Your pain teaches you to serve

Your pain is here to teach you Life lessons

Appreciate every person’s influence on your Life

A hairdresser and a Guru

When you are ready and willing, you will always be pointed in the direction you must take.

“Do we necessarily need a Guru to initiate us into Self-realization,” asked a reader yesterday. I have myself asked this question before; and I keep getting asked this question often too.

We must first understand the meaning of Guru. Guru really means ‘remover of ignorance’ – ‘Gu’ means ‘darkness of ignorance’ and ‘Ru’ means ‘remover, one who removes’. So, as I have experienced and learnt from Life, anyone or anything, that removes your ignorance, or helps you to become aware, or that which awakens you to a truth, is a Guru. So, a Guru is not necessarily a someone who has matted hair, is ritualistic, has a followership and has an ashram or a retreat. To me, a Guru, is a teacher. And since I am really, continuously, learning from Life’s experiences, I consider Life my constant Guru, my ever-present Teacher!

Now, to the next part of the question. I feel the word and the concept of ‘Self-realization’ is over-rated, and therefore, unnecessarily complicated. ‘Self-realization’ is simply the awareness of the transient nature of Life. I have written on writer Shreekumar Varma’s idea of happiness in my Sunday column, The Happiness Road, for DT Next. While conversing with Shreekumar, who is a scion of the Travancore royal family, he shared what his grandmother, the erstwhile ruler of the state of Travancore, used to say about Life: “I once had a kingdom, then I had a palace, then I had a house and now I have a room.” “This awareness”, pointed out Shreekumar, “is key to leading a simple, happy Life – that nothing and no one is going to be yours or with you permanently.”

I will add to his learning that this awareness is what ‘Self-realization’ is. Which is, you are not this body, you are not this human form, you are not the qualifications you have, you are not your position, your title, your bank balance, your relationship, your property, your grief, your worry, your health – you are none of those. In a basic, practical, simplistic context, you are just your breath. Everything and everyone who is around you is with you only because you are alive, you are breathing. Once you die, where does your breath go? It just becomes one with the Universal energy. I wouldn’t even complicate this discourse with the concept of soul, atman, and such – I am just sharing what I understand. To me, everything matters only because of this breath, only because of the fact that I am alive. Life is only jab tak hai jaan! This means, live your Life to the fullest, as long as it lasts. Utilize the opportunity of this lifetime within the lifetime of the opportunity. When you go, you are going to take nothing with you. So, don’t cling on to anything or anyone – practice detachment in every moment. This realization, this awareness is what ‘Self-realization’ really is. As you can see, it is downright simple.

Now, do you need a Guru to awaken you to this truth? The answer is simple. Do you need an alarm to wake up in the mornings or do you wake up on your own? Both possibilities exist. Those who are used to bio-rhythm, will be woken up by their body clocks. Those who need a wake-up call will respond to an alarm. And then, there’s the third category, those who are not sleeping at all, they are pretending to be asleep. They can never be woken up. So, a Guru really steps into your Life when you are ready and willing. As the Buddhist saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And that Guru will not necessarily be a scholar or a religious leader or a God-person. It need not even be a person! A book can be your Guru, a movie can be a Guru, a Life experience can be a Guru. And there can even be a combination of Gurus – different people, things, events coming together to remove your ignorance, to wake you up and to point you in the direction you must take.

A genuine Guru will not advise that you follow him or her, will not insist on any ritual or prayer, will not champion that you fear a God. A true Guru awakens you to understand the impermanence of Life, and therefore invites you to celebrate yourself and to be happy. A Guru is an enabler, who helps you unshackle yourself and sets you free.

