10 Simple Steps to a Healthier, Happier You

By Jené Luciani, SHAPE magazine

It sounds obvious. Drink more water, get more sleep, stop complaining, and your life will improve. But sometimes we need a little reminder that a few simple steps can make a huge different in our ultimate happiness and overall health.
We reached out to renowned life coach and nutritionist Ana Alexandre to find out 10 simple tips for a happier and healthier you!

1. Eliminate clutter: Ever wonder why those people on Hoarders look so miserable? Climbing out from underneath piles of stuff can also mean emotional freedom from items that could be mentally weighing you down.
"Get rid of all the things you don't need or that are not good for you," Alexandre says. "Ditch clothes you never wear and create more space to see the clothes you do actually wear."
And from your closets to your kitchen, get rid of unhealthy foods too. "Clean out your cupboards, and get rid of all processed foods like those containing white flours, sugar, and unhealthy oils," Alexandre says.

2. Supplement your life: "Take an omega-3 supplement," Alexandre says. These amazing fats found in salmon, flaxseeds, and walnuts purportedly give you glowing skin, fight stress, and reduce inflammation in the body.

3. Just add water: You've heard it before, but it's worth repeating. It's important to drink eight to 10 glasses of water every day to keep our bodies functioning properly.
"Water keeps you hydrated, eliminates toxins, and keeps you regular. Always keep a bottle with you. If you see it, you will drink it!" Alexandre says. 

4. Forget the complaint department: "Stop complaining about never getting what you want, and instead, create what you want," Alexandre says.
She suggests setting at least three clear goals per year. "Set goals that excite you, that are tangible, and something with a finish line. Write your goals in the present tense (I go to the gym every Tuesday and Thursday). This will get you believing that they can be a reality!" 

5. Create a daily ritual: If you set aside just 10 minutes a day for yourself, Alexandre says, it will do wonders in eliminating daily stress and anxiety."Meditate for five minutes in the morning to start your day. Take the additional five minutes to relax before bed. Read a book that inspires you, take a bath, or enjoy a cup of tea. 

6. Just move it! Exercise not only makes you more physically fit, it also boosts your mood, increases your energy, and it can even improve your sex life.
"Find an activity you like and actually want to do. Take a dance or yoga class, go hiking or rollerblading," the life coach says. "It doesn't really matter. Just get your body moving."

7. Improve your penmanship: If you're thinking "I'm too old for a diary," look at it this way. "Writing in a journal daily helps you clarify your thoughts and feelings, reduces stress, and helps you resolve problems more effectively," Alexandre says.
Write down the highlights of your day, something you learned, or just one reason why you're grateful for the things you have.

8. All you need is love: It may sound cliché, but love truly does make the world go 'round.
"Find ways to get more love in your life," Alexandre says. "Make time in your schedule to see the people you love. Play with a child, hug your friends, tell someone you love them, and smile at someone you don't know. These small gestures can make a big difference."

9. Eat your veggies: Vegetables are an abundance of necessary vitamins and minerals that help keep us healthy and energized. So stop making excuses and eat some everyday. Doctors recommend at least five servings a day.

10. Sleep it off: Most of us need at least eight hours of sleep a night. That's need, not want. There's a reason why we need a sufficient amount of rest.
"Sleep improves stress, reduces inflammation, and allows cells to re-charge and repair damage," Alexandre says. It also keeps us functioning at our optimum levels both mentally and physically.
To make sure you get enough sleep , Alexandre suggests shutting off computers, cell phones, TVs, and anything else creeping in from the outside world at least one hour before bedtime. 

Courtesy: Yahoo Lifestyle

WSJ Special: Swami Vivekananda and the West- Part 2

During his lifetime, Vivekananda had another enthusiast in Leo Tolstoy, the titan of Russian letters. "He is the most brilliant wise man," Tolstoy gushed after devouring "Raja Yoga" in 1896 in a single sitting and reporting it to be "most remarkable… [and] I have received much instruction. The precept of what the true 'I' of a man is, is excellent…Yesterday, I read Vivekananda the whole day."

Not long before his death, Tolstoy was still waxing about Vivekananda. "It is doubtful in this age that another man has ever risen above this selfless, spiritual meditation."

Tolstoy and Vivekananda never met, but the opera diva Emma Calvé and the great tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt sought him out and became his lifelong friends.

