A Simple Meditation

Your soul is already, in bliss, aware, wise, creative, relaxed and also full of energy. All you need to do to renew yourself with its qualities is touch it by silencing your mind for a while. Meditation is how you do this and meditation is not as difficult as made out to be!

Before I give you a simple technique, let me tell you what it does. Meditation just increases the space between two thoughts and take note that there is nothing such as achieving complete stillness and no thought, here on earth! When the spaces between thoughts increase, there is less of habitual thinking which causes mental clutter and more of feelings and nudges coming from your heart. The hearts desires translate into thoughts in your mind and can be recognised by a relatively silent mind as your first thoughts on a subject. When we meditate, we can easily catch these "first thoughts" because we start to automatically watch what we are thinking! Here is an example of what a "first thought" is like and why you should follow it - If your friend asks you for a coffee and your first thought is a hesitation, then you must follow this hesitation and postpone your coffee for another time. Since your heart knows the future as well, the hesitation was caused because something closer to your heart, such as a close family member dropping by at home, is due to happen, and the coffee date will spoil it!

Now here are a couple of things to do to prepare yourself before you start your meditation:

1. First, the time has to be right. Early morning after a bath is a good time because you have yet not started your mind on thoughts about work.
2. Turn off any humming noise from appliances if you can.
3. Put your phone on "Silent" mode and if possible, place it in another room.
4. Sit straight on the floor or on a chair or bed.
5. Let your hands face up and legs be in a comfortable position because you don't want to focus on discomfort.
6. Close your eyes.

THE MEDITATION

1. After your preparation is done, slow down the pace of your breath to the slowest rhythm that is comfortable to you. This does not mean taking deep breaths but taking normal breaths at a slower pace.
2. Now, mentally follow your breath at the tip of your nose going in and then going out.
3. In your mind you can say “In” as you take a breath in from your nose and “Out” as you allow your breath to go out from your nose.
4. After sometime if you don't feel like saying it, just follow your breath going in from your nose and out of it, with the attention of your mind.
5. If some thoughts arise in between, let them come and go like you watch passing vehicles on the road. You don’t sit on every vehicle on the road and go off on it for a ride, do you? No! So, allow these thoughts to flow and just keep following your breath in and out with your mind.
6. Do this till you feel like. And, when you feel like coming out of it, lie down with your eyes closed.
7. Then, get up when you feel like and stay blissful by loving the day.

Try to do this every day at the same time but without timing it. Don't ever time it because meditation is all about going into a timeless zone.

Rest assured that with daily meditation, you will be renewed with soulful energy, inside-out, for the day, every day. Your clarity and creativity will give you joy and when expressed will give others joy. Each day will surely be a meaningful day!

If you wish to go a step further into prayerfulness, then click on this link - Prayer and Worship

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Hurt In The Heart

A hurt in the heart is like an arrow striking your heart and sticking there. I am sure that at least once in your life you would have felt this way. Now, where did this “arrow” come from and how did it pierce your heart?

First, when you are a loving person, you keep your heart open permanently for those you love. There are no shields on it because out of love you have removed walls that divide and restrict. Then comes a person you love who may not necessarily want to hurt you, but because they are not operating from an open heart they may be unaware of how open hearts are vulnerable to words and actions that can slight the heart and slit it. They are operating from the mind and the ego which gives a sense of a separate self and not a sense of family. They are operating from the qualities of the mind like shrewdness and cleverness; logic and analysis; calculations and returns; unfaithfulness and disloyalty. All these are the “arrows” thrown at you from their minds in the form of words and actions, and because your heart is bare, they strike and injure it.

Now, if you don’t call this out to the person who hurt you, they will continue to injure you and the injury within will continue to fester in your heart! Calling it out is also like removing the arrow and throwing it away so that the injury can heal. Remember to call out your hurt very specifically to the person who hurt you and tell them exactly what it was that caused discomfort so that they don’t repeat such behaviour. If they still continue blindly with the same patterns, then the best thing is to avoid coming into their line of sight!

It is possible that because of a past hurt you decided to shield your heart and gradually opened it later with time. A shielded heart is unable to express feelings and these feelings get pent up inside the heart in the form of emotions. When your heart is hurt these emotions come bursting out and you get emotional with tears or crying out aloud. This is perfectly fine because the heavy load in your heart is being emptied out. You can try beating a pillow too to get all your emotions expelled out. E-motions are just “energies in motion” and it is beneficial to get them out at the first opportunity to lighten your heart. So in a sense, an injured heart may become a blessing in disguise!

Don’t ever close your heart with a shield because the heart radiates love like the sweet fragrance of a flower that attracts the gentle caress of loving beings. Your heart is the conduit of God to spread love in the universe too. Would you want to deny yourself all these joyous gifts for the sake of a few pinches that pain your heart?

In closing, here is an apt quote to encourage you to keep your heart open:

‘‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’’ - Rumi

An interesting story about a heartbreak - Going For Love

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Presence, Present Moment and Going With The Flow

If you have read or heard about meditation, you may have come across the buzz words in the title but didn't understand their correlation.

