Love yourself

Now turn inward and start a personal affirmation account for yourself.  Give yourself a big hug for being the most hard working, kind and special person in your life. Invest in a note book which will document your love affair with yourself.

v  Write a love letter to yourself. Recognize your unique beauty, your capacity to do your best and all the gifts that make you such a fabulous person. “Love yourself first and everything else falls into place,” said Lucille Ball.

v  Start a gratefulness dairy where you record all the things you are grateful for. Thank God for His blessings.

v  ‘I can,’ is a hundred times more important that IQ. Celebrate your smallest successes. Stop that nagging, critical voice in your head that keeps picking on you. Speak to yourself kindly and lovingly.

v  Stop worrying. The way to be happy is to stop worrying about things which cannot be changed.

v  Plug into the Source of all power, through prayer and meditation and acknowledge that you are a child of God, made in his own image.

v  Explore, dream, discover: at the end of your life do not regret all the dreams you have failed to pursue. 

Doctor’s Day

Perfect Health is not just an absence of illness. It is a state of total physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well being. That is why it is important to celebrate our partners in the quest for positive health – doctors.

India celebrates Doctor’s day on 1st July every year on the birthday of the freedom fighter, educationalist and physician Dr. B.C. Roy. Choose and make friends with a doctor younger than you for the sole purpose of helping you maintain and improve your state of positive well being. Most patients go to doctors when they are really ill, when it is too late to do anything. The Chinese were wise. They paid their doctors as long as they were well. They stopped paying when they became ill, since the doctor had failed in maintaining their health.

Women’s Day

Mothers, sisters, daughters and other women beloved to us make March 8th a special day of celebration, a day to show, respect, appreciation and love to women. This day cannot be dismissed like all the other days that make Archies cards such a successful business.

Even before women appeared on the corporate scene, women were the secret, hidden ingredient that made life worth living. So all of us, men and women, should use this day to write letters of appreciation to all the special women in our life, for the beauty they bring into our lives, for their delicate subtle strength and grace under pressure, for their tact and capacity to love, care and selflessly give, till there is nothing left to give. Thirty countries observe it as a National holiday. It is a day to celebrate beauty and motherhood! In Portugal a ‘Girls night out’ is customary.

Let us make this a happy day by honoring the women who work with us: our domestic staff and professional colleagues. One hundred and two years have passed, since the first celebration.  Remember seventy percent of those living in poverty are women. I like the UN theme of last year, “Empower women - end hunger and poverty”.  Choose a disadvantaged woman who works for you and change her life by helping her build a happy, educated family.

Everything Changes

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.

Action Plan to Protect Against Deadly Disease

1.         Make friends with a young doctor and visit him to ensure health maintenance and well being. Take steps to do live in a clean and unpolluted place.

2.         Ask for vaccines needed to immunize your family. Make a special visit when you are travelling to a new, vulnerable area.

3.         Follow a sensible happy life style and get your doctor to check key parameters that indicate health.

4.         Do not ignore minor symptoms. Talk to your doctor friend, with whom you develop a trusting lifetime relationship.

5.         Do not treat yourself. Do not get medical advice and prescribe medicine from the internet.

6.         Take care of your teeth: with increasing life span, you will need them for a long time. Invest in daily yoga, exercise and meditation.

7.         Build a warm, nurturing web of relationships.

Dedicated to Health

 It is not surprising that Ananda Shankar Ray’s Laboratory did the initial research to escape from mosquitoes. In India, with the emergence of highly resistant mosquito species that are unaffected by the most toxic bug killers, it has a kind of poetic justice that an Indian associate professor of entomology has found a way to make a human invisible to mosquitos’ most powerful hunting sense – smell. Featured in Nature, the scientist however lives in California!

This discovery was quickly turned into an innovative skin patch called the Kite mosquito patch an inexpensive sticker, which is non-toxic patch which is now produced by Olfactor labs. It disrupts the mosquitoes carbon di-oxide detection mechanism and protects against malaria, denque, filaria, West-Nile Virus and other deadly diseases.

The human body is a magical creation, whose continuing health, in spite of the dangers that assail, it is really a miracle. So keep this invaluable asset each of us in gifted with, at birth, protected against easily avoidance but deadly diseases. Health is your responsibility. Take care of your body temple. It is the only home you have.

Turn it Upside Down (T U D)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” This is a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. When he suggested non-violence as a way to make India free. It was revolutionary thought because usually, most of us will meet violence with violence. He suggested the exact opposite of what most of us would do. And it worked. Because as he said, “An eye for an eye only ends up making whole world blind.”

As his birthday approaches let us use a thinking tool called Turn it Upside Down. I will help you consider a course of action that is the revolutionary opposite of what is usually done.

So look at your life and think about turning it upside down. Think mostly about giving and loving rather than wanting and taking stop complaining. Give thanks in gratitude for what you have. Don’t sell your ideas. Let your ideas be a magnet that will draw others to them. Focus on maintaining abundant positive physical, mental and spiritual health, instead of dealing with illness. Finally remember that as the Mahatma said, ‘The best way to find yourself is to love yourself in the service of others.’