Meditation

Meditation is the broom that sweeps out the negative emotions and pours the honey of tranquillity into the mind. There are many forms of meditation. Here are some examples: Each of our senses provides us with new adventures and helps us live more fully. Often, however, our senses are scrambled or numbed by the hurry of life. Opening-up meditation gives us a heightened awareness of our senses. Explore each one of your senses and experience their immense potential for joy. The purpose of this meditation is to relax the physical body and the mind.

This exercise of sense-opening can be performed with any object, and while taking a walk in the park, in the house, or at your workplace. For the purpose of the example here we will use an apple. Practise this meditation for ten minutes. Some actions are performed simultaneously, but focus on one sense at a time.

1. See: Take an apple and closely examine its outer skin—its colour variations and texture. Peel it and inspect the edge of the peel. Look at the inside of the peel. Cut the apple into wedges and look closely at them. Break open a wedge and examine the heart of the apple—the tiny seeds and the wooden core. It is even permissible to use a magnifying glass.

2. Hear: Squeeze the apple. Is there a sound? As you peel it, listen. Bend the peel and listen to the sounds. What sound is it? Close your eyes and break a wedge in half. What sound is there? Rub your fingers along the outside of the peel. Is there a sound? Rub your fingers along the inside of the peel. What difference is there?

3. Touch: Close your eyes and rub your fingers along the outside of an unpeeled apple. Feel the texture. Rub your hands all over the apple. Spend five minutes examining the apple with your fingers before peeling it. Peel it slowly, feeling each piece. Break the apple into wedges and explore each wedge. Feel the inside of the peel. Examine the edges.

4. Taste: Close your eyes and place a wedge of the apple in your mouth. Bite slowly into the wedge. Bite a piece of the peel. Taste the pulp. How many different tastes are there in an apple?

5. Smell: Sniff an unpeeled apple. Peel it and smell the inside of the peel. Smell a wedge. Bend the peel and smell the acid as it explodes from the peel. Smell the pulp. Smell a squeezed wedge. How many different smells are there in an apple?

By extending the senses one forgets about present problems and is able to relax. By allowing in more than the ordinary amount of information from a single sense, other thoughts are blocked. That is why it is called meditation. It must be patently apparent that if one can extend the senses to examine an apple, those senses can be used in an even more extensive way during a walk in the park, or on a city road, on the way to work, or during lunch. It is a handy, quick and efficient way to meditate. It will even work with an apple!

Field of Emotional Energy

Around every person there is a field of emotional energy. Some people always look radiant, and everything in their life flourishes and grows. They have a positive energy field around them. Some people, on the other hand, always have a morose or tense air about them, and everything in their life seems to fade and die. They have a negative energy field around them. A positive field is created by positive emotions and a negative field draws sustenance from negative emotions.

Energy causes all beings to act in this world. The higher the level of energy, the greater the accomplishments. All beings have within them the all-pervading life-force, the same one that creates and sustains life in the universe. It is the universal or cosmic energy that binds and connects all creatures in a single, networked web. That is why it is difficult to be completely happy while hurting others. 

Mechanisms of Yoga

1. Yama: Our attitude towards our environment.

2. Niyama: Our attitude towards ourselves.

3. Asana: The practice of body exercises.

4. Pranayama: The practice of breathing exercises.

5. Pratyahara: The restraint of our senses.

6. Dharana: The ability to direct our minds.

7. Dhyana: The ability to develop interactions with what we seek to understand.

8. Samadhi: Complete integration with the object to be understood.

Rejuvenate the physical system

Yoga rejuvenates the physical system and restores mental equilibrium. The word ‘yoga’ is derived from the Sanskrit word yuj which means to ‘yoke’, ‘unite’ or ‘join’. It implies the joining or uniting of the individual consciousness with the universal consciousness. This chapter deals with the most popular element of yoga—asanas or body exercises. Yogasana is the science of the beauty of form. It combines effortless postures and definite stances in the projection of a healthy and striking personality. Asanas mould every part of the body to its ideal contours.

Yogasanas, in conjunction with pranayama, bring harmony and balance to every part of the body, and are highly therapeutic for the body, mind and soul.

Sacred way of Eating

·         Sit down peacefully to eat. Close your eyes and allow your mind to leave all other subjects and return to the food before you.

·          Choose the fuel for rebuilding your body with care.

·          Thank the universe for creating the food that will give you the energy to accomplish your goals.

·          Focus on the sight, smell, feel, touch, and finally the taste of the food you are eating. As you chew, be completely assured that the food is gently repairing all the cells of your body.

The Basis for Life

Food brings people together, allows human beings to feel satisfied and comfortable, connects us with the earth and provides us with health. You are what you eat. Eating should be regarded as a sacred act. In an orthodox Hindu home, food is offered to the family deity first and is then consumed as prasad or offering with the diety’s blessing. There is a basic similarity between the rituals observed in offering food to the deity and those in eating oneself. In both cases, food is offered as an oblation to the five pranas which are regarded as five fires. Even if one does not follow this ritualistic concept, one should make eating a fully conscious and peaceful act. Hurry, worry, anger, distractions and chattering should be avoided while eating.

