Category: Life

Laws of 20 minutes

On By Anita SatyajitIn GD, learning, Life, Personal, spiritualityLeave a comment

Is it possible to move beyond the mind? I look around me at my family and friends, and feel no. How earth do ‘I’ ever do it? Then I look at my teacher GD, my god Sai Baba, all the spiritual teachers across the earth, and I feel this peace, this possibility emerge inside. ‘Of course it is possible’, says something inside. ‘You are just too scared to try’. And then I choose, because all our choices, GD says, are either based on love or fear. So I choose from love. I want silence.

GD recently warned us about the dangers of being too dependent on healing, clearing and other techniques. Turns out, he reminded our spiritual circle about it in 2009 as well, when I wasn’t in the group. Hearing a talk on the Value of Silence by him back then, I discovered a real treasure. Excerpts from that conversation as he says and I understood it, follow:-

Most of the silence in our life is replaced with words. But how much information do you really want to be able to stay silent for 20 minutes a day. The ego loves knowledge and so that is why we need even information on how to stay silent. So here are some laws of 20 minutes:-

  • Don’t aim to reach anywhere.
  • No desire to understand anything.
  • No desire to silence the mind
  • No desire to relax the body. They are but sensations that arise.
  • No desire to control the environment
  • No war with the world or yourself.
  • No desire to improve self-

Self-improvement is an outside goal; silence tells you everything is inside, it is here. There is a simple allowing that exists during those 20 mins. You as ego don’t interfere. There should be no you. Doing, fixing, improving is a continuous process and all doing implies a future. Choose to rest in the now.  A Course in Miracles says, “God is so kind he has given you fulfillment from the time before you are born.” But we never notice it.

So don’t insist on mental silence. If you find silence difficult, use music or a discourse because this involves pure listening. Pure listening doesn’t involve the thought or mind. Don’t insist on anything, because that is what you are doing the rest of the day. Just stay awake, stay dead.

Soon, if you are lucky, you will find you will spend your entire day in surrender. Everything just happens. How will you know? Because there won’t be a struggle. Ego only knows struggle and fight. But don’t try and be clever. Don’t convert negative thoughts to positive in these 20 minutes. Everything is allowed. During this journey, if you get even a whiff, for even a second… this bliss of surrender is so beautiful that then, nothing else matters.

Embracing Change (EFT Script)

On By Anita SatyajitIn LifeLeave a comment

Serene Reflection

One of my readers wrote in requesting for an EFT script to cope with change.  So before I share the script I wrote in response to that request, I felt it relevant to share one my recent poems from FB here:

Sometimes we pretend to ourselves
That we are waiting for someone or something
That everlasting joy will be ours then.

But, the truth is our happiness is here.
And we don’t really want anything to change
Neither us, nor our circumstance.

For with all that we want
to run from
There is also much
That which we don’t wish to end.

It is like that in a dualistic world.
Light and darkness
Always go hand in hand.

The truth is that our motivations and interests are often conflicting and or confused.  Hence, this script begins from that internal push and pull, and then move towards a greater ease and…

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Unlearn and re-learn

On By Anita SatyajitIn LifeLeave a comment

This blog was for me and about me. Somewhere with spirituality, came a very strong and large spiritual ego. A “I know” which began to pervade everything I did and I strongly began to believe I know. But now I know that I don’t really know what I thought I knew. Ha ha ha.

The past two months have been a personally tough time. The seeds of this was sowed way back last year and I didn’t even notice it. It somehow takes a physical crash for me to begin to pay fresh attention to how I have wandered off from myself and the truth. How I begin to live in a world of dreams and imaginations believing every thought I have to be its own reality. I had wandered off from faith and began to believe in that I was somehow responsible for life, that of mine and others. And that has brought with it this hardness, this struggle, this physical turmoil and an intense return of fears, anxieties and panic.

Do I know better now that I need to stop resisting this, stop trying to quickly get rid of it and instead work on it, allow my body to feel the sensations as my mind works out the issues? I hope so. I need to haul attention away from my continually chattering mind which is full of negative fears and focus on what I remember. I need to unlearn how I did this this last time and dwell fresh into simple things that will bring me back to God. No this blog, this life cannot be about what I can teach others. This is about what I learn  This journey is about me moving the I am not this body-mind information to awareness that I am not this body mind.

Every time I am unwell and fall into this pit of fear, I wait to be rescued. And it has never worked. There is this beautiful line in the movie Manjhi- The mountain man. “Bhagwan ke bharose mat bhaito. Kya pata Bhagwaan harame bharose baita ho” (which can be loosely translated as -Don’t wait for God to come rescue you. Who knows he maybe depending on you instead. ) It is time to rescue myself.

