..................................... Understanding Anger
Whatever power has been given to you, learn to use it with awareness! Even anger and lust are great energies given to you by God. When you have respect for that energy, you will not waste it or misuse it.
You should never get disturbed by your own anger. If you get disturbed, it means that you have you have not gone through anger with awareness; you have allowed anger to overtake you. This is the scale to see if you have used anger properly!
You need to use anger in the right way in the right quantities. Anger is a tremendous energy if we know how to use it rightly. Knowledge about anger reduces anger.
............................Moving from Abuse towards your Body to Love towards your Body
Are you aware of how much you abuse your own body? You overeat and cause disturbance to the beautiful digestive system functioning inside you. You stay up late in the night and torture your body when it is crying for rest. You smoke and drink despite knowing that it is not good for your body. Are all these acts those of friendliness to your body? Some of you even hate your body and therefore neglect it.
When you feel comfortable with your body, a certain grace happens to you. Skin diseases happen mostly because you have certain hatred towards your body. They happen because you have low self-esteem and disrespect for your own body.
Once you drop your imagination about your own body and the other's body, you will be able to start showing compassion and friendliness towards the other's body. Friendliness is the component you need to add in the alchemy process to transform lust to love.
Daily Awareness Practices
When you are with your partner, drop your cerebral layer (the layer that you have developed using input from outside) and start feeling love towards your own body as well as to the other's body. Bliss is happening continuously inside your body but you are not allowing it to surface because you are caught up in your imagination. When you drop your imagination about your body and the other's body, the impurity in your lust is removed and the first step in the alchemy process - removing the impurities - happens. The second step is to add the element of friendliness. The third step is to allow the alchemy process to happen, have the patience and perseverance to process your transformed emotion. Then you will experience the supreme and mutual emotion that is love. The other will also reciprocate your transformed emotion and then you have arrived! Your being becomes bliss! Then, you have done your meditation properly! Y
Carry with you words that heal you and others. Show friendliness towards the other's body, mind and being. Spirituality is not ringing the bell regularly in the pooja room and praying to Goddess Lakshmi for wealth. It is imbibing the Goddess Lakshmi's qualities of grace and goodwill. Wealth will automatically happen. Y
In Tantra there is a technique wherein upon waking in the morning, you touch your body at every point with deep love, and allow the subtle body to settle down in the gross or physical body upon awakening. Simply spend 5-10 minutes touching your body lovingly all over. You could also utter words of love and appreciation for each body area. If you do this, your body will develop a grace and begin to radiate well-being and love. Y
Just for once, walk into your garden and look closely at a flower or a leaf with utmost awe and love in you. Feel the beauty of it in your heart and look at it lovingly. Connect to the wonders of Existence through it. Handle it like it was a new-born child. Feel the emotion swelling from deep inside you. Now think of the number of times you have unconsciously plucked at the same flower or leaf while you were walking near it and simply chucked it elsewhere. Do you understand the difference between the two emotions, the two attitudes? Now, are you really being friendly towards everything and everyone around you? Y
Look at everything with awareness. Now, you are functioning from your unconscious and so you are behaving in a violent fashion towards these things without even knowing that you are being violent. If you look at them with awareness, you will see the immense beauty in them and treat them with love. Stop talking about the violence outside and start addressing the violence in you. Automatically the violence outside will stop. We are always ready to point out the imperfections of others. What about our own imperfections that are so many in number? Don't judge yourself when you notice yourself doing this however. Just notice. Shift your awareness to the inside journey. When you are upset about something happening outside, shift your awareness to yourself. Chances are you are projecting an inner quality onto the outer world.
........................................ Understanding the Way to Teach our Children
Just allow the child to be free in its ways, even if it means that you have to take certain risks. Children have in them a certain sense of intuition and instinct. So, you can take the necessary precautionary measures and allow them to explore. Just allow the child to be his or her own natural self, giving the child adequate opportunity to explore himself or herself. Children when untouched by social conditioning, are by nature so comfortable inside their own boundary.