Meditation is a spiritual practice where an individual uses a technique to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

Some people focus on an object or thought and some un-focus to be in meditation.

The fact is that you become mentally clear when the space between your thoughts is increased whatever be the technique for meditation. There is no such thing as “no thought” because there will always be a thought conscious or sub-conscious at some interval unless you are dead!

You become emotionally calm when you allow, during your practice of some meditation technique, your pent up emotions in your sub-conscious to rise to the surface like bubbles and be expressed. Uncontrollable crying is often an outcome and the end result is calmness.

With meditation, when the space between your conscious thoughts increases and your sub-conscious emotions dissolve, you will feel your own “presence” as something larger than your body and mind and encompassing your whole being with a reassuring warmth.

You are right here in the "present moment" because you are no longer worried and anxious about your future and you are no longer uncomfortable about some past happening. 

When you are in the present moment, you are then consciously “going with the flow” of each present moment as it progresses with different events in the course of the day. In your calmness, you accept every moment with whatever present it brings and because there is space between your thoughts, which is actually where your presence resides, you respond to each moment with wisdom. It is within this space that you get in-spirations, in-sights and in-tuitions. You now have a “presence of mind” because the space between your thoughts is awareness, tapped into the all-knowing super-intelligent “Universal Consciousness"! This is what is referred to as mindfulness.

When you go with the flow, you have consciously befriended life and no longer think of it as opposing you. You have started to walk hand-in-hand with time and now, you are grateful for your past, you accept the present and love the future. You are not sitting still in some timeless realm nor are you shying away from events, instead you are engaging with each present moment with presence of mind and going with the flow... Isn’t it exciting that time brings to you waves upon waves of people, places and circumstances to engage with? Life can be as joyous as waves upon the ocean landing on the beach as you walk. I feel you will become passionate about life if you think of it this way!

To receive each “present” from the universe with the same excitement with which you receive a precious gift, find a meditation technique and keep marching on...

If you want a simple meditation to start with, then click on this link - A Simple Meditation

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Prayer and Worship

Prayer means an earnest and devout petition to God or an object of worship and it also means a spiritual communion with God or an object of worship.

The Indian word for worship is “Puja” and it is made up of two words, namely:
Purna - meaning Complete
Jiva - meaning Self

When you earnestly yield, to your object of worship, your “complete self” i.e. your ''body, mind and heart'', during worship (or even for that matter during your daily work because work is worship too), then you reach a blissful state of devout oneness! In this state you are in prayer and will receive answers to all your questions and wisdom to direct your life forward. When you are ''earnest'' (deeply, sincere and serious), then prayer becomes worship and worship becomes prayer!!!

This leads to a harmonious life where you are marching in unison with “All that there is”. You may ask, ''How can I know I am in unison with “All that there is” when a lot of It is generally invisible?''
Well the invisible has at command all the invisible stuff in you - your gentle nudges within, your conscience, feelings, thoughts, senses, and all of these in people and even things around you as well. So called inanimate things too have the entire blueprint of the cosmos present within them and are alive and kicking with activity within.

So if a book suddenly falls in front of you, it is the invisible leading you to it to gain the knowledge you need. If you bump into an old friend at a cafe, it is the invisible leading you to an exciting opportunity...

open vessel taking a dip in holy water 

An understanding of prayer and worship must lead you to make it a daily and important part of your life in order to keep your invisible-self in harmony just as bathing and brushing your teeth have become a daily part of your life in order to keep your visible-self in harmony. I believe that daily bathing is honouring yourself too because not bathing is dis-honouring yourself. Similarly, daily prayer and worship is honouring the invisible and not praying and worshiping is dis-honouring the invisible. In prayer and worship, you are like an open vessel taking a dip in holy water that lies in the deep. The vessel gets washed from outside and takes a sip of the holy water from its opening and gets washed from inside too!!!

Are you now ready to commit yourself to daily prayer and worship? If yes, and you don't know where to start, here's a link with a simple way to begin - A 5 Minute Simple Ritual To Align With God

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What Makes A News Service Trustworthy?

“Fake News” and “Paid News” have become the buzz words for all news coming from sources that have a wide outreach that it makes it difficult to build trust on any news service.

However, an intelligent person would ask, “What is the “agenda” of a news service?”

1. Is it to promote a bias like a particular political party/personality/organisation/religion or is it to promote facts for people to form opinions on those facts by including views expressed by all stakeholders related to a fact?

2. Is it to promote mainly dramatic events to build their TRP which translates into greater advertisement revenue or is it to promote a balance of negative, neutral and positive events in the same ratio as the quantum of such events? An example of “neutral news” is key findings in an Academic Conference which are rarely reported though a large number happen everyday.

3. Is the funding method of a news service, linked to big corporate houses, political parties or even non-profits that lobby; largely advertisements; or mainly crowd funding? Crowd funding would generally suggest that the news service is likely to be democratic otherwise it may not receive amounts from a vast population. If it is crowd funded by a group with say a political bias then it would be easy to catch that political bias in their news.