Bernhardt, in fact, introduced him to the electromagnetic scientist Nikola Tesla, who was struck by Vivekananda' s knowledge of physics. Both recognized they had been pondering the same thesis on energy—in differentlanguages. Vivekananda was keenly interested in the science supporting meditation, and Tesla would cite the monk's contributions in his pioneering research of electricity. "Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana and akasha and the kalpas [time]," Vivekananda wrote to a friend. "He thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go to see him next week to get this mathematical demonstration. In that case Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations. " For the monk from Calcutta, there were no inconsistencies between science, evolution and religious belief. Faith, he wrote, must be based upon direct experience, not religious platitudes.

More presciently, he warned that India would remain a vanquished, impoverished land until it "elevated" the status of women. And while he admonished Westerners for their preoccupation with the material and the physical, he famously advised a sickly young devotee to toughen himself with athletics: "You will be nearer to heaven playing football than studying the Bhagavad Gita."

Vivekananda' s influence bloomed well into the mid-20th century, infusing the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, George Santayana, Jane Addams, Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller, among assorted luminaries. And then he seemed to go into eclipse in the West. American baby boomers—more disposed

to "doing" than "being"—have opted for "hot yoga" classes over meditation. At some point, perhaps in the 1980s, an ancient, profoundly anti-materialist teaching had morphed into a fitness cult with expensive accessories.

Moreover, a few American academics have recently taken to scrutinizingVivekananda and Ramakrishna through a Freudian prism, offering up speculative theories of sexual repression. In turn their critics respond that the two titans from Calcutta are incomprehensible via simplistic Freudian prisms. To understand the unconditional celibacy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, they argue, requires fluency in 19th-century Bengali and a decidedly non-Western paradigm.

Supporting this view were Christopher Isherwood and his friend Aldous Huxley, who wrote the introduction to the 1942 English-language edition of "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, " a firsthand account (originally published in India in 1898) described by Huxley as "the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature  of Ultimate Reality." Nikhilananda, Salinger's guru, did the translation, with assistance from Huxley, Joseph Campbell and Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the late president.

Huxley and Isherwood were introduced to Vedanta in the Hollywood Hills in the late 1930s by their countryman, the writer Gerald Heard. In a fitting counterpart to the New York Center, the Hollywood Vedanta society was likewise run by a scholarly and charismatic monk, Prabhavananda, who

initiated the English trio of writers.

Like Nikhilananda, Prabhavananda was a magnet for the intelligentsia, and his lectures often attracted the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and W. Somerset Maugham (and led to his writing "TheRazor's Edge"). Inspired by Isherwood—who briefly lived at the center as a monk—Greta Garbo asked if she too might move in. Told that a monastery accepts only men, Garbo became testy. "That doesn't matter!" she thumped. "I'll put on trousers."

Henry Miller, who made headlines with his torrid and banned "Tropic of Cancer," visited with Prabhavananda at the Hollywood center, devoured a small library of Vedanta books and settled down in Big  Sur in 1944. Throughout his memoir, "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," Miller invoke Vivekananda as the great sage of the modern age and the consummate messenger to rescue the West from spiritual bankruptcy.

Isherwood's commitment to Vedanta, like Salinger's, was unswerving and lifelong. Over the next 20 years, he co-translated with Prabhavananda the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms" and Shankara's "Crest Jewel of Discrimination, " and was the author of several books and tracts on Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.

Huxley, however, in his final years turned over his spiritual quest to his second wife, Laura, and pharmaceuticals— an unequivocal no-no among Vedantins. Believing he had found a shortcut to samadhi, the great man had his wife inject him with LSD on his deathbed. "Aldous was the most brilliant man I ever met," sighed one monk, "but he lacked discrimination. "

Of all the literary lions captivated by Vivekananda and Vedanta, J.D.Salinger perhaps made the fullest commitment and sacrifices. In 1952, Salinger exhorted his British publisher to pick up the English rights of

the Gospel, calling it "the religious book of the century."

At the peak of his fame in 1961, Salinger delivered a warmly inscribed copy of "Franny and Zooey," which is saturated in Vedantic thought and references, to his guru Nikhilananda, who by then had formally initiated him as a devotee. Salinger confided to Nikhilananda that he intentionally left a trail of Vedantic clues throughout his work from "Franny and Zooey" onward, hoping to entice readers into deeper study.

The two men often met at the 94th Street center, where they would discuss the spiritual challenges of renunciation. Salinger would also embark on "personal retreats" at the Vedanta center in Thousand Island Park in the St. Lawrence River. There he would stay in the cottage where Vivekananda had lived and held retreats in the late 1890s.

