Mindful Parent

Children need the security of a simple, dependable schedule. Ambiguity or lack of dependability in family life is known to affect the individual’s capacity to live in a secure long-term relationship in the future. The family provides the love and nurturing required for the survival of children Affirmation is important when people in our lives appreciate us and express it verbally, tonally, non-verbally. The opposite of an affirmation is a discount. You need at least ten affirmations for every discount for the maintenance of a healthy relationship. A home filled with discounts becomes a torture chamber instead of a sanctuary.

Healthy diet is very important for children’s growth. Forget grandma’s belief that fat children are healthy children. The Zero Heart Attack Path (ZHAP)diet is just as good for kids. A ZHAP home will provide the foundation for a healthy adulthood. These years are dangerous years when unhealthy emotional patterns are learnt. Food often becomes a source of solace. Be a mindful parent.

Emotional Environment for Happiness

In order to treat or prevent disease, it is essential to look into our emotional, mental and psychological environment, as our thoughts and emotions directly contribute to our wellbeing or otherwise. Meditation can clean up the field and contribute enormously to an individual’s psychological and physiological wellbeing.

How to create a positive field around yourself, your home and office?

Ø A mental process which draws a magic circle of love around all those who are participating.

Ø A prayer or mantra said together.

Ø A common exercise, a company song, common goals.

Ø A handshake, a friendly look, an encouraging word.

Ø Thinking, believing and acting in a positive manner.

Ø Laughter and shared jokes.

Give yourself happiness breaks every day: call an old, lonely relative and take her shopping once a month. Schedule a beauty parlour date for yourself, once a month. Read a great book. Listen to fabulous music.

Healthy Networking for Happiness

The world is in your drawing room, through television and internet it is clamouring to change your life with more and more sophisticated toys. As a popular saying 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 put family first. Finding a job you love is one of the ways you can immunize yourself against health problems. A good marriage is a protective shield against health attacks. One should consistently cultivate the positive emotions of love, compassion, courage and peace, not merely avoid negative emotions in the family.

1. Budget for family time every day

2. Plan for meals together

3. Pray together

4. Plan an annual get together of the extended family.

5. Create a family face book page

Build Family Bonding

‘The family is the shock absorber of society, to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world,’ wrote Alvin Toffler in his classic ‘Future Shock’. The breakdown of the joint family has led to a loosening of extended family relationships. 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.

It is our mission to restore the family to its traditional role as a place of rest and healing, 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 couples.

Protective Friendships

Friendship can immunize you against heart attacks, confirms research by Dean Ornish, MD. Those with five or more close friends are more likely to avoid heart problems. The real epidemic is not heart attacks but attacks of loneliness and sadness. Those who feel their wives love them, are more likely to recover from a heart attacks says the same research.

The basis of social success lies in the ability to build successful, pleasantly harmonious, lifetime relationships with all. When you meet anyone, always look for what is good. Listen for value. 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. You are not the world’s policeman.

Belonging to a supportive nurturing group is the best protection you can have against disease and unhappiness. Being loved can prevent you from the flood of negative emotions that have the capacity to destroy you. Take steps today to make sure that you cannot be replaced by a blanket or a computer.

Explore Yourself

‘Every person has before him a hundred alternative futures. You can change that scene, by spending more time with your family. The mind is the only place where you can examine a germinal, fragile new idea, stretch it without breaking it or explore an explosive new idea without having it blow up in your face. Use thinking tools and imaging to analyse, reinvent and recreate life as it is today. 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 ofCarrara. 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 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.

Contentment - Path to Happiness.

Contentment with whatever you have is the greatest path to happiness. Comparison with those better than us makes us discontented. Comparison with those who are worse off makes us proud and arrogant. Shanti or a peaceful, calm mind, suffused with affection and compassion, makes our field a happy one while spreading like a fragrance to embrace all those around us. Everyone has only two choices—life-enhancing and lifedestroying. An event is not as critical as is your reaction or perception of it. It continues its life inside you, a nuclear landmine of memories that wreak far more destruction than the actual event. The more mindspace you allocate to unhappy memories, the more time you spend in the past while being a spectator in the living present, the more you miss the joy the present moment offers. At any given time, the past should not inhabit more than five per cent of your mindspace, and the future should not exceed ten per cent. Did you know that human beings are the only creatures who can think about the future? This ability should be devoted to a rational planning exercise, not aimless daydreaming that nibbles at your day like a rat in a godown of rice. We have a choice to look at failure and loss as a life-lesson, or to carry it with us till we are bent over with their crippling burden. They make us tired and discouraged to handle the opportunities of the present. They echo in our mindspace in a tone that is vicious, critical, chipping away at our resolve to do battle for progress. We need to change the way we talk to and treat ourselves. All of us need a tender, loving caretaker within who nurtures us, not an internal drillmaster who victimises us in an insulting and disparaging tone, sucking out all our energy, enthusiasm and happiness.