4. Most importantly, is it raising questions or reporting facts that will encourage people to make themselves and life better? Ex. What are the effects of over population in a country? What are workable solutions for controlling population explosion? And, is it broadcasting answers to such questions answered by authentic “Subject Matter Experts”?

Ultimately you have to spend some time to observe and research about a news service and come to your current decision on where to get your news from so that you make informed choices based on reliable information.

Want to know what global impact Artificial Intelligence can have? Click here - Will AI take away your job?

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Why is there sacrifice, struggle and pain on earth?

Metaphorically speaking if everything that existed was just white coloured atoms then these white atoms would not know they were white. However, if they got an opportunity to be in a dark space then at least like a candle in a dark room they would know they were white light.

Further, if they got an opportunity to be each of the component colours of white in the rainbow spectrum one by one i.e. red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, then they would experience and fully know each of their components.

Now to experience one component you have to forget that you are the other components, otherwise you cannot experience them. So there has to be a veil or filter to hide all that you need to forget and let in only that which you need to experience.

In real life this means that to experience being tall you have to forget that you are both short and tall and remember only your tallness. To experience being a gloomy person you have to forget that you are both cheerful and gloomy and remember only the gloomy part of yourself.

Forgetting parts of yourself and leading a less than whole life is a sacrifice because you do have to struggle when you don’t have all your attributes available to you and the struggle can be painful. If you have seen someone with amnesia or Alzheimer, you will understand the struggle and pain better.   But forgetting is necessary to realise your wholeness by experiencing your attributes in parts because there is no other way of realising them.

You can reduce the struggle and pain if you are willing to share your life with someone who has what you don't have. For example, an engineer can collaborate with a management graduate to open a tech start-up. The engineer makes a product with his skills and the management graduate grows the business of selling the product. Both fairly share the profits rather than neither of them having a profitable business! Both of them still are able to experience their attributes.

Until you realise your attributes by experiencing their facticity and particularity, you will be an un-satiated “white atom” and the good news is when you experience all your parts you will be a satiated “white atom” able to rest in the peace of “Being”. I guess then you would have a “been there, done that” kind of feeling sitting with the Lord of Creation and shall go no more out into the universe to experience its trials and tribulations.

Want an objective picture about life? Click here - The Painting of Life

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Love Explained. Is it like playing ball?

All matter has different types of forces acting upon it and the “Four Fundamental Forces of Nature” are:

1. Gravity - the attraction between two objects that have mass.
2. Electromagnetism - responsible for electricity and magnetism.
3. Strong nuclear force - that binds the fundamental particles of matter together.
4. Weak nuclear force - responsible for particle decay.

Similarly, humans have the fundamental love force acting upon them and I am going to describe some metaphors to explain this force.

One level of love could be like magnetism. It attracts and repels and also does both without expectations. So this may be the love and hate level of love in our world of duality which happens at the heart level. And perhaps when this love force acts at the mind level of consciousness, expectations from those you love and hate may set in.

Another level of love could be like gravity. It only attracts and doesn’t repel but again without expectations. It does create a feeling of up and down which indicates whether you are moving away from the source or towards it. This maybe the soul level of love which is unconditional. This is somewhat like a Master attracting his or her followers and the Master’s field of influence is not selective but universal towards all humans who come near.

What is common between these fundamental forces of nature is that they have a certain integrity. When you are in their field they will act according to their inherent nature. It’s the human mind that enacts dramas of hide and seek but not these forces. Your heart and soul have integrity. And when a human like a Master has the capacity for unconditional soul love it will show up as integrity, which means that even when no one is looking you are still acting out of love for a particular person or thing.

Now coming to another aspect of love which is the all important fulfilment of love. When there is an exchange of love then you feel that your effort of love has been fulfilled. When you give her a rose and she gives you a hug, that is a moment of fulfilment.

Here is something interesting about what causes the fundamental forces of nature. The force between two objects can be described through the exchange of a particle. The transfer of momentum and energy in the two objects during the movement of the exchange particle is said to mediate the interaction which shows up as a force of attraction or repulsion between the objects. A simple analogue of this is a ball being thrown back and forth between a man and a woman. The momentum and energy when you bend backwards and stretch yourself to then gently throw the ball propels you towards the catcher if you are on friction-less ground like an ice sheet and when she catches the ball and throws it back in the same way to him, she is propelled towards him. When this goes on, an attraction between the two will develop. So at the very heart of a fulfilling love relationship would be bending backwards for a gentle exchange between two people and also, not a one sided effort!!! On the other hand, if you wish to create a repulsion, then you don't have to bend backwards and you just have to toss the ball hard towards the catcher or bend forward and gently toss the ball backwards away from the catcher and then you will move away from the catcher if you are on friction-less ground and when the catcher does the same she will move away from him. 

So, a good idea if you want a fulfilling love relationship, full of attraction, is to bend backwards and stretch yourself to the limit for a gentle exchange of gifts, favours, appreciation and gratitude. And, remember to do this often...

Here's how to handle a heartbreak - Hurt In The Heart

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