In January 1963, at the New York celebration of Vivekananda' s 100th birthday—presided over by the secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant—Salinger sat front and center at the banquet table. A few weeks later, he published "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, " two exquisitely wrought novellas in which the suicide of Seymour, arguably Salinger's alter ego, is the catalyzing event. "I have been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day," begins one entry in Seymour's diary in "Raise High." In Seymour, the narrator declares, "I tend to regard myself as a fourth-class Karma Yogini, with perhaps a littleJnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot."

In Salinger's last published work, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in 1965 in "The NewYorker," Seymour bursts into a manic tribute to Vivekananda. "Raja-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga, two heartrending, handy, quite tiny volumes, are perfect for the pockets of any average, mobile boys our age, by Vivekananda of India."

And then America's beloved novelist stopped publishing. "Name and fame," eschewed by Ramakrishna, no longer was the ticket for the increasingly hermetic Salinger. His ferocious literary ambition was now supplanted by what appears to have been a diligent, albeit eccentric, spiritual quest for the next four decades—until his death in 2010.

While Salinger is depicted by many chroniclers and contemporaries as an ornery crank, four letters, approved by Salinger's estate for use by the New York Ramakrishna- Vivekananda Center, suggest a man of singular devotion and renunciation: "I read a bit from the Gita every morning before I get of bed," he wrote to Nikhilananda' s successor swami at the New York center in 1975.

Salinger also conducted a long correspondence with Marie Louise Burke, who compiled a six-volume history of Vivekananda' s visits to the West. Burke was as serious a seeker as Salinger and as devoted as a nun: Indeed, she took the monastic name Sister Gargi. Nevertheless, the nervous, sometimes paranoid Salinger fretted that she might profit from their letters. Unfortunately, Burke proved her fidelity to her friend by burning them.

In between his two treks to the West, Vivekananda returned to India and founded the Ramakrishna Order as both a monastery and a service mission. Today it is among the largest philanthropic organizations in

India—providing food, medical assistance and disaster relief to millions. His prescription for his countrymen, however, who had been demoralized by colonialism, was to borrow a page from the West, he said, and instill itself with the "can do" spirit of Americans. "Strength! Strength is my religion!" he exhorted. "Religion is not for the weak!"

India has scheduled a yearlong party to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vivekananda' s birth, beginning on January 12, 2013. There will be plenty of readings of his four texts on yoga as a spiritual discipline. Nine volumes chronicle his talks, writings and ruminations, from screeds against child marriage to Milton's "Paradise Lost" to his pet goats and ducks. But if there were a single takeaway line that boils down his teachings to one spiritual bullet point, it would be "You are not your body." This might be bad news for the yoga-mat crowd. The good news for beleaguered souls like Salinger was Vivekananda' s corollary: "You are not your mind."

In a 1972 letter to the ailing Nikhilananda in the last year of his life, Salinger seemed to be saying as much. "I sometimes wish that the East had deigned to concentrate some small part of its immeasurable genius to the petty art of science of keeping the body well and fit. Between extreme indifference to the body and the most extreme and zealous attention to it (Hatha Yoga), there seems to be no useful middle ground whatever."

Salinger went on to express his gratitude to the man who had guided him out of his "long dark night." "It may be that reading to a devoted group from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is all you do now, as you say, but I imagine the students who are lucky enough to hear you read from the Gospel would put the matter rather differently. Meaning that I've forgotten many worthy and important things in my life, but I have never forgotten the way you used to read from, and interpret, the Upanishads, up at Thousand Island Park."

By then, Salinger had not published in some time. Nor would he again. Nor did he seem to miss it. 

Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal

WSJ Special: Swami Vivekananda and the West- Part 1

[From the Wall Street Journal WSJ. MAGAZINE - Updated March 30, 2012, 2:01 p.m. ET]

What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common? The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement

By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents' sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at "The New Yorker," he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna- Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.

Though the iconic author of "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Franny and Zooey"published his last story in  1965, he did not stop writing. From the early1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees.

After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger's spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.

These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. "As soon as I think of myself as a little body," he warned, "I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies. Then you and I become separate." For Vivekananda, who established the first ever Vedanta Center, in Manhattan in 1896, yoga meant just one thing: "the realization of God."

After an initial dalliance in the late 1940s with Zen—a spiritual path without a God—Salinger discovered Vedanta, which he found infinitely more consoling. "Unlike Zen," Salinger's biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, points out, "Vedanta offered a path to a personal relationship with God…[and] a promise that he could obtain a cure for his depression….and find God, and through God, peace."

 

Finding peace would, however, be a lifelong battle. In 1975, Salinger wrote to another monk at the New York City center about his own daily struggle,citing a text of the eighth-century Indian mystic Shankara as a  cautionary tale: "In the forest-tract of sense pleasures there prowls a huge tiger called the mind. Let good people who have a longing for Liberation never go there." Salinger wrote, "I suspect that nothing is truer than that,"confessing despondently, "and yet I allow myself to be mauled by that old tiger almost every wakeful  minute of my life."