I used to regularly visit a hairdresser named Ramalingam at the erstwhile Taj Residency (now Vivanta by Taj) in Bangalore. I was a lot younger then and had a lot of hair. I was also an angry man – aggressive, impatient and quite rabid. One day, when Ramalingam was working on my hair, I received a phone call from my accountant saying a particular client payment, which was overdue by six months, was unlikely to come in for another week. I just took off on my colleague over the phone – I raved, ranted, screamed and literally shredded my colleague verbally. Ramalingam stepped back as I went ballistic. And when I got off the call, I gestured to him brusquely to continue with his work. As he resumed, Ramalingam whispered into my ear: “Sir, losing your cool like this is no good. This is not the sign of a mature leader. You are a very capable man. But you are letting your anger ruin you. Intelligent living doesn’t call for big intelligence. It requires common-sense. If you can learn to be in this world and yet be above it, untouched by its pulls and pressures, then you are a true, evolved leader.” Ramalingam’s words strangely did not anger me or hurt me. In fact, they gripped my conscience and woke me up from my stupor. It has been over 15 years now. I am still a work-in-progress. But my journey of channelizing my anger and my spiritual quest – both – began that day sitting in that salon chair. I was Arjuna that day and Ramalingam was my Krishna. He was my first Guru – he removed a part of the ignorance that I was steeped in and, set me off on glorious path where I have experienced freedom, inner peace and happiness – despite my excruciating material circumstances. (Read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal)

On this path, whoever I meet now or whatever comes my way, is a Guru. I know I have miles to go, but I know there will always be a Guru to light up the path, every step of the way.    

Inspirations from the reflections of an 18-year-old Angel

It is when you feel love, loss, joy and pain, that you can even know that you can’t ever understand Life!  

A reader of my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal  (Westland) reached out to me a couple of weeks ago wanting to send me a book of his choice. The book, My Little Epiphanies  (Bloomsbury), by Aisha Chaudhary, arrived over the weekend. I finished reading it in one sitting last evening. Aisha passed away, at 18, on 24^th January 2015. She had S.C.I.D (severe combined immune deficiency). Before she left this world, Aisha shared her most intimate thoughts – her joys, her inspirations, her fears and anything that told her more about herself and Life – in the form of My Little Epiphanies. All of 70 pages, the book is a rare, and profound, collection of very mature perspectives on Life. Coming as it does from an 18-year-old, it amazed me. The book does not tell a story, it is not a biography, it is not an account of her pain and hopelessness, fighting as a she was, a losing battle against Life, for her Life. To me, My Little Epiphanies, is a way for you, the reader, to discover the opportunity to be the light yourself, when you are going through a dark, seemingly endless, tunnel.

Sample here my selection of Aisha’s most profound thoughts from the book:

Are we living to die? Or are we dying to live? I want to do the latter.

If Life is a stop in the station, I must admit I don’t want to get on to the coming train.

I think we are the truest versions of ourselves at night before we go to sleep, just before we close our eyes.

If you feel like things aren’t moving, there is a cure for that, and that is time.

Happiness comes in all shapes and sizes; you just have to find the one that fits you best.

If you can’t change your own Life, there’s always someone else’s.

Pain lingers in the mind longer than it really lasts.

What was, is not.

My Little Epiphanies will stay with me for a long, long time. Not because I feel sorry for Aisha. But because I am grateful to her.

She reiterates what I have always believed in – that it is very important to be honest with your feelings. You don’t have to always be strong in the face of a Life situation. You just have to be yourself – even if it means you are being vulnerable! In sharing her deepest thoughts, Aisha helps us connect with the way we often feel when pinned down by Life. Reading her book, I felt that she was telling us that it is fine if you feel low and miserable some days. It is fine if you feel beaten and burnt out. It is fine if nothing makes sense. Most important, Aisha makes no claims about knowing more about Life either or how it must be dealt with. At almost her parents’ – Aditi’s and Niren’s – age, I couldn’t agree more. I certainly don’t know what Life is all about. So, to me, being honest and wearing your Life on your sleeve, is the only way forward in living this inscrutable Life!

I consider it a blessing that I came across My Little Epiphanies. I found inspirations in Aisha’s reflections there. Inspirations, that I believe, will give me enough energy to last longer on my journey. They say, when the student is ready, the teacher shall appear. I guess this is true of a seeker too. Almost always, an Angel will lead the way…helping you be the light that you are seeking!

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 despiteyour 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.

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!