Quotes Tagged "life-lessons"
We must employ our intelligence wisely. Do you want to feed your fears or do you want to feed your Bliss? Some opportunities that will give us great joy may not always be financially rewarding. And some opportunities may be giving us only money and no joy. Invest in your Bliss. It will never fail you.
Don’t resist your pain, embrace it. It is normal to run away from pain – to hate it, to question why it is there in the first place. That is when – and how – you invite suffering into your Life. You suffer only because you wish your Life is different from what it is. Instead, accept your pain. When you hold up your pain and feel its intensity, you will realize that it is teaching you unputdownable Life lessons. At this time, if you choose to express your feelings through your art – anything…painting, music, cooking, gardening, writing…do whatever makes you come alive – magic and beauty will flow through you! Look around you – every work of art out there is a product of someone’s pain and their choice to express how they felt while enduring it. So, employ your pain to create something of lasting value and relevance! The world is waiting…
Oh! But training the mind isn’t easy…” Surely, Life is not easy. Getting through this lifetime is never easy. So, training the mind is not going to be achieved without dedication and diligence. But just as the body can be trained, the mind too can be taught how to live in the present moment. You see, the mind thrives only when it is stuck in the dead past or when it races into the unborn future. In those two states it is constantly spewing thoughts of anger, grief, guilt, anxiety, worry, fear and stress. But when trained to live in the now, the mind is powerless. That is how you learn to be non-worrying, non-frustrated, non-suffering, to be happy! You can either train your mind, and employ equanimity and happiness to deal with Life’s upheavals, or you can continue to cite the ‘it-is-not-easy’ excuse and be unhappy! Your call!
Life’s very nature is that it is fraught with uncertainty in every moment. Anything, absolutely anything, can happen at any time. Simply, Life hai, kuch bhi ho sakta hai! So, learn to trust the process of Life. This act of trusting the process of Life is what Faith is all about. When you have Faith, Fear cannot debilitate you. Now, Faith and Fear cannot co-exist. So, if you are feeling fearful, it clearly means you lack the Faith! Re-examine how you are approaching your Life. Are you anchored in Faith or are you cowering in Fear? Intelligent living means embracing the uncertainty with Faith and going with the flow; it means knowing that wherever Life takes you is where you were always meant to arrive!
Faith must always thrive in the absence of any physical evidence. Let’s say you are negotiating a dark tunnel with a torch in your hand. As long as the torch is lit and you can see, you imagine you are in control, that you will soon figure your way out. But what if the battery drains and the torch dies? And it is pitch dark, scary; you are clueless and don’t know what to do? Faith, then, is your only resort. If you deploy your Faith – in the absence of even a shred of evidence that you will survive – and believe that you will come out of the tunnel unscathed, you surely will! That is why Faith is not just a coping mechanism, it is a game-changer! Harness the power of your Faith, understand the futility of fear, and see doors open miraculously where there once stood impregnable walls!
Every story is precious. Each one of us is making our own myth with our choices. And our stories evolve over time, with the following of our Bliss. As long as we are not obsessed with how others' stories are unfolding, of how their lives are shaping up, and are instead offering ourselves to be led in the direction of our joy, we will always be happy no matter hard the going really gets!
Are you living an unhappy Life while trying to make everyone around you happy? You want to make an unconventional personal – career or relationship – choice but you refuse to, because you are considering how your family will feel about it. Or you are keeping a job only to earn-a-living so you can meet the wants of those around you. Or you are not expressing yourself honestly in a relationship because you don’t want to hurt the other person. Whatever be your context, if you are choosing to be unhappy, only so that someone else is happy, well, then, you have lost the plot! How you are feeling alone impacts your happiness. Your feeling unhappy and being a martyr means you are squandering the Life that you have been given. Life is not a popularity contest. Being unhappy while wanting to be ‘nice’ is a poor choice you make.
When you are driven by Purpose, focus on living that Purpose every single day. Why are doing what you are doing is more important than what you have achieved, where you have reached. Yes, the human mind will play games with you. It will make you feel inadequate. It will make you imagine that the progress you make is not enough given the enormity of what you have set out to do. But believe in the Power of One…in your individual ability to impact the Life of another individual…one day at a time. How have I lived my day today? Have I lived by the why of what I do? Have I taken my vehicle forward in the direction in which I am headed? These are the only questions that need to be asked and the only ones that matter! Keep the focus, keep it basic, keep it purposeful…when you have Integrity of Purpose, all else will always follow!
Invest in experiences not things. Surely, build an asset and savings base for a rainy day. But don’t kid yourself thinking you are really ‘secure’ and ‘settled’ just because you have money. Anything can happen in Life – that too, in a nano-second! Besides, as you age, you will realize that what you can do when you are 20, you really can’t do when you are 40! Which is why, invest in experiences, in doing what you love doing. Your experiences shape you. They intricately weave your learnings from each experience with your idea of Happiness to create a beautiful fabric that stays in your subconscious even when people and things around you perish over time. In the end, what will count most in your Life, are who you loved, how you were loved back and how you enjoyed doing all that you loved doing!