It was his daily mauling by the "huge tiger" and his dreaded depressions that led Salinger to abandon his literary ambitions in favor of spiritual ones. Salinger—who appears to have had a nervous breakdown of sorts upon his return from the gruesome front lines of World War II—subscribed to Vivekananda' s view of the mind as a drunken monkey who is stung by a scorpion and then consumed by a demon. At the same time, Vivekananda promised hope and solace—writing that the "same mind, when subdued and controlled, becomes a most trusted friend and helper, guaranteeing peace and happiness." It was precisely the consolation that Salinger so desperately sought. And by 1965 he was ready to renounce his once gritty

pursuit of literary celebrity.

Although all but forgotten by America's 20 million would-be yoginis, clad in their finest Lululemon, Vivekananda was the Bengali monk who introduced the word "yoga" into the national conversation. In 1893, outfitted in a red, flowing turban and yellow robes belted by a scarlet sash, he had delivered a show-stopping speech in Chicago. The event was the tony Parliament of Religions, which had been convened as a spiritual complement to the World's Fair, showcasing the industrial and technological

achievements of the age.

On its opening day, September 11, Vivekananda, who appeared to be meditating onstage, was summoned to speak and did so without notes. "Sisters and Brothers of America," he began, in a sonorous voice tinged with "a delightful slight Irish brogue," according to one listener, attributable to his Trinity College–educated professor in India. "It fills my heart with joy unspeakable. .."

Then something unprecedented happened, presaging the phenomenon decades later that greeted the Beatles (one of whom, George Harrison, would become a lifelong Vivekananda devotee). The previously sedate crowd of 4,000-plus attendees rose to their feet and wildly cheered the visiting monk, who, having never before addressed a large gathering, was as shocked as his audience. "I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world," he responded, flushed with emotion. "I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects."

Annie Besant, a British Theosophist and a conference delegate, described Vivekananda' s impact, writing that he was "a striking figure, clad in yellow and orange, shining like the sun of India in the midst of the heavy

atmosphere of Chicago…a lion head, piercing eyes, mobile lips, movements swift and abrupt." The Parliament, she said, was "enraptured; the huge multitude hung upon his words." When he was done, the convocation rose again and cheered him even more thunderously. Another delegate described "scores of women walking over the benches to get near to him," prompting one wag to crack wise that if the 30-year-old Vivekananda "can resist that onslaught, [he is] indeed a god."

"No doubt the vast majority of those present hardly knew why they had been so powerfully moved," Christopher Isherwood wrote a half century later, surmising that a "strange kind of subconscious telepathy" had infected the hall, beginning with Vivekananda' s first words, which have resonated, for some, long after. Asked about the origins of "My Sweet Lord," George Harrison replied that "the song really came from Swami Vivekananda, who said, 'If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must

perceive it.' "

The teachings of Vedanta are rooted in the Vedas, ancient scriptures going back several thousand years that also inform Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The Vedic texts of the Upanishads enshrine a core belief that God is within and without—that the divine is everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) is another sacred text or gospel, whereas Hinduism is actually a coinage popularized by Vivekananda to describe a faith of diverse and myriad beliefs.

Vivekananda' s genius was to simplify Vedantic thought to a few accessible teachings that Westerners found irresistible. God was not the capricious tyrant in the heavens avowed by Bible-thumpers, but rather a power that resided in the human heart. "Each soul is potentially divine," he promised. "The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature,external and internal." And to close the deal for the fence-sitters, he punched up Vedanta's embrace of other faiths and their prophets. Christ and Buddha were incarnations of the divine, he said, no less than Krishna and his own teacher, Ramakrishna.

Although Vivekananda was a Western-educated intellectual of encyclopedic erudition, "the descendant of 50 generations of lawyers," as he would say, Ramakrishna was for all intents and purposes illiterate. Born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna had not an iota of interest in schooling beyond the study of scripture and prayer. Fortunately, that amply met the job requirements of his post as a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. According to numerous firsthand, contemporaneous accounts, Ramakrishna—who is revered as a  saint in much of India and as an avatar by many—spent a good deal of his short life in samadhi, or an ecstatic state. On a daily basis, sitting or standing, he was often observed slipping into a transported state that he described as "God consciousness, " existing with neither food nor sleep. He died in 1886 at age 50.