Live Happily and Healthily

Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review in USA, published a convincing account of his dramatic recovery from a debilitating  and incurable disease of the connective tissue in the book, “Anatomy of an Illness”. ‘Many activities create the chemicals of happiness and tranquillity in the body.’

Wise gurus, and now modern research, both believe that meditation can contribute enormously to an individual’s psychological and physiological wellbeing. It reduces stress, hypertension, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, improves cardiovascular health, memory and concentration, work efficiency, and immunological resistance to diseases. As a result, some form of meditation has become an essential part of most holistic health programmes. Your Happiness Quotient is directly affected by your physical condition. Health is the foundation for a feeling of wellbeing and joy. It is difficult to be full of energy and enthusiasm if you are not in a state of positive health.

A Holistic Approach to Health

Sushruta Samhita, the ancient Indian work by the physician Sushruta, describes perfect health as a state where all body parts function at their optimal level and wherein the body, mind and spirit are in perfect balance and in a state of bliss. This is the highest goal.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely an absence of diseases or infirmity. Really speaking, health is not a state but a continuous adjustment to the changing demands of life and the environment. Positive health implies perfect functioning of body and mind in a given society.

Ayurveda defines health as: Svasthya—to be one’s own spiritual self. It is a state of balance between the three doshas (which are mind body energies: vata or wind; pitta or bile; and kapha or phlegm) that govern our external and internal environment, leading to a contented

state of the senses, mind and soul.

The Seventh Radiant Action For Dharmic Living

You can fool everybody, but you cannot fool yourself. Not even for a single minute. Doing your dharma as you understand it, alone can make you happy. If you feel that what you are doing is adharma, you can never be happy. 

Think what we have done to chickens. Look at chickens in the yard. How happy they are flying around, pecking in the dust playing with their other fluffy chickens. Think how they feel in poultry farms, packed together, unable to move except to peck at their food. The poultry farms want to improve their profit, by keeping them fat and inactive.

The Sixth Radiant Action For Social Bonding

No man is an island, but a part of the Main, wrote the pensive poet John Donne. Man is a social animal and needs to live in harmony with fellow human beings. Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people, to communicate effectively with them, to identify what motivates them, and to work cooperatively with them. Intrapersonal intelligence is the inward ability to understand and form an accurate model of one’s self and to operate that model effectively to live life. Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard School of Psychology says that the two aspects of personal intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal, form the most important foundation for a happy, fulfilling life. For those who define success as happiness, these two elements are essential to learn and practice.

The Fifth Radiant Action For Nurturing The Workplace

‘People can be very happy if they love their work,’ A national anthem celebrates nationhood, the blood, sweat and tears of creating a country. It aims to transcend logic and unleash the tigers of passion. The Americans stand there, hand on heart, before their flag and sing the Stars and Stripes. It creates a wave of national pride and primes people for leadership. The Japanese use this same force to create love for the company they work in. Vivekananda carried the message of India to the world with his matchless talk which starts, “Arise, Awake, stop not till the goal is reached”!

When you infuse a sense of pride and joy in what you do, it becomes a joyful experience, instead of a chore. To work at something you love, to be “self-actualised”, in Maslow’s terms, is to protect yourself against dying young.

The Third Radiant Action For Personal Wellness

Before you are a husband, a father, a son or a team mate, you are a person. Explore the self, the ‘you’ in your life. Most people go through life without being fully aware of their own identity. Everyone on earth is given only twenty-four hours. Use them wisely so that you have more life in your years. You cannot leave footprints on the sands of time just because you used your Blackberry better than anyone else! Music has the power to purify the emotional field like nothing else. Pranayama helps you sing without losing your breath. The mindspace becomes sweetly harmonious and no harsh words can be spoken there.

The Second Radiant Action For Emotional Wellness

Emotions pour into the blood stream like mountain streams on a parched desert.  A garden blooms, with the fountains of compassion, the flowers of friendship, the moon light of wonder, the arrowing birds of courage and the butterflies of laughter and humor.  Positive emotions create a garden around you.  Negative emotions create rocks and stones, thorns, snakes and scorpions in your mind space.  Meditation, practiced regularly, can help you develop the capacity to be analytical, positive, disciplined and eliminate negative fields. The positive field is created by a common prayer or “mantra”.  A mental process which draws a magic circle around all those who are participating.  A common exercise, a common company song, common goals, all enhance the power of the positive field.  A handshake, a friendly look, an encouraging word are key factors. When you think, believe and act in a positive manner, you create a positive field for yourself and others.

The First Radiant Action For Physical Wellness

Health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being, not merely an absence of diseases or infirmity.  Really speaking, health is not a state but a continuous adjustment to the changing demands of life and the environment.  Positive health implies perfect functioning of body and mind in a given society.

All the ancients believed that no attempt should be made to cure the body without treating the soul.  To be healthy is to have the ability, despite an occasional bout of illness, to live with full use of your faculties and to be vigorous, alert and happy to be alive, even in old age.  This concept of operational health has been termed ‘wellness’.  It is a sense of all-round well-being.