Breaks Boosts Happiness

All things with reverence and sraddha

Decide to approach all events, all people, and all things with affection, reverence and ‘Sraddha.’ This reverence is due to all, because of the divine spark that dwells in everyone whether he is a legend or a failure. Sometimes it is obvious. It is the silent flame of consciousness that reaches out to you from a flowering creeper or a healthy pet. Sometimes this life force has lost its vitality and is dimmed by dirt, lethargy and lack of care. Clean the glass of your Life’s lamp. Make the light shine through. When you consider yourself sacred, you will treat yourself well. You will wear clean, fresh clothes, ironed and starched, mended if torn, but clean and fresh. You will smile at yourself, encourage yourself. Just as you put on clean fresh clothes, you will also clean up the mental space or field around you. Sweep out all ill-will, anger, fear and anxiety. Let there be the fragrance of incense, divinity of prayer and mantra, the smiles of loved ones, laughter and joy, the smell and taste of good, nutritious food. It is as important to clean the field around you, as it is to have a bath. Sweep out the sad baggage of the past. Take into that field only what is bright and elevating, fine and happy.

Yoga

The word ‘yoga’ is derived from the Sanskrit word yuj which means ‘yoke’ attach or ‘join’. It means the joining or uniting of the individual consciousness with the universal consciousness, or self-realisation. The science of yoga was systematised by Maharishi Patanjanli in 285 yogasutras. There are eight components of yoga. These are: 1. Yama: Our attitudes towards our environment. 2. Niyama: Our attitudes 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. Their respective meanings are: i) Universal moral commandments. ii) Self-purification by discipline. iii) Posture. iv) Rhythmic control of breath. v) Withdrawal of the mind from the domination of the senses and exterior object. vi) Concentration. vii) Meditation. viii) Thoughtless state in which one becomes one with the object of his meditation.

Rediscover the child in you

Workplace and Stress

Ambition and increasing peer pressure ensures the 'rat in a trap syndrome', where you are trapped into running faster and faster to stay in the same place. This note is dedicated to those involved in the daily rat race that life has become. It will help you avoid the ill effects of a fast-track career in today's competitive environment. It will focus on innovative approaches to de-stress, both on an individual and group levels. Work follows us everywhere. The blurring of work and leisure has intensified in this era of twenty-four-hour access, when the computer is just a fingertip away and the Blackberry and the cellphone are as intimate as a heartbeat. The delicate tissues of the body are constantly awash in the lethal chemical bath of chronic stress. Interactive electronic devices have made stress continuous. Home is no longer a refuge. I was talking to one of the brilliant young men in a fast-track company. He said, ‘No one takes you seriously if you leave office before nine pm. The fellow who stays on till twelve pm to answer his last email, received at 11.45 pm from the boss in the US, is a winner. The fact that he had an auto accident going home makes him a corporate hero!’

Health is wealth and critical to happiness

Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely an absence of disease 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 highest spiritual self. It is the state of equilibrium of the three doshas or mind-body energies that govern our external and internal environment―vata (wind); pitta (bile); and kapha (phlegm), along with a contented state of the senses, mind and soul. All the ancients believed that no attempt should be made to cure the body without treating the mind and 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 having a joie de vivre, even in old age. This concept of operational health has been termed ‘wellness’. It is a sense of all-round wellbeing.

Cultivating Happiness

Focus on cultivating happy people and avoid toxic people. Build protective walls against toxic events that threaten your tranquillity. Too much television is tele-visham—tele-poison. Too much stimulation, a mindspace crowded by fantasy, people and events, distracts you from working on your own home and backyard to create a healthy self. Some days we seem to live a fantasy life dominated by daydreams while reality tugs at our heartstrings for attention, like a neglected child. There is no use focusing on Aishwarya Bacchan’s beauty while neglecting to do the most basic things to maintain yours. This is the only body, mind and soul you will be given. Take care of what is yours and enjoy it. Let the cells of your body be gently bathed in happiness, positive thoughts and healing energies. Run from, toxic people and build protective walls against toxic events that threaten your tranquility. The Vedas speak of the self as a beautiful lotus growing in the muddy waters of life. With its roots in the muck it rises above it, in perfect beauty and bliss.