Though Ramakrishna spoke in a village idiom, invoking homespun local parables, word about the "Bengali saint" spread through the chattering classes of India in the 1870s like a monsoon. Many who flocked to him—and declared him a divine incarnation—were educated as lawyers, doctors and engineers and were often the graduates of British-run Christian schools. His closest and most influential disciple, however, was Vivekananda (born Narendranath Datta in 1863 to an affluent family), whom he charged with carrying the message of Vedanta to the world.

Certainly, a smattering of Eastern thought had already traveled to the West before Vivekananda' s arrival in the U.S. In the 1820s, Ralph Waldo Emerson had snared a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and found himself enchanted. "I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita," Emerson wrote in his journal in 1831. The Gita would inform his Transcendentalist essays, in which he wrote of the "Over-Soul," that part of the individual that is one with the universe—invoking the Vedantic precepts of the Atman and Brahman. (In a tidy historical twist, one of Emerson's relatives, Ellen Waldo, became a devotee of Vivekananda, and faithfully transcribed the dictated text of his first book, "Raja Yoga," in 1895.)

Emerson's student and fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, would study Indian thought even more avidly and crafted his own practice—living as a secular monk, as it were, by Walden Pond. In 1875, Walt Whitman was given a copy of the Gita as a Christmas gift, and it is heard unmistakably in "Leaves of Grass" in lines such as "I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my boots." Though the two never met, Vivekananda hailed Whitman as "the

Sannyasin of America."

The Academy, however, was a bit slower to embrace Eastern thought and literature. It wasn't until after an electrifying lecture by Vivekananda at Harvard's Graduate Philosophical Club on March 25, 1896, that Eastern Philosophy departments became a staple at Ivy League colleges.

Fascinated by the erudite and polyglot monk—who could pass an entire day sitting motionless in silent meditation—the esteemed philosopher William James roped in many of his colleagues, students and friends to attend Vivekananda' s Harvard lecture. They were not disappointed. "The theory of evolution, and prana [energy] and akasa [space] is exactly what your modern science has," their exotic visitor blithely informed them. Nor were they unamused. When asked, "Swami, what do you think about food and breathing?" he replied, "I am for both." The evening ended with the turbaned monk, "dressed in rich dark red robes," receiving an offer to chair Harvard's new department. Columbia University promptly made its own bid for Vivekananda—who declined both, noting his vows of renunciation.

At a dinner party in his honor the following night, William James and Vivekananda scurried off to a corner by themselves, where they were observed nattering away until midnight. The next morning, James sent  word inviting him to dinner at his own home that evening. And over the next week, James would dash into Boston to hear his other lectures.

"He has evidently swept Professor James off his feet," wrote a Harvard colleague. Indeed, the eminent scholar was deferential to a fault with his newfound Bengali friend, referring to him as Master. More important, in his seminal book "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James relied upon Vivekananda' s "Raja Yoga," a treatise on the discipline of meditation practice from which he quoted extensively: "All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state, or samadhi."

Unbeknownst to him, Vivekananda had hit the piñata of influence: James was arguably the country's premier intellectual. And it hardly hurt that his brother was the master novelist Henry James.

Along with the James brothers, a half dozen socially prominent and wealthy women immeasurably facilitated the visiting monk—who not infrequently encountered some racism on his U.S. lecture tours. Sara Bull in Cambridge, Josephine MacLeod in New York City, and Margaret Noble in London would set up salons and avidly spread the word—and even followed him to India. With the vast contacts and shrewd networking of these women, his talks in Cambridge and Manhattan became standing-room- only affairs attended by the

cognoscenti of the day, assorted seekers, and all manner of movers and shakers—from Gertrude Stein, one of James's students, to John D.Rockefeller. Blessed with "the power of personality, " as Henry James would

say, Vivekananda was the ideal missionary to pitch the message of Vedanta.

O Zone: Where do you draw the line with children?

VINITA DAWRA NANGIA

To teach children coping skills, parents must hold themselves back from overindulging them emotionally or financially!

I remember standing outside the imposing school gates of Convent of Jesus and Mary, some loose change clutched in my fist, as I debated the pros and cons of buying some chikki or chilli chips. It was a serious consideration for a child, involving a thought for the hygiene factor, recollection of when I last indulged myself, the school’s admonishments about buying from wayside vendors, wondering if I could spend the money in a more useful manner, and whether my parents would approve!

What mattered was not the tiny amount in my fist; it was the thinking that went into spending it that I cherish today. Years later, I am just as careful about spending money. It is never a question of how much I can afford; and always one of whether I really need the object of desire. It doesn’t matter how deep my pockets are, what matters is whether what I buy is really worth the spend!

