Happiness Blog - Proactive Change

The results of transformative change are all around us this summer. Sunflower plants busting out from seeds where they have slept tightly curled, butterflies leaving behind their worn out cocoons, flowers dressing up the bare limbs of trees. This time as the financial year begins it is the time for the 3Rs rest, relaxation and rejuvenation of proactive change.

Change is the only certainty in an uncertain world. This year you will change merely because everything around you will change. What you can decide is whether you will lead the change or become a victim of it.

Think about proactively changing things in the following areas of your life.

1.       Personal

2.       Family

3.       Professional

4.       Social

Personal: Create goals that will improve your skills and build on your strengths. Tap into the passion that you have kept tightly leashed because you had no time. Did you always want to learn to play the guitar? Sign up now. Was Bollywood dancing what lights your fire? Do it. Sign up for a distance learning programme.

Family: Ask your family members to suggest change each of them would like. Try to see if it can be done. Don’t be a casualty of the corporate rat race.

Professional: Have a chat with your team mates. Volunteer for a tough blue sky job. Create a daily ‘huddle’ in your workplace so that everyone can meet and talk for a few minutes every morning. Make sure everyone participates. Work on making it a fun place.

Social: Create a face book page for your family and friends. Keep in touch, share pictures, keep them informed and interested and involved in an interesting activity: a get-together for all your friends, an annual family reunion, a pot luck meet and eat for all your neighbours.

Things will change anyway. Make sure they change in the way you want. And remember a butterfly is not an improved caterpillar. Just as a sunflower is not an improved seed.

Principles of Emotional Well-being

 •Listen to yourself.

• Live in the present moment. Now. Every minute.

• Discipline yourself—it will give you true freedom.

• Do not pretend to be in total control.

• Allow yourself to be vulnerable sometimes.

• Ask for help. Network.

• Reinvent and renew yourself periodically.

• Explore the concept of acceptance of self.

• Love yourself. Accept yourself, your body and mind, as you are.

• In your quest for self-improvement, affirm and love yourself as you are today, here and now.

• Accept your life, good and bad as it is now, as a divine gift.

• Love another. A gift of yourself is the greatest gift you can give.

• Keep the child in you alive. Cuddle, nurture and liberate the baby in you.

Principles of Healthy Living

 Start the day with a glass of warm water and a dash of lime.

·         Eat only freshly-cooked meals, not refrigerated leftovers.

·         Include one green vegetable and one yellow vegetable in every meal.

·         Go on a ‘juice fast’ for a day. Start with vegetable juice, and sipfruit juice for lunch and dinner.

·         Kick the old coffee-drinking habit. Have a glass of fresh fruit juice instead.

·         Make every meal an enjoyable experience. Set dishes out attractively and chew slowly to appreciate the full flavour of the foods you eat.

·         Make every meal an enjoyable experience. Set dishes out attractively and chew slowly to appreciate the full flavour of the foods you eat.

Living Lakes

Thousands of fish lay belly up dead in Ulsoor Lake in India’s garden city, Bangalore. There was a bund separating sewage from fresh water.  With the degradation of that bund, the oxygen levels fell and the fish died. Environmental degradation is destroying water bodies. There were 1000 lakes in Bangalore in the 80’s. Now there are only 200 lakes remaining. People go boating in the lake. They throw garbage into the lake. Apathy is the cause. How do we clean our water bodies of micro beads of plastic which enter our bodies through the food chain? Health, economics and ecology are all connected.  People sometimes feel they have nothing to do with the environment. But we are interconnected. What we do to water we do to those we love. Take responsibility. Lake authorities are pumping in oxygen to help solve the problem. You start watching the lake.

A Lake is an asset. Monitor the health of the lake in your neighbourhood. Gujarat has made lakes difficult to encroach. There were so many warning signs on the lake: Water hyacinth, higher temperatures and now the fish dying.  Lakes are converted into residential localities, untreated chemicals, cause irreversible damage.  We cannot afford this. Dissolved content in water oxygen is below 4mg/litre.  Over six hundred million litres of sewage flows into 3 lakes.  Drains open into lakes. Increased untreated sewage from 14 industries around the lake and fast urbanization are obvious threats. We need the environment more than the environment needs us, let’s do something about it.

The Detroit River which serves as a link between Lake Huron and Lake Erie was estimated to dispose off more than 700 million gallons of waste water daily and 150 million pounds of toxic polychlorinated biphenyl’s yearly, into the Detroit River. Steps have been taken to manage this pollution because the source point has been identified. But there are non source contaminants that seeÆp in through small diffuse sources like agricultural fertilizers, pesticides and manure. Even tougher is acid rain and leaking from septic tanks. This is far more difficult to handle.

The world’s largest fresh water Baikal Lake, in Siberia, has a volume of 5523 cubic miles of water (23,000 cubic kilometres) or approximately 20% of the earth’s surface water! Lake Huron is the largest fresh water lake in the world with a total surface are of 45410 square miles (117,611 square kilometres). But in terms of volume, it is much smaller: 2030 cubic miles.  The 25million year old Baikal Lake, is inhabited by over 2000 plants and animals. Over 40% of those life forms have not even been described yet! No wonder it is called the Galapagos of Russia. Over the last four decades the lake is becoming increasingly polluted.

Pollution of fresh water bodies not only makes water unfit for drinking, but also reduces recreational activities and reduces land value in the vicinity. Each of us as individuals needs to be aware and willing to spread the information about pollution. We also need to be aware of how our activities  are affecting the landscape and all the millions of living creatures in that environment.  We are responsible for our lakes and other water bodies.

Rekha Shetty

Water Warrior

Beware of Happiness Traps

Expecting too much from others.

• Not accepting yourself as you are; demanding too much of yourself.

• Not being content with anything.

• Feeling you are not contributing.

• Feeling excluded.

• Playing politics and being manipulative.

• Feeling you cannot prevent another’s suffering.

• Constantly craving for food.

• In a rush all the time.

• Excessively or often angry.

• Full of lethargy and inactivity.

• Having too much tiredness.

• Ignoring others.

Indigenous Health-Care Systems

The indigenous health-care system is commensurate with the traditional habits, lifestyle and value systems of a particular culture from where it has evolved. It cannot be effective if there is a radical change in the habits of that culture. This ‘patient–system– mismatch’ is very evident in the case of westernized American Indians who have lost their traditional healing capacities. On the contrary, the Keralites, for example, in spite of coming into contact with western culture, do not endorse its systems, and hold on to their own traditions. Perhaps that is why their age-old habit of using a high cholesterol diet has not resulted in an increased incidence of heart disease. The indigenous systems of medicine continue to have a stronghold in Kerala. All health-care systems, including modern medicine, are in agreement today over the issue that a patient’s psychological state has much to do with the healing process. Minor activities like taking part in a satsang, singing a tune you enjoy, and dancing for fun to your child’s delight can make you feel contented and allow the good chemicals flow.

‘The chief role of the doctor is, by various means, to induce the body to recover its trust in the Supreme Grace,’ said the Mother from Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, decades ago. The contact of the patient with the physician is only an occasion to awaken him to the touch of the healer within.