Responsible citizenship is about trusteeship. Think of trusteeship like this. You are a trustee of the Life that’s been given to you. And you are a trustee of the planet that you inhabit. So be responsible with how you live and how you use the planet’s resources. Recognize that you need only so much to live and to support your immediate family. Beyond food, clothing, shelter, education, a reasonable healthcare and retirement plan and hi-speed internet connectivity through a smart device, whatever you have, whatever comes your way, give it away. Give, not because you have to give, not because you are asked to give, but give because you want to give. Recognize that just as this human form, this Life, is a gift, every thing, every resource that you acquire in this lifetime, is also given to you. So, be responsible by employing all that you receive for human good, to make the world a better place.
Don't imagine you are in a worse place than you actually are. Things could have been far worse. So, seize the day, count your blessings and move on. You can survive a crisis only by dealing it with one day at a time. Don't add up all your problems in your mind and think you are finished. Compartmentalize your problems; put them in different buckets and project-manage them separately. This is how you live through uncertain times – making decisions when there are few or no options to choose from. You never see it this way when you are going through a crisis. But, unfailingly, every crisis leaves you stronger, wiser – and happy!
Life is not only about going after name, money, success, fame and fortune and getting all of them. It is also about how you live with humility, dignity, and discipline when all of what you attained and acquired are taken away from you. Resilience and equanimity cannot be developed and deployed in simulated environments. They are always discovered within you, when you stand in the middle of the battle of Life, in the chaos, in the eye of the storm. It is by facing Life and learning to be happy, to be useful, despite your circumstances, that you become stronger.
When something – or someone – that you are clinging on to starts controlling you, the joy of doing that something or being with that person evaporates. You feel miserable. To uncling, you must feel and hate that misery deep within you. Ask yourself if you really want so much suffering in your Life – for instance, if you smoke, are you smoking for yourself anymore or is your habit controlling you, driving you crazy; or if you are in an abusive marriage, are you in it because you are loving it or are you being held hostage in it by the person’s power or by social norms? Only brutally honest conversations with yourself on what – or who – is possessing you leads you to uncling. You finally uncling only when you realize that you have to make that choice to let go, to move on, to end the suffering!
Don’t think about what has not happened. What has not happened has not happened. Simple. It has not arrived. So why worry, why fear? Of course, when it comes into your Life, you have to, and must, deal with it. But why lose your precious present, your sleep, thinking about the unborn future? Living in the now is not an art. It is an absolute necessity for you to be happy. It is like breathing. You (can) breathe only in the now – your having breathed in the past is over, it is done with; and your breathing in the future is irrelevant at the moment. The only Life you have is what you have in the now. So, stay here. Be present. Be happy with what is.
Sometimes Life will hang you at the edge of the precipice. And fear will grip you. You will not know what to think, say or do. But don’t despair. You see, Life has always been and is intrinsically risky. Your education and your money trick you into a fake sense of security. But look at what Manohar Parrikar, who passed away yesterday, had to say: “You are alone in the final act of the drama when the end of the show is visible. Nothing, and no one, can help you.” Such is Life. It has always been fraught with uncertainty and has never been in your control. So, don’t fear dead-ends or no-go Life situations. Face your fears, gracefully accept the darkness. Learn to hang from that precipitous edge, live dangerously – and when you do that, you will, interestingly, not feel scared, instead you will feel calm, content and happy!
Your Life is ultimately made up of the choices you made at different times. When you choose based on economic criteria you may end up being both challenged and unhappy. When you choose based on Happiness, you may still have challenges to deal with, but you will be happy. So, choose wisely. Going with the flow is to be able to choose to be happy over choosing to be economically secure. Because economic security is a human invention, it is an illusion. What is true is Happiness. You have been given this human form to be happy. With Happiness, you can never be unhappy. Simple!
Acceptance does not necessarily help you solve a problem. But acceptance helps you immensely in dealing with it, in making you non-suffering. When you resist a situation, you are fighting it. Whatever you resist, will fight back. Such is Life. All your suffering comes from wishing that your Life is different from what it is. So, in addition to the intense pain that the situation has thrown up, you have now invited suffering into your Life by wishing that the painful situation did not exist in the first place. Instead, embrace the situation. Gracefully accept your Life for what it is. Then, slowly, very slowly, time heals, peeling off layer after layer of suffering, as you understand the futility of prolonged sadness. As your suffering and sadness dissolve, you feel repaired, happy and at peace with your new reality.
Each one’s pain is different. You can empathize with them but you cannot always understand what someone is going through. Even if they are a long-time companion, a sibling, a parent or a child. No amount of empathy can help the other person either. They have to go through what they have to go through. Ultimately, everyone has to deal with their pain themselves; they have to understand it, negotiate with it and accept it. Acceptance does not take away the pain, but it instantaneously frees you of all suffering. So, if you you love someone who is dealing with intense pain, encourage them to embrace it; help them to be non-suffering. Being non-suffering holds the key to Happiness.
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