Somewhere deep down, one’s attitude to money has a lot to do with the values one imbibes. Selfless or selfish, caring or thoughtless, self-indulgent or generous – all this dictates your relationship to money.  And when we pass on values to our children, a very important part of that transaction is attitude to money. Teaching them how to handle money through instruction, discipline or example, is an important part of bringing up children.

Today parents share a much closer, friendly bond with their children, which makes it more difficult to discipline them. It is easier to give in to the urge of indulging your children, rather than denying them a pleasure you can easily afford. Parents find it difficult to say no, whether it is the gift of a car, a motorcycle, a foreign trip or a wild party. The persuasive powers of children brought up on a diet of mesmerizing television commercials aimed to seduce, and video games that allow them to manipulate reality, are exhausting for parents already confused about where to draw the line!

Rather than risk long-drawn battles, parents tend to give in. They find it easier to bring up children in the cocoon of protection, rather than leave them frustrated and wanting. When indulging our children, we are also indirectly indulging ourselves.

However experience shows that if all the mollycoddling and indulgence keeps them ensconced in a delightful, unreal bubble, children will never be prepared for real life.  So it is important to introduce them to realistic situations and allow them to make their own mistakes. Denial is as important as indulgence; kids must understand the difference between need and want, and learn to wait for what they desire. To leave scope for motivation and ambition, it is important to leave that little something they still need. 

Young mom of two Monisha Bajaj says, “I make sure that I allow the children to get a little less than what they ask for because it is very important to teach them they cannot have all they want. That would surely spoil them!” Good thinking.

Bewildered parents brought up in leaner times, are eager to share their new-found prosperity and spending power with children, and find it difficult to draw lines and lay down rules. Even if they realise the risks of indulging a child’s every whim, they find it difficult to answer why friend Sanjukta can throw money around at the mall when their Kanika cannot. Why Parthiv is allowed his video games, Blackberry and iPad, while their Rakshit isn’t.

These are not easy questions for any parent to answer. Yet, intrigued at how other parents deal with their children, I threw a question at friends on my Facebook page:"Am sure you indulge your kids! How do you decide where to draw the line?" Many wrote back. Ratheesh V Sankar  said, “Kids draw the lines these days" while Kumar Saurav agreed "Parents are just advisors!”

One way of giving children a realistic idea of their strengths and limitations is to talk straight to them, and make them understand that your denial is not a cruel whim, but a considered decision for their own welfare. Handling pocket money teaches children to make choices, take considered decisions, save and plan. Learning about money is indeed a critical life skill for children to pick up. However, this skill can be learnt only if they get a limited amount, dictated by their need rather than the parents’ giving capacity. Lachmi Bose, another Facebook respondent, says, “I love to indulge my son with gifts, but I always draw a line and make him understand that money does not come easily... or he will not have the drive to earn and do well in life.”

Courtesy: TOI blogs

Live with a meditative attitude

This is an insightful article by Swami Brahmdev, published in the Speaking Tree blog was shown to me by middle-aged neighbor who has recently taken to mediation and spirituality seriously. Swamiji uses simple language to explain what is mediation and how to make every aspect of our life full of mediation. Must read with an open mind...and heart. Love yourself to love others- Ramananda

Meditation is not an activity or a hobby. It is the attitude one has to life. If you think you are “doing” meditation by sitting alone and closing your eyes, think again. Meditation is not something you do.

If you live with clarity, meditation will awaken. Meditation is an attitude. You are always with yourself, meaning that you are expressing your true self. When you are close to yourself, you are in meditation. So anything which can bring you close to yourself is meditation. If you are “doing” meditation, you will go farther away from yourself.

When you sit to meditate don’t do anything, just be there, quiet with yourself. Be present, feel the environment, the atmosphere, just enjoy your own company. To awaken your meditative nature, there are certain kriyas and one powerful kriya is that you observe your breath. If you cannot observe your breath, then count your breaths. Make it your permanent habit from today that you will never spend a day without counting hundred breaths.

As you start it, in ten minutes you will start feeling some changes inside. Don’t make any effort to breathe, let it be natural. Just count it. Counting your one hundred breaths will awaken your meditative nature. Slowly you will start feeling that your life is becoming a meditation…What does that mean? That means your life will be full of power, creativity and strength.

The environment is full of vibrations. When vibrations touch your system, your system transforms them into thoughts. Thought is power. I have the power to think and to create thoughts. We never use that power. In our whole life we never think. What we call thinking is not thinking, it is just repeating or parroting. If we knew how to think and what to think, we could create paradise.

