How to Deal With Loss

How to handle failure, loss, death—how to solve problems in thegreat textbook of life? There is no use solving problems in other people’s books. Concentrate on passing your own exams. Your life provides you with a chance to achieve the highest in yourself, by using pain as stepping-stones to enlightenment.

No one can avoid bad times, but you can ensure that you look at this time as a time for growth and learning. When the mind numbing pain that immediately follows loss has subsided, you can take proactive steps to provide emergency attention to heal your body, mind and spirit.

Pour music into your soul. Touch people who love you. Explore new places. Reach into great books and study alternate futures. Pamper yourself and ask your loved ones for hugs. Meditate. Be silent. Plug into the universe. Let go. Let God catch you. Your sankalpa or intention must be pure. Be clear about your goal. Be non-judgemental. Love and seek to understand with tenderness. Learn and immerse yourself in knowledge. Learn all you can about your chosen field from books, internet, from people, competitors. Remain focused. Never give up. Never,  ever.Help others, motivate them! Let others achieve their targets. Say no to negative people and emotions. Everything life offers is prasad—blessed by the gods. Good and bad experiences, people who love you and those who hate you, are all sent here to teach you. Go on to achieve your highest potential. Look for the highest in others. Know your purpose on earth, the

highest that God created you to become Question injustice. Stand up for those who cannot fight, speak for those who have no voice. Speak gently and with love. Receive this prasad, compliments, gifts and encouragement with grace. 

Necessary Steps to Increase Personal Happiness

·         The world is in your drawing room, it is clamouring to change your life with more and more sophisticated toys. As a popular saying goes, ‘What separates the men from the boys is just the price of their toys.’ Simplify and go home to what you really need.

·         The world is like a buffet counter at a five-star hotel. Let’s not grab everything on our plates. Let us be choosy, so that we may avoid spiritual indigestion and physical exhaustion.

·         Let us replace stress with positive emotions that engender joy. Let us increase our Happiness Quotient (HQ).

·         Finding a job you love is one of the ways you can immunize yourself against heart problems.

·         A good marriage is a protective shield against heart attacks.

·         Merely avoiding negative emotions is not enough; one should consistently cultivate the positive emotions of love, compassion, courage and peace.

New Ways for Corporate Women

Woman managers need to appreciate that it takes heroic energy to rock the cradle and rock the corporate world. First pin a badge for bravery on yourself for attempting it. Then, promise you will not even begin to tread the path that leads to the joyless land of being a super-woman or super-mom. Enlist your men and families as willing accomplices in the challenging task of reconstructing a corporate.

Workplace that lovingly accommodates the needs of humans, for families, for music, poetry and time for just standing and watching the world go by! Be kind to yourself. Love yourself. Conquer fear and overcome the need for instructions. Pursue the ability to adapt and be a leader of proactive change. The New World is not for those who are what Nehru called unwilling victims, dragged to be sacrificed on the altar of change. Be leaders to be accepted as such. Banish forever your fear of being centre stage, your reluctance to accept that you are where the buck stops.

Relearn and re-install the software of the human heart that your mothers embodied. The New Woman of the past decade must not forsaken her heritage of loving and caring for the tough hard-bitten so-called ‘male boss model.’ Both men and women managers need to put the human being at the centre of all business processes.

Water and Flowers

The most beautiful and common expression of God as an artist, is seen in flowers. Today, Scott Kelly Commander of the International Space Station tweeted a photo of a yellow Zenia, outlined in red! Last year he grew lettuce in space!

Flowers and water have a symbiotic relationship. You need water and sun to grow flowers.  Consider the rose  All that is precious and rare must be protected. Like the rose. A rose will bloom only when it is cherished. When it receives the benediction of rain and sun. When it is wrapped in the love that guards it against pests and the harshness of the elements. It needs to be carefully and regularly watered. You cannot forget any more than you can forget to feed your gold fish.

If you do not want to lavish so much care on your garden, get yourself a gaudy patch of sun flowers which bloom with loud and careless gaiety. Happily insensitive to the most hostile conditions. But remember a rose can fill your days with a fragrance no sunflower can aspire to.

On the other hand there are other plants which will flower only when they are not watered. One is often reminded, especially by those who have never had firsthand experience, that hardship refines the soul. I found this difficult to believe until I started growing bougainvillea.

This hardy shrub flowers only when it is starved. In the midst of the hottest summer in April and May, it is not watered for a week. The leaves grow yellow and fall. The branches stand gaunt and ghostly in the pitiless sun. After these weeks of this stern discipline, it is watered twice a week.

One morning I noticed tiny buds blistering the tips of every stem. The I began to water them profusely.

Three weeks later the garden was a blazing dazzle of colour. Branches of multi-coloured flowers exploded on every branch in an incredible celebration.

Then, it rained. All the earth was green with rejoicing. But the flowers of the bougainvillea began to drop in great unsightly handfulls. Till not a single flower was left. Leaves covered very limb, but not a single flower appeared.

Somehow there is always something flabby in those who have never known the exhilaration of the struggle. There is a loss of the sharp – edged flash of brilliance that comes only with the conquest of unbeatable odds.

Achenyo Idachaitra, from Bayeku, a riverine community in Ikorodu, Lagos, Nigeria, has turned the deadly plant, the water hyacinth, into a thriving business. Living in a rural community, criss crossed by Nature’s bounty of running water, she watched God’s gift being destroyed. The fishing industry crippled chocked water ways and transport destroyed, by a devilishly beautiful plant, with gorgeous, showy lavender flowers, called the water hyacinth. The Igala language has given it an unforgettable name: ‘death to mother and child’ (Kp Iye Kporia). Others call it the Devil’s weed.

She took action:

a.        She got into the waterways and harvested the water hyacinth

b.       The stems were dried

c.       She then contacted the Sabo community, who taught her to weave the stems into ropes.

Malam Yahaya, who spoke only Hausa, taught her. Today she has a flourishing business which makes, pens, table ware, purses and tissue boxes from the water hyacinth plant.

The same killer weed is now called ‘provider of food for mother and child’. Flowers and water are beautiful and create wealth.

Rekha Shetty

Water Warrior