Tag: Scarcity

In which Nithyanand, a Buddha, teaches me to live with ‘anand’ (inner joy) ‘nithya’ (daily)!!!

When you look for things that you don’t have, you remain incomplete. When you look at what you have, including who you have in your Life, you are complete!

Nithyanand – The Buddha
Yesterday, I spent a transformational hour with a young man called Nithyanand, in his 20s, who is visually special (I hate to call him visually impaired). He lives in Korrukkupet (a Chennai suburb). He commutes every day to Express Avenue Mall, where he works at an exhibition tour company called “Dialogue in the Dark” (Google them – go check them out). Nithya, as he prefers being called, says he doesn’t have any problem when I ask him how he “manages with Life on a day-to-day basis”: “Sir, we work on getting oriented to spaces and with basing all our responses to the velocity of sound around us. I take bus # 18 and get to work pretty much without a hitch. When I do have to cross the road, I just wait for a good, helpful soul. The Universe always has such people around. There are so many good people in this world. Someone always comes by to help me.” There’s a joie de vivre about the way Nithya is. He is happy, content and peaceful with the way he is. Actually he truly, simply is. There is no self-pity. There’s no lament. In fact, there’s so much dignity with which he conducts himself – even you don’t feel pity for the young man. You come away inspired. Now, how many times will you come away inspired after meeting a rank stranger for barely an hour?

Much of our grief and suffering comes from lamenting over what we don’t have. This pushes us into a, often subconscious, depressive spiral out of which we rarely climb out. But always, when the focus shifts to what is, the result is magical. The reason why we struggle with making this shift from what isn’t to what is, is that the negative is always seductive. Its reasoning power is far more logical. The good in us rarely speaks. It merely states. It does not profess, it doesn’t argue, it doesn’t convince. Nett Nett, we succumb to the wily designs of scarcity__what we don’t have, what isn’t__thinking. This results in incompleteness. Whereas, with all our quirks, defects, chinks, blemishes, scars and handicaps, we are complete. There’s so much abundance in our lives. Such is the way we have been created. To recognize this complete state of ours, we need to be in a state of total acceptance, we need to be peaceful.

My learning from Nithyanand: when there is peace within, when there is acceptance of the Life you have, the focus will shift to what is. And then the wholesomeness of your Life will become clear to you! This the way, we__you and me__too, just like Nithya, can become a Buddha – and experience ‘anand’ (inner joy) ‘nithya’ (daily)!

Start living freely, unfettered by fear

Know this for sure: Nothing can derail the Life that’s been designed for you. Most definitely not the lack of money!
Much of our worries come from how much money we have or don’t have. Think about it! When has the lack of money stopped anything in your Life__or mine? Well, if it has denied a want, you probably did not need it. Life always provides everyone with everything they need just now. Let me clarify, money is important. But you don’t need money__especially when it is unavailable__to live happily! Besides, why are we embracing fear worrying over economic indices that feed off human greed? Every stock market operator, watcher and speculator, is responding to (and is in) greed. Every billionaire listing speaks of wealth in the hands of a few people who have the power to change the world and lives of the have-nots, but very few seldom really do or want to do anything. So, why focus on a negative influence__greed?
Another perspective. Our parents earned a fraction of what we do now. Their parents a much lesser fraction of that. And yet Life has been going on. We have all been educated by our less economically privileged parents. And, miraculously, are holding positions of influence in our own small ways. We are, in fact, managing to rear our children with more comfort than we were provided. So, why the fear? In fact, here’s a counter argument. If each of us can stop fearing the lack of money, and stop imagining that the world is coming to an end, we will be more productive than we are just now. And that may just revive and grow the economy faster__if it becomes a global trend.

So, stop thinking of what’s wrong with the world and with your Life. Stop cribbing. Stop wishing things were different. Start living freely, unfettered by fear. Have faith that all that you need will continue to be available to you, just as it always has been. Up until this moment. Think abundance. Think prosperity. Every time you read about the crumbling global economic indices, job losses, falling currencies and begin to wonder how you will survive, think of the most beautiful sunrise you have seen, the most intimate moment you have spent with your companion, or the most joyous vacation you have been on in Life. Define one spot outside your window that is beauty__believe me, you will find beauty everywhere, most definitely in unexpected places. And view that sight each time you feel worry and fear gripping you. The beauty of Life and nature can revive even the most hardened, numbed, human spirit. This is abundance thinking. Realize that it is from abundance that peace is born. It is from peace that prosperity flows. Will you make a new beginning today?

Feel Life – feel abundance, not scarcity

Feel Life. How you feel Life is very critical to what you experience.
When you see a mother feeding her infant at a traffic signal in the blistering Indian summer heat, an apology for a garment covering her sweaty bosom, while she moves from one vehicle window to another, hoping for someone to drop her a penny; you may well feel uncomfortable. The very sight is despicable. Avoidable. It makes you squirm. You are agitated and start thinking the whole Indian social order is so rotten, so cold, so inhuman. But instead if you feel compassion, for the way a mother protects and nurtures her baby despite the odds, for the way Life provides for everyone, for the miracle called your Life because it is only a quirk of time and destiny that you are on the other side of the car’s glass window, you will experience peace.
So, feeling, and what you feel, for Life makes all the difference to what you experience. In ‘The Little Prince’(1943) author Antoine de Saint-Exupery makes several profound and idealistic observations about Life and human nature. For example, Saint-Exupéry tells of a fox meeting the young prince during his travels on Earth. The story’s essence is contained in the lines uttered by the fox to the little prince: “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Indeed. Happiness, peace and joy are there in front of us, but they are never visible to the eye. We don’t see them because we find things material__our jobs, our money, our properties, our cars__far more important. But what’s essential, what’s absolutely necessary is that we live this Life fully. And all that we need for living fully is with us, has been with us, all the time.
To experience a fuller, richer and blissful Life, we must feel for abundance and not be steeped in scarcity thinking! Going back to the lady at the signal, scarcity thinking means we see depravation. Abundance thinking means we feel compassion. Depravation leads us to be cynical and embittered. Compassion leads us to bliss. So, make an intelligent choice. Choose to feel Life differently. Feel from the heart, not from the mind! Abandon rational thinking and plunge into Life __ in total abandon __ you will experience bliss! 

