Life's an amazing paradox. When you
fill yourself you feel an eerie emptiness. And when you empty yourself you feel
a joyful fullness!
Think about your Life deeply. What are you
filling it with? The more you fill yourself with fear, guilt, grief, ego,
anxiety, greed and desires, the more empty you feel. You can’t just escape the
emptiness. You may call it by any name: mid-life crisis, not enjoying your job,
unhappy with your partner, feel lost with how to raise your children, whatever.
But you do feel empty. The irony, however, is that to rid yourself of this
emptiness, all you need to do is to empty yourself. When you empty yourself of all
wasteful emotions, like those listed above, or many more, you are emptying
yourself of your self. This is when you are enriched, filled with love and are
full of peace. This fullness is what is called bliss. Emptying yourself of your
self means to get rid of the ‘I’!
Several years ago, when my business started
going horribly wrong, I sat in my hotel room in Bengaluru and shared my worries
with a good friend, Deepak Pawar, a highly acclaimed media photographer in
India. He’s much older to me and I have always valued his perspective. What was
causing me immense grief was the way my team was behaving with me. There were
resignations, a case of embezzlement and even blackmail from a colleague who
threatened to share company data with competition if his salary was not paid.
This was tragic for me. We had not only given this gentleman employment but had
also supported his MBA program and his coaching in spoken English. As I shared
my woes, describing my Life as being ‘empty, meaningless and thankless’, with Deepak,
he said, “For your Life to be full and meaningful, you must shed yourself of
your ego AVIS.” I was devastated by his remark. I shot back: “Sorry Sir, with
due respect to you, I disagree. You are saying I have an ego. I don’t. I have
worked hard to grow my business and I have done so with humility. My team is
family to me. This colleague of mine who is today threatening me, I have
groomed him. I have trained him. I have educated him. I have always sat with
him and guided him on how to plan his career professionally. I have done so
much for him and you are saying…” Deepak cut me short. He smiled and said,
“Just see the number of times you have said ‘I’ in your defense just now
AVIS….That ‘I’…that’s your ego speaking….that guy, the ‘I’ in you…you must empty
yourself of that ‘I’…and you will find meaning and a Life full of peace and
happiness!”
To me that moment, that nano-second, was
the ‘CTRL+ALT+DEL’ moment of my Life. With that enlightening perspective,
Deepak opened my eyes, helping me see clearly, why there was so much emptiness
in my Life. Osho’s masterly perspective on this too helped me immensely:
“Emptying oneself means emptying of all content – just as you empty a room of
all the junk that has gathered there, over the years. When you have emptied the
room of all the furniture and all the things, you have not destroyed the room,
not at all; you have given it more roominess, more space. When all the
furniture is gone, the room asserts itself, the room is.” What’s interesting
is, as I discovered, when the ‘I’ goes out of you, all the parasites that
thrive on it, off it__fear, guilt, grief, anxiety, greed and desires__run after
it too. The feeling you get with emptying yourself, and
therefore filling your Life with abundance and bliss, is truly liberating. It
has to be experienced to be understood. It has to be lived!
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