Happiness Curator, Inspired Speaker, Life Coach and Author: Inspiring Happiness, Sharing Life Lessons from Lived Experiences!
Today’s Vlog flows from this question that I was asked recently: “Do you believe in God?” And I talk about about why it is relevant to celebrate the Godliness in us – by being Grateful for the Gift of Life! This understanding is key to achieving our Goals!
Viewing time: 3:00 minutes
A lady called me frantically the other day. She was upset that her husband, who has not spoken to her mother over the last eight years, expected her (his wife) to look after his mother! She conceded that she didn’t see any value in having an honest conversation with her spouse. Even so, she was keen to understand how she can learn the art of being happy while living without expectations.
The lady’s quest is in the right direction. She has nailed her focus. What is the point in trying to change others if you believe they won’t heed the voice of reason? Instead, why not transform yourself? And if anyone can truly learn to be happy, living without expectations, and despite the circumstances, they would certainly have learned the art of intelligent living. For this to happen, essentially, one needs to train and tame the mind. You must learn to simply still the mind, you must learn to just be.
Just being may sound and appear to be difficult. But it is not.
In Zen Buddhist practice, there’s this concept called zazen. It invites the seeker to simply sit, “opening the hand of thought” – which means to drop all judgment and let words, actions, events just unfold, just flow. This means assuming the role of a witness of one’s own Life. In that witness state, you always see the futility of clinging on to emotions, things, opinions and relationships. As a witness you just are – you are not observing, you are not engaging, you simply are. Just being brings phenomenal clarity to you and helps you anchor within.
My advice to the lady who called me would be to embrace and practice zazen. She must learn to just be, to be a witness of her own Life and not be involved emotionally in the actions of her spouse. Learning this art of just being takes time and practice. It is like riding a bicycle for the first time – initially it appears tough and you need help, but, soon, you are on your own. And then you feel liberated!
How can I be a witness of my Life when my world is pulled at from different directions, you may wonder. Good question. But in some situations is Life, what else can you do? By trying to control the uncontrollable__Life__you are subjecting yourself to misery. Your suffering comes from this desire to control. Instead let go, you step away, be detached. The essence of detachment lies in just being. Not in controlling. Not in demanding. Not in becoming. So, just be.
Osho says it profoundly, “There is nothing to become. You are already that, it is already the case. Stop running after shadows. Sit silently and be. Sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.”
What a beautiful perspective. Step away from your Life. Let go and get some zazen into your day today!
In today’s Vlog, I point out that success and failure are mere labels that society tries to pin on to us. To be happy, we must take neither seriously!
Viewing time: 2:38 minutes
A couple of days ago, Facebook threw up a memory from 7 years ago. It was from a post on a hotel we had stayed at in 2010. The hotel in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, has a weird name – Bans! But the hotel is special to me for a different reason. This is where I learnt a very important lesson in my Life – I learnt the value of letting go and trusting the process of Life.
Here’s an excerpt from my Book, Fall Like A Rose Petal, where I share the anecdote that led to this learning.
In the summer of 2010, I was afflicted with a chronic episode of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). In my case, this auto-immune disease affects my upper back. Standing, sitting, walking, even turning on my side in bed, became a nightmare. For 45 days, I could not even stand up. In those days, an understanding client in Pune paid us a retainer even though I could not physically travel to work with their team. I conducted my meetings with them on Skype and over phone in the days that I was immobile. Thanks to this client we survived that phase.
At the end of May 2010, another client called us for a full-day workshop to Chittoor. Vaani requested the client to send us a good car because of my back condition and also forewarned the client that I may not be able deliver the full workshop on my feet. The client had worked with us in the past and was considerate enough to allow me to sit down and conduct the workshop. In great pain, thanks to the poor condition of the roads, I arrived in Chittoor with Vaani on Tuesday, June 1, 2010.
I woke up with acute pain at 3 AM the next morning. I struggled through preparing for the workshop and my bath. At 9.30 AM, I took 30 minutes to walk to the banquet hall of the hotel where we were staying, a distance of hardly a hundred feet from our room, where my session was to be held!
80 managers and senior executives awaited me in the banquet hall. After our client’s Human Resources Head introduced me, I rose with much difficulty, and in great pain, to conduct my workshop. I am a high-energy workshop leader who likes to pump up the audience, provoke their thinking and bring them alive! Despite writhing in pain, I was sure I had to do it again that day. I started cautiously but as the day wore on, I just let go. Barring a 30-minute lunch break, I stood all through the eight hours leading and delivering one of the most transformational, personally for me too, workshops I have ever conducted. To be sure, I healed during those eight hours and have not had another debilitating episode of RA in over 40 months so far!