The power to think is the power of creation. Whatever we are now, we created that life with our thoughts, with our imaginations, with our dreams. Whatever you imagine, that becomes. Whatever you think, that becomes. If I know consciously how to use my thoughts, how to use my thinking power, then we make our lives as we want it to be.

If you pause a little you will realize we have freedom to think but we are not free to think. We are living in frames; society, system, culture, religion, philosophy -- we are so boxed in that we are unable to think. Since we are not free, we need to first get liberated! Only with wisdom we can think. And wisdom comes with consciousness.First discover higher consciousness by cultivating a meditative attitude.

All matter is energy, energy is consciousness, all force is consciousness. Strength comes when you are positive, you feel healthy; when you are destructive you start feeling different, you start feeling weak. When your thoughts are healthy, positive, you start feeling strong. When your thoughts are negative, you start feeling weak. When we are sincere, we feel strong; when we are not sincere, we start feeling very weak.

Do not confuse positive thoughts with the ego. Such thoughts relate only to yourself. Positive thoughts are when you feel positive not just about yourself but about everyone around you. That again is born only with a meditative attitude.

So the first step for any kind of meditation is to develop the right attitude through watching your breath and slowly progressing to discover your inner Self.

Courtesy: Speaking Tree

Swami Brahmananda on Meditation and Realization

Swami Brahmananda was one of the most eminent and beloved of the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. The following is an excerpt from the book Spiritual Teachings of Swami Brahmananda.

Q: Maharaj, I am practicing Japam and meditation, but I have not yet acquired any taste for these. Somehow or other I am struggling on. What must I do?

Swami Brahmananda: Is it possible to have that taste in the beginning? No. Struggle hard to attain it. Concentrate all your energies on its achievement,and never for a moment pay heed to other matters. Apply yourself whole-heartedly to it and to it alone. Onward, onward! Never be satisfied with your present state of mind. Try to create within yourself a burning dissatisfaction. Say to yourself “What progress am I making? Not a bit.” Sri Ramakrishna used to say to the Divine Mother “Mother, another day is gone and I have not seen Thee!”

Reflect

Every night before you go to bed, think for awhile how much time you have spent in doing good deeds, how much again in doing useless things; how much time you have utilized in meditation and how much you have wasted in idleness. Make your mind strong through Tapasya (austerity) and Brahmacharya (continence) .

In rich men’s houses they keep a Darwan (porter) whose duty is to prevent thieves, cows, sheep, etc., from entering the compound. The mind is man’s Danwan. The stronger the mind becomes, the better. Mind has also been compared to a restive horse. Such a horse generally takes the rider along the wrong path. Only he who can hold a tight rein and check the horse can go the right way. Struggle, struggle on! What are you doing? Is everything achieved by the mere wearing of the Gerua cloth (ochre-coloured cloth of the Sannyasin) or by renunciation of hearth and home? What have you realized? Time is flying. Do not waste a single moment. You will be able to work hard only another three or four years at the most. Afterwards both body and mind will become weak and infirm and you will not be able to do anything. What can be achieved without diligence?

You are thinking, “Let us first of all have yearning, faith and devotion; then we shall do our Sadhana (spiritual practices).” Is that possible? Can we see the day without the break of dawn? When the Lord comes, love, devotion and faith follow Him as His retinue.

Be up and doing!

Can anything be achieved without Tapasya? Brahma at first heard–“Tapas (meditate), Tapas(meditate), Tapas (meditate)” Do you not see what a severe Tapasya even the Avataras (Incarnations of God) had to perform? Has anybody gained anything without labour? Buddha, Sankara and others what tremendous austerities they practiced in their lives! What burning renunciation they possessed! What severe Sadhana they performed!

Real faith cannot be had in the beginning. First realization, then faith. But at first the Sadhaka (aspirant) has to pin his faith “blind faith” it may be to the precepts of his Guru (spiritual teacher) or of some great soul; then only can he advance toward the goal.

Do you not know the parable of the oyster as told by Sri Ramakrishna? The oyster floats about on the surface of the sea with its shell wide open, just for a little drop of the Swati-rain (rain falling when the star Swati or Arcturus is in the ascendant). As soon as it gets a rain drop, it dives down to the ocean-bed and there forms a fine pearl. Like the oyster, you too should be up and doing and then dive deep into the ocean of meditation.

You have no self-reliance. Personal exertion is an indispensable factor for success in the spiritual life. Do something for a period of at least four years. Then if you do not make any tangible progress,come and take me to task.

Japam and meditation are impossible unless you transcend the limitations of Rajas (excessive activity) and Tamas (inertia or lethargy). Afterwards,you have to rise even above Sattwa (illumination) and attain the high spiritual plane from where there is no return.