A Gift and a Blessing

Life is an eternal blessing, an endless course of abundance. We are not seeing this always because we are steeped in scarcity thinking!
Focusing on what we don’t have comes naturally to all of us. But for each thing that we don’t have or for each dimension of our Life where there’s something scarce, there’s a blessing, another aspect that’s soaked in abundance. For every dark cloud that hangs over us, there is the proverbial silver lining. To find it, we must just let go of our grief over what has happened and of what we don’t have, and simply survey what we have left with us. When we let go and learn to live with what we have we will immediately experience inner peace.
Some months ago, I had to sell my car. It was old and was breaking down far too frequently. There wasn’t money to either fix it or replace it with another car. We simply had to let it go. It was a difficult decision, having had a car for over 25 years, for as long as I have been independent and married. The question that confronted me – and my wife – was how would our daughter manage. She had never used public transport before. Not that she was spoilt by luxury. Hardly. But there had miraculously never been a need for her to take a bus or auto-rickshaw ever – to school or to her social outings or to college. We called her and updated her of our hard decision and predicament. We advised her to use autos for transport. To our surprise, she declined. She said she understood the situation we are in and so wanted to use train and bus for her commute. We tried explaining to her that since we was not used to either mode, she may find it difficult to cope with the crowds at rush hour. But she insisted that she wanted to give it a shot. We agreed that she would try for two weeks at which point we would review. In exactly a fortnight our daughter came back to declare that she was “comfortable and was settling in” with her new reality. She said it so simply, so responsibly and so convincingly that we did not feel like countering her with our parental anxiety and reasoning.

It was a beautiful moment of awakening and discovery for me personally. Here I was grappling with what I didn’t have – a car, and so was steeped in scarcity thinking, wondering how a child who had never ever used public transport would cope. And here was Life that had blessed me and my wife with such a wonderful daughter who not only had the maturity to accept our current reality – in which anything material, even a basic taken-for-granted gadget, device, instrument, machine or asset, is a luxury – but also had the sense of adventure to plunge head-on into an environment she was not familiar with. I don’t share this by way of self-congratulation or to praise my child, but I share to tell you how beautiful Life’s ways are. Our daughter (and son) fills our Life with abundance – this blessing far outweighs what we don’t have and what, perhaps, no longer matters!

Indeed. There’s so much abundance in us and around us. And not all of it is material or linked to money or to what money can buy. Most of it, in fact, can make us happier even if we didn’t have money or things with us. Someone I know, Madhuri Velegar, who used to write for Femina magazine from Bangalore, died of cancer a couple of days ago. A friend pulled out what she had written sometime back (on how she felt in her last days) and posted it on facebook: “…I got drawn into meditation. Almost daily I stared long at the Gulmohar tree and its flowers outside my house. I waited for sunsets, I sat under the morning sun, I worshipped the rain…” That’s the abundance that I am talking of.
Our lives are abundant too. Our sunrises and sunsets, the rains, the flowers, the birds, the love and warmth of our children and the companionship of our soul-mates, all these are available to us and are waiting to soak us in abundance. Provided, of course, we stop complaining about what we don’t have and instead celebrate what we have! When we do that we too will realize what a wonderful gift Life is and what a blessing it is to be alive!

You will never be denied what you need by Life!

Whatever you need will always be provided for. And if you don’t have or get something that you want, it really means you don’t need it right now!
This really is how Life works. If you carefully examine the Life that you have lived until now, you will notice that your needs have always been taken care of – with amazing consistency. If anything was denied to you at any point in time, it may well have been only something you wanted. This is true for everyone – irrespective of who they are, what they do and where they live.
We don’t see this very evident sign of this whole Universe, and its inhabitants, being soaked in this abundance (of every need being fulfilled), because we are always focusing our attention on what we don’t have or don’t get. Also, our definition of what we need or what anyone needs is not how Life looks at it. In fact, Life’s way – how it thinks and works – is  inscrutable. So, if people who live in pitiable conditions, in slums for instance, are, in our opinion, denied even basic, bare necessities – Life’s view may be different. And we can’t even quite know what that view is or why do some people have to live the way they have to. Yet even these people manage to survive only because Life takes care of them – again providing whatever “they” need appropriately.
Your grief comes mainly when you think of what isn’t there, what you have not got and what you don’t have. Almost all your waking time is spent in such unproductive scarcity thinking. If only you shifted your attention to what you have, you will realize that everything you need is there – and it keeps coming, just in time, every single time! This is called abundance thinking. It means that you must know, and keep the faith, that if you have been created, you will be provided for – with whatever you need, as long as you are alive!
So, switch the way you think. Know and be sure that you may not always get what you want – but you will never be denied what you need by Life!