Affirmations for Personal Wellbeing

You are a powerhouse of potential. The great Michelangelo was once asked how he created great statues. Old and half blind, Michelangelo stood before a block of marble, scarred and muddy from the quarries of Carrara. He said quietly, ‘I have never created a statue. I just stand before a block of marble and study it with reverence. For I know that within every block of marble, there lies a statue, waiting to be liberated by the touch of the Master’s hand.’ Within each of us lies hidden a masterpiece waiting to be liberated by the magic touch of attention. Only you can do it.

Be your own ‘expert’. Do not build negative ideas about yourself through the comments of others. Your self-talk should be calm, happy and elevating. Choose to see and hear what is beautiful and encouraging. When you are wounded, learn to soothe yourself by using these affirmations.

(Sit with eyes closed and silently affirm)

By nature I am kind, gentle and loving.

Any mistake committed is unintentional and I forgive myself and others for it.

God’s grace has created a magic circle of love, a safe haven for me and my loved ones.

I am capable of achieving my goals with hard work and dedication.

I look around me for help and knowledge to reach my goals.

I seek companions who encourage and help me.

Invest in Happiness

You can buy happiness by spending your money using these seven principles:

1.       Spend on experiences instead of things: holidays instead of jewels, movies instead of curios

2.       Spend on small every day pleasures, instead of saving till you are blue in the face, to buy the one, huge, dream house. Do not ignore the roses and the chocolates. Drink that great cup of coffee and wear great clothes.

3.       Don’t spend a lot on long term warranties.

4.       Pay now and consume later. Anticipation helps you enjoy the pleasure twice. Waiting for a time share holiday, planning your monthly movie or weekend getaway, adds to the joy.

5.       Look into details before making big investments.

A house on the beach, sounds good on paper. But if the traffic jams are terrible, you have to drive there, pay for the security and the caretaker and then think again.

6.       Avoid comparison shopping and keeping up with the Joneses.

7.       Spend on others. It will make you happier.

Exploring New Alternatives

Many management teams are involved in fire fighting and solving urgent matters that have developed into critical situations. Time needs to be set apart to study alternative solutions for the problems that lie under the surface of a running organization. ‘Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,’ say the Americans, meaning, do not change something that is working well. This is disastrous advice in the present context of rapid change. Status quo is the gateway to overnight obsolescence. Innovation should be planned when things are going well. When things are going badly, when survival itself is an issue, no one has the time or energy to look for alternatives.

Ashok Leyland has a YES program to harvest new ideas from young executives.

Happiness Bytes

The world is in your drawing room, it is clamouring to change your life with more and more sophisticated toys. As a popular jingle 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 HQ.

‘I felt like a waterfall,’ said Diane Roffe–Stainrotter, gold medallist skier in the 1994 winter Olympics. The joy of a job perfectly executed, fills the body with the chemicals of bliss.

Professor Mihalyi Csikzent speaks about a state called the flow, which athletes, musicians, surgeons—in fact everyone experiences when they are at their best. It is the experience of doing your job with total immersion in it. So absorbed are you, that there is no place for anxiety or niggling worries.

Finding a job you love is one of the ways you can immunise yourself against health problems. A good marriage is a protective shield against heart attacks.

The capacity to enjoy the free gifts of Nature—sunlight, rain or flowers starts the flow of the chemicals of bliss. It is in this gentle chemical bath that the body is able to replace dying and dead tissues. Merely avoiding negative emotions is not enough; one should consistently cultivate the positive emotions: love, compassion, courage and peace.

Stress is the epidemic of the new millennium. Protect yourself.

Stress and 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. The indigenous health-care systems 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 westernised Red Indians who have lost their traditional healing capacities. On the contrary, the Keralities, inspite of coming into contact with the western culture, have not themselves become westernised. They still value their tradition. Perhaps that is why their age-old habit of using a rather high cholesterol diet has not resulted in an increased incidence of heart disease. It is also interesting that 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 and the system is only an occasion to awaken him to the touch of the healer within.

Meditation And Pranayama

The only way to break this pattern is to find a way to change the response to tough situations. There is of course no way to make the situations less tough. Meditation and pranayama, provide everyone with a way of reducing the automatic, violent reactions to stress. You can actually control autonomous systems like heart beat and pulse rate, which were thought to be outside the individual’s control. Knowing and practicing meditation can provide you with a silent space where you can retreat into peace: slow breathing, steady heartbeat, low pulse. This space is always available within a person who has learnt to meditate. While you cannot change your job, family or your life situation, you can certainly learn to breathe more peacefully, thus reversing the process of excitation and avoiding the emotional hijack. It is not possible to learn meditation by thinking about it, any more than it is possible to learn swimming by talking about it. If you have to swim, you have to get into the water. Learning mediation and understanding your breathing patterns through pranayama may be the best investment you ever made. In India, there is no excuse not to learn these things. Stress need not be a response to the pace of your life. You can learn a peaceful response that protects your body.

The Age of Biology

Harvey described the heart as a pump. This was a mechanistic view which indicated that if the heart ‘broke down’, it had to be repaired like a machine. It did not take into account that the heart is a living organism sensitive to feelings and can recreate itself. As Deepak Chopra writes, ‘The body is a river,’ a swiftly changing river, which can reinvent itself by replacing unhealthy tissues with tender new tissues at the cellular level?

Our understanding of human life and growth is becoming organic. Building a life is not like putting up a building, but more like growing a tree: slower, organic and evolutionary. It cannot be done in a hurry. Like Nature, human development in order to be healthy has to follow a slower, more stable timetable. Those who seek to speed it up beyond a point will have to pay the price. The price may be their own lives. Many have died to live up to some unrealistic modern myth of yuppydom and success.