What happened of my RA? Of my 45-day back problem? How did I stand and deliver a workshop, moving, jumping, singing, dancing and energizing my audience, for eight hours?
The answers to all questions lie in my letting go. I just let the Universe and Life take over. Only when we let go and move on will we see newer horizons. When you let go, you are free, unfettered and are ready to go where you want to and where nobody ever has gone before! Our true work is living, and travelling the journey of Life, moving on and on!
All of us like to believe that we are in control of our lives. That we make our own destinies. We become self-centred and begin to see everything only from one point of view. But Life doesn’t work like that. It has a mind of its own. Always remember, you are made to go through each experience for a reason. When things don’t go your way, you get angry and frustrated. In some time, after much kicking around, you will realize that fighting and resisting Life is futile. Instead, isn’t it far simpler to just let go? And take each day as it comes, accepting Life for what it is?
People often tell me and Vaani that they find it difficult to let go. We believe that letting go is difficult only when you consider it as one of the options in front of you. What if letting go was not an option but an imperative? I have found, repeatedly, Life placing us in contexts where letting go is not an option for us but is the only way forward.
For instance, even as I write this, we are faced with a fresh twist to our tale, yet another inscrutable situation that leaves Vaani and me clueless. That sense of cluelessness gnawing at you from within can be very, very debilitating. As long as I held on to that sense of cluelessness and attempted to look for ways and means to resolve the situation, it made it difficult for me to create value. But yesterday, I decided to, yet again, simply let go. I took my mind off the problem we are confronted with and wrote one more chapter of my next Book, The Happiness Road. I healed through my immersion in my writing. This morning, I am writing this Blogpost. And I am feeling truly liberated.
Letting go and immersing yourself in what you love doing is not inaction, it is not resignation. It is the most sensible thing to do. It involves trusting the process of Life and helps you to be non-frustrated when your efforts don’t yield the results you want and/or when you clearly don’t know what to do.
A young man came to meet me some days ago. He confessed that he has low self-esteem. And that, he said, was forcing him to be tentative in almost all situations. Often this tentativeness was translating into insecurity and fear. He wanted to know how he could be more confident of himself.
The only way to be confident of yourself is to not bother about what people have to say. Simple. If there’s something you have to do, go do it. When you do something, when you present yourself to the world, naturally, there will be several opinions that will be thrown up about you and what you have to say or do. If you fear those opinions, you will be tentative, therefore, you will lack confidence. Over time, this tentativeness will cripple you. You will become phobic – not wanting to express yourself freely and fearing judgment all the time.
The way to deal with such a situation is to first understand Life. The fact is that you are created special – you are gifted and talented in your own unique way. And this lifetime is really an opportunity to express that talent. When you don’t express yourself freely, you are not living fully. You are living an incomplete Life. This incompleteness, this lack of fulfilment is what manifests itself as a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. Some people, like the young man I met, are acutely aware of this state; most people blunder along not knowing they are even living incomplete lives.
The way to regain self-confidence is to go do what gives you joy! Only doing what you love doing, only expressing yourself fully, freely, without inhibitions, can give you joy. And when you are truly happy, from within, then you are really not concerned about what people have to say about you. So, in essence, self-confidence lies in just being who you are. When you are the way you love being, without a care about what people think or people say, you can only be happy, you can only be confident.
Have you heard the birds sing? They sing without a care about whether anyone hears them sing or what they think. They sing because they want to sing. They sing to express themselves. The birds don’t have a self-esteem or self-confidence problem. Surely, we humans can learn from those humble birds?
Or, without appearing to trivialize the discourse, if you want to learn from another human, learn from Trump. When he tweeted ‘covfefe’, he surely didn’t bother about public opinion. He simply expressed himself. He still doesn’t care what people think of him and the word he invented! Perhaps, ‘inventing your covfefe’ can be a metaphor for being yourself and being confident!?
In today’s Podcast, I champion why we must celebrate being clueless, unsettled and living dangerously! Listen here: 5:43 minutes
There’s an interesting story behind the title of my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal. I share that story on my Vlog here. Viewing time: 6:55 minutes
