time around her marriage has failed, on the other hand, she realizes that only her facing up to the situation can help her walk out and free with her honor and her settlement intact. She seemed to me to be someone who is undoubtedly in enormous pain but who may not be suffering anymore. And that, I believe, may be because she’s not resisting her pain, but may have accepted it!

Pain is a great teacher. A brilliant coach. When pain affects us, physically or emotionally, it shocks us out of our comfort zone. It shakes us awake from our stupor. Without a wakeup call, there will be no awakening. So, we must be grateful to pain than hating it. The other day I accidentally drank some hot soup. It was very, very hot. Because the first contact I made with it, scalded my lips and tongue, I put the soup down to cool before I had the rest of it. The first contact, the shock, reported to me that it was hot. Yes the scalding was painful. But the pain, the shock, made alert. It made me focus on the temperature of the soup for as long as I drank it. This is how pain works. It alerts you. Alertness means mindfulness. It means awakening and awareness. The awareness you get through pain, when you accept it, and not resist it, transforms your entire being. It cleanses you. And makes you understand the true nature of Life.

When everything is going fine, when you keep getting all that you want, you do settle into a comfort zone. The comfort zone spawns ruinous habits at times or makes you develop an ego, makes you arrogant perhaps or simply makes you a laggard, a dullard. But in a comfortable scenario, if pain is introduced__maybe someone dies or you lose your job or someone betrays your trust or your health suffers a serious setback__you wake up with a start! You begin to examine your Life closely. If you ask “why me?” and grieve, the pain will continue to haunt and torture you. But if you accept the pain, and ask “what can I learn from the moment”, from the experience, the pain may still be there but your ability to deal with it goes up phenomenally.

Look at your own Life. Haven’t you already withstood an unbelieveable amount of pain? Perhaps you have suffered a lot of it too. It may also be possible that you currently are going through a painful phase that’s testing your tolerance limits beyond your own imagination. If that were indeed so, stop looking at pain as a tormentor. Accept it instead as a teacher. And watch your suffering immediately disappear even as you learn from your painful situation! Remember pain comes into your Life only to awaken you, not to cause you any suffering. When you are awake, when you are aware, the suffering always disappears.

There’s a Celestine conspiracy to make you better, stronger and wiser!

Everything that’s happened to you, is happening to you and will happen to you is part of a Celestine conspiracy. A Master Plan, if you will. And it has NO flaws.

We label events as good or bad based on expectations, assumptions and conditionings we have. If someone we know dies, we believe it is a bad, a terrible, thing to have happened. If someone is born, we believe it is a good, a great, thing to happen. But in reality, nothing’s good or bad. Almost everything is going to a plan __ and that plan is to make you, make me, make all of us, stronger, better and wiser through this journey called Life.

The house where Ramana Maharishi was born in 1879

About nine years ago, even as I was grappling with finding inner peace, I started the practice of ‘mouna’. Of practicing silence periods. It was a struggle. The practice required me to be silent __ and not strive to work on making the environment around me silent. After almost eight weeks of intense trial and error, I completed my first 21-day cycle of observing an hour of silence each day. The next morning, I had to take an early flight to Madurai for making a day-trip to a place called Tiruchuli, that I had never heard of. I had no knowledge then of why Tiruchuli was significant historically nor did I have an inkling of the profound impact it would have on my Life. I arrived at Madurai and my cabbie drove me up to Tiruchuli in about an hour. I found Tiruchuli deserted at 8.30 AM in the morning and it looked every bit a one horse town. My meeting here was not due to start until 11 AM and so I asked the cabbie suggestions for ‘killing time’. I asked him this more out of making polite, aimless banter and not out of any serious intent. He, however, responded enthusiastically. He declared that Tiruchuli was the birthplace of Ramana Maharishi (1879~1950), the revered 20^th Century saint from South India. This came as a pleasant shock to me. I had heard of Ramana Maharishi. I did not worship or idolize him as many did. But I thought it only sensible to invest the couple of hours I had free, to kill, on me, to “look up” sites of historical importance. The cabbie took me to the house where Ramana grew up and to the ancient Siva temple where Ramana occasionally mediated in the years preceding his move to Tiruvannamalai where he eventually set up the famous Ramana Ashram. Like at any heritage site in India, worn out boards told the story of Ramana Maharishi and his connection with this place__of his birth and early years. My two hours were spent even without my realizing it. I even spent quality time practicing ‘mouna’ at Ramana’s house! As I got ready to leave for my meeting, and got into the car, a man rushed out from Ramana’s house. I recognized him as the caretaker. He thrust in my hand a badly produced pamphlet extolling the Life and times of Ramana Maharishi on one side. A quote on the other side read:

“Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.”
― Ramana Maharishi

I must have lost that pamphlet somewhere on the flight back to Chennai that day. But the learning from that message I continue to carry even now. I needed that lesson perhaps very badly that day. My Life was heading into a dark abyss then. I had leaned on to ‘mouna’ hoping to find solace. After some strife I had made its practice a habit. And here was a cosmic sign, through a “messenger” of one of the greatest seers the modern world had known, that I was on the right track! I didn’t immediately realize the import of the experience I had been through that day. I do realize it completely now. My problems have not been resolved as yet. I find my Life in the same abyss and it continues to be very, very dark. But I have no fear, no anxiety, no guilt. Because I have learned to live in acceptance. And have learned to remain silent__especially in times of extreme provocation and intense turmoil!

This makes me believe that there is a Celestine conspiracy that is working overtime__pushing us, nudging us, elbowing us, often to our chagrin, towards our destinies. This makes me believe too that when the student is ready, the teacher, always, does appear!

What the jackfruit tree taught me

The human mind is so fickle. It simply does not trust. I am sure this has happened to you too. That when you are beaten in Life, cannot go on any more and feel defeated, you often wonder why are you treated this way by Life? You wish at such times that Life was more understanding, compassionate and intelligent! You are suddenly aware of your mere, mortal, human nature and wonder if all the pain that you are being put through can even be endured by you__any more? The truth is however just the opposite. Nobody is ever given a situation in Life that she or he cannot handle. It’s the mind that says it can’t. What the mind protests, causing you untold misery and suffering, the spirit indefatigably accepts__always without protest!

Such is Life. Such is the beauty of creation.

The Teacher

There’s a jackfruit tree outside my balcony. In the last several weeks it has been bearing fruit. And is looking luscious, beautiful and inviting! Yesterday, I spent several minutes just staring at it. I noticed it held a very aesthetic charm __ a very poetic appeal! Right at my balcony’s level several fully-grown jackfruit hung. That’s when I noticed__and learned__the intricacies of how nature, how Life, created and provided. Jackfruits can grow up to 36 kg in weight. The branches and the stems that harbor fresh leaves look normal. As in they are green too and look vulnerable. They will break away from the tree even if a small weight is placed on them. But the fruit-bearing stems are strong, thick and hard. They are distinctly different from those bearing the leaves. It appeared to me that a Master Designer had taken adequate care to ensure that the heavy fruits that the tree bears are not falling off unless they are specifically plucked. In a special, masterful, way although each fruit is heavy, its stem is strong enough to hold it up.

I connected that learning to our own lives. We may not see it this way at all but our own burdens are possibly directly proportional to our ability to be able to bear them! If you sit down and reflect on your Life so far, you will discover that you have been able to eventually overcome every challenge, leap across every chasm, carry any burden or face any situation despite your initial doubts about being able to do so. Every time you have felt you had too much to do and too little time. Or each time you felt you will not be able to handle something. Or when you wished you could die than live and face a situation. Every such time, when you look back now, you will agree that you actually made it.

If you are faced with another such time, learn from the metaphor of the jackfruit tree. And remember that Life is both intelligent and benevolent. Remember also:

• You have been given a situation only because you can and must handle it.
• You have been given a burden only because you can and must carry it.
• You have been given a test only because you can and must learn from it.
• You have been given a challenge only because you can and must emerge stronger facing it.

And you have been given this Life only because you can must live it!