Creating Joy in Family Life

Today everyone has a chance to maintain links with the extended family through the internet. It is a nourishing and often supportive network. Today, however, the family, as the ‘shock absorber of society, to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world,’ in the words of Alvin Toffler in his landmark work Future Shock, is going through a transitional phase. The breakdown of the joint family has led to a loosening of extended family relationships. The powerful mother-in-law of the joint family is emerging as the subdued caretaker of children, helping the educated daughter-in-law augment the double income of all upwardly mobile young couples. The large, amorphous, supportive joint family that supported a wide variety of people and bestowed unconditional love for the crippled, the old and the helpless, has been reduced to the nuclear family where everyone is in sharp focus. Much like the modern corporation, there is no place to hide, no place for passengers, and everyone has to pull their own weight. It is our mission to restore to it its traditional role as a place of rest and healing, albeit in a new paradigm. There should be one person in the family who can cushion the blows of the outside world. Someone who is not too busy to listen, give support, and manage the daily tasks of living. This could even be a paid caregiver or cook. Networking with parents, in-laws, neighbours, domestic help and friends is the key for working mothers.

Creating Joy in Family Life

Today everyone has a chance to maintain links with the extended family through the internet. It is a nourishing and often supportive network. Today, however, the family, as the ‘shock absorber of society, to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world,’ in the words of Alvin Toffler in his landmark work Future Shock, is going through a transitional phase. The breakdown of the joint family has led to a loosening of extended family relationships. The powerful mother-in-law of the joint family is emerging as the subdued caretaker of children, helping the educated daughter-in-law augment the double income of all upwardly mobile young couples. The large, amorphous, supportive joint family that supported a wide variety of people and bestowed unconditional love for the crippled, the old and the helpless, has been reduced to the nuclear family where everyone is in sharp focus. Much like the modern corporation, there is no place to hide, no place for passengers, and everyone has to pull their own weight. It is our mission to restore to it its traditional role as a place of rest and healing, albeit in a new paradigm. There should be one person in the family who can cushion the blows of the outside world. Someone who is not too busy to listen, give support, and manage the daily tasks of living. This could even be a paid caregiver or cook. Networking with parents, in-laws, neighbours, domestic help and friends is the key for working mothers.

Master the art of forgiveness

Steps for Personal Health

1. Take care of your health. You cannot deliver a prize-winning performance with a broken-down body. 2. Force the world to look at issues like: What kind of world are we leaving for our children? Where have leisure, poetry and caring been banished? Why has the door been shut on the smiles and joy of our children? Why do we have no time for our friends or small acts of kindness? Why are deadlines so terrible that they extract death as the price? None of us would mind dying for great causes, but to die for a power-point presentation, seems slightly frivolous. 3. Do not get stereotyped into how others see your role: as a mother or an all forgiving rescuer in the workplace. Encourage men to discover their so-called feminine qualities of sensitivity and caring. Do not stereotype men! 4. Affirm women who are role models instead of trying to find chinks in their armour. Network with them. There is a queen-bee complex, which causes successful women managers to surround themselves with male managers and discourage the entry of women. Identify this and speak up when required.

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.

Save the blood of earth!

‘Save the blood of earth!’ is the touching campaign by DGN Raja Gopalan from Coutrallam, the land of the medicinal waterfalls and the healing breeze. He has hands on experience cleaning lakes in his district. Many lakes need just a little help to keep them clean. The local people living around the lake need to feel that a dirty lake can harm their children’s health. I want to see the Chittlapakkam Lake in Tambaram. It had been cleaned just a couple of months ago. Already patches of water hyacinth were beginning to grow. Removing them how would be easy. A few months later it would take a lot of men, machines and money. On the far side, I can see garbage dump bit by bit garbage is sliding into the lake. In the pristine water there are lot of plastic covers on the edges. There is a beautiful walking track and benches. It could be a beautiful recreational spot. Locals has asked for lights to be put up around the walking track. The Rotary club of Tambaram is seeking support from 21 Rotary clubs to do it. The point is, the lake is like your drawing room. You need to clean it and watch it every day. A little cleaning can prevent it from becoming a multi million rupee health hazard. It is your lake go look at it. Plant trees around it. Pick up some garbage. Talk to other walkers, see your local civic officers tell them what’s happening. And you will have a beautiful lake attached to your home. With best wishes and regards, PDG Dr. Rekha Shetty WASRAG, WATER AMBASSADOR, RID 3232

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.

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.