How difficult is the attainment of a human birth! Yet it is only in this human birth that God-realization is possible. Strive hard in this life and reach that state from which you will not have to comeback.

Step by step

The mind is to be raised, step by step, from the gross state to the subtle, then to the causal state, still further to the Great Cause (Mahakarana) and finally to Samadhi (highest illumination). Resign yourself fully to the Lord. He is everything. There is nothing besides. “Verily all this is Brahman.” Everything is His and His only. Never be calculating. Is self-surrender possible in a day? When that is achieved, everything is achieved. One must struggle hard for it.

Life is eternal. The span of man’s life is at most a hundred years. Give up the pleasures of these hundred years, if you want to enjoy eternal life and, with it, eternal bliss.

Courtesy: Atma Jyoti Blog

Speaking Tree: Nurture With Nature

Nature’s mystic power can elevate our soul to a consciousness by which we can discover ourselves, writes APARAJITA BHOOSHAN

Far from the maddening crowd, rainbows shine through silver clouds, songs of birds echo across flowering valleys, waterfalls cascade down majestic mountains and we pause to wonder about the poetic painter whose imagination creates sheer miracles on the canvas of the Universe.

As the sunflower turns towards the sun to soak in its energies, when we surrender to the warm embrace of nature, fatigue gives way to vigour and the mind finds new strength.

‘Nature cures, not the physician.’ Hippocrates recognised the powerful attribute of nature. In its pure, unpolluted state, nature contains all the energetic and spiritual elements needed for life and vitality!

Why do wind and water, trees and ether have this wondrous effect on us? It’s because all of creation including the human body comprise of the very elements that prakriti or nature is made up of. Prakritiand Purusha are the two different aspects of the manifest Brahmn, known as Iswara. Purush sets in motion the entire creative process and Prakriti gives shape and signifies pure energy.

Nature consists of life force or prana, by which all living entities are upheld, and, on manifestation, nature takes on the forms of earth, water, fire, air and ether. When we are physically and emotionally depleted, we lose these life-sustaining energies and negative energy accumulates, resulting in disease and disharmony. But nature automatically helps us discharge negative energy and recharges us with its life giving force! John Muir, the naturalist says, ‘Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad. Whatever is done and suffered by her creatures, all scars, she heals’!

Here’s how different elements of nature help rejuvenate and heal us:

Trees & Air: The energy converting activity of photosynthesis — the constant cycle of conversion by green plants — maintains the earth’s natural balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen. In the midst of green trees, our negativity is absorbed, and replenished with positive energy, making us feel better. A simple walk in the woods, or sitting under the shade of trees enhances our wellbeing.

Flowers: Flowers are powerful energy givers. When someone is unwell, we bring them flowers, helping them feel better. We also send flowers, along with loving thoughts to comfort the bereaved. And countless, invaluable herbs like basil and thyme are used in healing.

Earth: Just as we try to reach up to the heavens to receive its blessings, we need to reach down to mother earth to take away our negativity. Spending time in the garden gives us a calm connect with all of life. As we dig our fingers deep into the soft earth, we can feel its energy and our spirits soar! Walking barefoot on the ground or along the beach saying our meditation mantra is also a powerful way to heal.

Water: Rivers, lakes and oceans make us part of the flow, washing away resentment and help us cleanse ourselves physically and emotionally. Bathing is a sacred renewal, discarding the old and embracing the new.

Fire: Fire is an active force reflecting the passion and creativity within us. It can animate and create with its colours of red, orange and yellow. Thus, lighting diyas or earthen lamps in our homes, helps keep the environment pure and free of negativity.

Mountains: Nature’s peace and the pure air refresh us as we climb up the mountains. They influence us with their sense of stability and strength as we climb up. We find the will to touch skies, which otherwise seem unreachable. Sir Edmund Hillary said, ‘It is not the mountains we conquer, but ourselves’.

Ether: The fundamental element is ‘Akashik Intelligence’. Turning our hands upwards and consciously drawing in the blessings from the power we believe in, will enable the channels in our fingers to open and we will feel life flowing in with a tingling sensation.

If constraints do not allow us to ‘get away’, we can receive similar benefits by gazing at a blue sky overhead or a scenic painting, and practising visualisation. ‘God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars’, said Martin Luther.

The luminous star of Bethlehem led the wise men of the East to the manger where Jesus was born and Buddha found enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

Nature is the flautist and we the flute! When there is no disharmony and ego within, nature plays incomparable divine music through us.

Coutesy: Times of India