 

Stepping out of the dream

On By Anita SatyajitIn GD, learning, Life, spiritualityLeave a comment

In the past three weeks, our spiritual circle has been having fantastic sessions with GD and each session is taking us further and further into the truth. A few days back, I re-posted Aalif’s blog about the story of me. GD then lead us to examine this story of me deeper, to see everything that occurred as a dream  and to question the very dream, this very story of me.

One of the ways in which GD suggested we do this was by making a list of all the things we have made important.  “Which part of the world are you making real, including making the you character perfect,” he asked us to check. Some very other important reminders for me included –

  •  The dreamland is the sum total of the past. The more we live in it, the more distorted life is. The more we step out of it, the more simple life is.
  • Choices are real only in the dream. Polarities exist only in the dream. For the ego there are thousands of choices; every day or every moment is a choosing. But in truth there is only one choice- in the dream or out.
  • In this life, all choices are the same, what are you going to think about?
  • Solving, fixing, getting out of the problem is how the dream works. Frantic search for solutions is how it works. But what if the dream can’t be fixed, doesn’t need to be fixed. What if you could take a deep breath and let the dream go. What if we could say, it doesn’t matter how it unfolds.
  • Observe, how does your mind keep the dream? It needs speed, to do that it needs some subjects to chew upon. the more it chews, the more the subject stays alive. if the mind slows down, how will it keep the dream alive?
  • As long as one runs with the dream, peace and consciousness is not possible. When the running stops internally there is no dream, no you.

I have been meditating over this since Sunday. One of the thought that arose was that there is only one single thing which keeps the dream alive – fear. All stories of money, health, love, and even happiness, are about not experiencing discomfort. So while awareness brings us back to the I, it is complete and total trust and surrender that lead us from the dream to consciousness.

I have this habit of reading random parts from some spiritual books. Nisargadatta Maharaj’s  ‘I am That’ happens to be a favourite. Last night, mulling about this, I opened a page. Here is what Maharaj said , ” There is no need for a link between a real world and an imaginary one, for there cannot be any. Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically and scrutinize every detail. My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed for pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not know what is pain. Your mistake likes in the belief that you were born. You were never born and you never die.”

…..

To download the entire 60 minute talk which includes further insights and a deeply meditative space – as well as other Q&A and clearings from GD’s group telephonic sessions – go to the Core Healing India Archives.

Conscious Child Project

On By Anita SatyajitIn Children, Family, learning, Life, spirituality3 Comments

This is something I have been intending to do for days. Something I felt called to do at the end of the last year. Conscious Child Project is a blog on making spirituality, mindfulness and social sensitivity a part of our children’s daily lives. Do check it out. If you are someone with kids, do consider making spirituality a part of your child’s life too.

The economic worth of I

On By Anita SatyajitIn Indian Society, learning, Life, spiritualityLeave a comment

One of the constant questions that arises in people’s mind when it comes to healing or therapy or even investing in spiritual courses/activities is, how will we benefit from it (or the unsaid, is this worth the expense). This often makes me sad in more ways than I let on. But I see this as a societal issue and not as someone’s personal issue.

As a society, all of us grow up associating some economic worth to every activity. Most of what we do has to do with money. The education system itself raises us to be productive clogs who perform certain activities to contribute to the smooth functioning of the economy. And so by the time we have completed our graduation, all we can think of ourselves is in terms of our economic worth. What we can earn is how we measure our worth. All I need, to be sure of this is to look around at ourselves and the people around us. What is the most common question we ask a stranger- “what do you do?” I have written more about this in the wasting my day blog post.

The thing is because of this economic association with personal worth, most people end up only spending on activities that enhance their professional skills and look good on a resume ( which results in economic benefits) or on things that bring us instant gratification like eating out, clothes, etc. But in the end, aren’t both only about how the world looks at you? Will they truly bring you lasting joy? If you had to measure your worth, would you do it with money or with the attributes of love, goodness, compassion, etc. that you possess? Our children give us no monetary benefits. It is a hug from them that fills our heart. What brings more peace, money in the bank and a lonely child or maybe a few thousands lesser but time with your child in the park? I really wish sometimes that I could shake people out of this strange self-absorbed existence and make them address the impermanence of it all.

I am not saying money is bad, it is simply a means, a product itself. Why should we spend on healing, therapy and spiritual pursuits? Simply because they are not an expense, they are probably the best investment you can make. Even better than life insurance because what you learn is something you can carry beyond this body. Nothing else on earth can allow you that. The more we invest in this personality, chase it, the more we lose out on the larger picture of our place in the universe- the real reason why we are on this earth.

The power of knowledge is limited but the power of awareness, inquiry and expansion is limitless. Knowing how to control your own mind, manage your own health and bring in your happiness is invaluable. If we keep looking at ourselves as simply money-generating and consuming creatures, we will never live up to our true human or soul potential.