If youre a certain kind of person, you might have tried to feel the difference brushing your teeth twice daily makes, or wondered about how eating green vegetables helps when all you feel is a slightly bitter taste in your mouth. The thing is, the benefits from these activities are incremental, and they build up slowly. They fly below the radar of our perception. Stop brushing your teeth twice daily, and maybe in a few days your lover or spouse will gag when you go near them. Dont do it for a few years, and your teeth will fall off. Yet, brushing your teeth seems so mundane, boring and dull, we dont want to do it. Regular practice with a discipline is perhaps also like that - Pandit Jasraj still does riyaaz at five every day; the Dalai Lama spends a few months every year in solitary retreat; and writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway and Mahadevi Verma to Ghalib and Maupassant have extolled the virtue of daily writing; Monet painted his famous lilies and farms every year in different light conditions - I could go on and on :) The thing is, we dont realize the need to practise a lot in order to think in a certain way by default: happiness, as the Dalai Lama and SriSri Ravi Shankar say, is more a skill rather than a quality. It grows with practice. Here is a small daily practice my Reiki teacher taught me more than a decade ago to help us train our minds to remain happier and calmer - Before going to sleep, recall the whole day and let images and thoughts float in your mind. See the day playing like a movie in your mind, and try to learn what you can from the days happenings: whatever happened, it happened for a reason, and it has left you a better and stronger person from within. Be grateful for whatever you can recall - a cup of hot chai, a long conversation with your friend, a fight with a colleague or batchmate, an accident, good results at a test. Be grateful for whatever has happened through the day. Be grateful, and learn, and move on - as you drift deeper into sleep, yet another day will be over. More opportunities to be grateful will present themselves the next morning. Good night, friends :)
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 19:53:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015