The Healthy, Nurturing, Home

A healthy home should be a healing space, a nurturing positive mind field. It can be a place where all wounds are healed. Alvin Toffler wrote ‘The family is the giant shock absorber of the family to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world!’ If your home is not a sanctuary but a battle-field do something about it. Get help, your work. Have a rule to avoid difficult topics during meal times or bed time. Music, if is soothing, can be a powerful force for peace. The very walls absorb the vibrations of the music. Mantras can do the same for your home. I sometimes feel that if music can be infused into the mindspace so that it plays quietly in your mind, as the background to your day, it can have a really soothing affect. Avoid violent, depressing programmes. Just as you would not allow a terrorist into your home, do not allow such movies into the sacred space of your home. You surely are the protector of the field that exists in your home. Make your home fragrant with incense. Clean and sparkling and beautiful. Respectful of the sacred forces that can animate your home.

FROM ZERO TO HERO

Handling and learning from failure is a skill that will ensure you achieve your goals. Like boxing, in life also there is no dishonour in falling down. You lose only when you fail to get up. “Learning to fail well is important”, said Rahul Dravid, renowned cricketer at a camp for teenage cricketers. World Mental health day is celebrated in October. The key element of mental health is the capacity to deal with the ups and downs of life. The capacity to deal with failure, enhances our capacity to have healthy relationships, make good life choices, maintain physical health and well being. So how do we recover from failure and even make it a stepping stone to success. Embrace the experience of failure. Feel the pain, grieve and learn from it. Then get up and go. If the failure shatters you and makes you feel there is nothing left to live for, get professional help from a therapist. Never failing, means you are not leaving your comfort zone. Failure, properly handled, is good for you and makes you a more compassionate person. Focus on the present. Be gentle with yourself. Take care of your health. Introduce a few happiness breaks into every day: activities that definitely make you happy. Meet positive friends. The past is over and no one knows the future. The present is yours to shape. It is a gift. Enjoy it. Get help to develop a plan for what to do next. Lay down the burdens of yesterday and develop choices for what to do tomorrow. This is a time of freedom, when you can recreate your life and leave behind what you don’t like. Choose to do something you love that you have never pursued seriously. Something that makes you feels blissful. Do something for others. It will give you jolt of bliss. Reach out to someone who cannot do anything for you. Failure can be God’s greatest gift to you. Enjoy it!

Action Plan to Enhance Positives

• Write a love letter to your parents • Buy tickets to a music concert and give away some of it. • Treat yourself to a full moon dinner with loved ones. • Take your dog to the beach. • Plant a tree and take care of it (a tree is an oxygen factory). • Give away seeds. The monsoons are awaiting to make them grow • Feed the birds. Do God’s work

Celebrate the Positives

Celebrate the positive in all interactions. Rest assured that God did not create you for the sole purpose of correcting others or making them unhappy. When we say namaste, we say ‘I bow to the Divine in you’. ‘Vasudeva Kutumbakam’ say, our holy book – the whole world is your family. Imagine the rich network of love you could create, where your children can be nurtured if you believed and practiced this. The most inexpensive ticket to happiness is helping others and making others happy. So spread happiness like Amul butter on bread. It will stick to your fingers. Create a happiness committee in your street, which meets every month to create a happy street. Every month as you decide to install comfort touch, celebrate Diwali or have a painting competition for kids, neighbours become friends.

Take them everyday!

1. Take short relaxation breaks, at least thrice a day. 2. Eat fresh, energy-giving foods. 3. Take a walk outdoors during lunch break. 4. Stay away from politics and back-biting. 5. Involve your spouse and children in your work. Bring them to the office during lunch break or on a Saturday. 6. Spend time reading and improving your mind. 7. Get involved in activities that will benefit others. 8. Develop an absorbing hobby or skill—driving, dancing, gardening, carpentry, painting, amateur radio, etc. 9. Keep in touch with your close friends and extended family; use the power of the internet. 10. Plan to cut off from work on weekends.

Steps to increase everyday happiness

• Do the crossword as you age • Take up a course of study that will improve your work skills: may be computer literacy • Eat a piece of dark chocolate 4 times a week. • Have at least four interesting, intimate conversations with family and friends every day. • Spend at least two hours outdoors. • Participate in at least one group activity. • Have a good belly laugh. • Forgive and forget and what you cannot forgive, forget. • Find a meaningful job to do, even if unpaid. • Live in the present and enjoy it.

World Kindness Day

The world kindness movement began incorporating NGO’s on November 13th 1988. The actions on this day make everyone feel that kindness is cool. Young, trendy people, caring adults, celebrities participate to make kindness so viral. Corporates who participate in my year long Innovation Initiatives have a Make Things Better (MTB) Board in the front office. Anyone can post a note which says ‘You made things better by ………………, about a team member’. The person who gets the maximum MTB notes, is recognized, as also the person who posts the most MTBs. Kindness, generosity and co-operation can spread faster than violence or hatred. A study conducted by San Diego and Harvard Universities provide laboratory evidence that co-operative behavior is contagious. When the people benefit from kindness, they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of collaboration that influences dozens more in a social network. Research and Shakespeare have both shown that kindness benefits both giver and the receiver, filling the blood stream with neurotransmitters of relaxation and contentment. Serotonin and endorphins elevate the mood. Doctors have to do less when people are kind and content. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the ‘most curative herbs and agents’ of gentleness and kindness is ensuring health and well being. So on World Kindness Day, start a daily, lifelong habit of kindness. Let’s start to: 1. Hug all the loved ones in your life who rarely get a hug – your parents and grandparents. 2. Write love letters to them recording how you feel, before it is too late! 3. In Singapore, they gave away 45,000 yellow flowers last year. 4. Canada had a Kindness Concert. 5. Put out grains and water for birds to feed. 6. Adopt a elder who has no visitors and cheer up that elder by visiting him once a week or fortnightly or monthly – whichever is feasible. As the Dalai Lama said, “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” Send this to all your friends. Let’s go viral with this.