Also, children are so total in their expressions. So don't suppress them. They don't know to bring in their mind and exhibit superficial or hypocritical behavior. We have all mastered the art of hypocrisy by allowing our mind to exercise restraint. We never express totally.
Daily Awareness Practices
Y Try your best not to allow children to watch the duets (romantic song sequences featuring the hero and heroine) on television. If they simply enjoy the music and dance along with it, it's alright; but what they do is, they internalize all that they see the duets, the emotions and what not. This is where the problem starts. Everything will get stored in the muladhara chakra, the sex chakra. Then a mere suggestion is enough and the muladhara will be ready.
Y Don't suppress the child's other half, male for female. Let him freely express and experience himself in different ways. Don't teach him to be gender conscious.
Y When it comes to children's clothing, it is always better to dress them in single-piece clothing instead of two-piece clothing. The latter gives them a sense of dividing their body into two and with time, they forget and become insensitive to the lower half of their body. It is almost a division in their consciousness. That is why today, if you are asked to visualize yourself, almost always, only your upper half will come to your mind. You simply neglect your lower half.
Y Allow children to use both their hands freely. We all discourage them from using the left hand for various things. Why can't the child be ambidextrous? There is nothing wrong in it. Arjuna in the Mahabharatha was ambidextrous. He could wield arrows with both his hands with equal ease. When we hear of these things, we listen with awe but fail to understand that we are also perfectly capable of these things, if only we give ourselves the chance!
Y If you have noticed, all children enjoy whirling. Whirling is their way of allowing centering of their energy to happen. You can whirl freely only when your manipuraka chakra is clean. Children are so innocent and worry-free and hence they are able to whirl effortlessly. But do we allow them to whirl? When we see them whirl, our head starts whirling and so we stop them! We tell them, 'Sit in one place! It's not good for health' and what not. I tell you, just allow them to whirl. Place a blanket beneath them so that even if they fall, they will not get hurt.
Y Never instill fear in your child! Let him be free; let him climb and fall a few times. Let him enter a dark room and come out with whatever experience. If you constantly discourage the child, it can lead to various phobias like height phobia, darkness phobia and the like, which can later turn into fear of making unknown new decisions etc.
..................................... Dukkha Harana Meditation
Your body is filled with toxins. Your mind is filled with fantasies. The body needs to be detoxified. The mind needs to be intoxicated with bliss. Dukkha harana does both. Apart from this, it strengthens your new system and removes body pain and mental suffering.
Instructions:
Y Step 1 (-Duration: 10 minutes): Rhythmic breathing a. Stand with your eyes closed. Breathe deeply and rhythmically from the depths of your body, always through your nose with your mouth closed.
b. Move your hands, flex your knees and bend to a semi-squatting position and then rise up. Move as if you are a bird in flight, up and down, knees moving up and down, arms moving up and down, all rhythmic in line with your breathing.
c. Do the movements gently and synchronize your inhalation with upward movement and exhalation with downward movement. If you have a heart problem, do only as much as you can. Similarly, pregnant women and others with physical ailments - do only as much as you can. Do this for 10 minutes.
Step 2 ( Duration: 10 minutes): Tensing the body Y -
a. For the next 10 minutes, keep your eyes closed and tense each part of your body, part by part, limb by limb, then let it relax; tense and relax one limb and then move to the next.
b. Start with your feet; move to legs; then move to thighs; next to the hips; then to stomach and lower back; then to chest and upper back; then to your arms from finger tips to shoulder; next to the neck and shoulders; next to your face, and finally to the top of the head.
c. Relax each part of your entire body before you move to the next part. This is like an isometric exercise with each part of your body.
Step 3 (Duration: 10 minutes): Y
Sit down keeping your eyes closed and chant the 'hoo' kara sound, just the word 'hoo'. There is no need to chant it deeply and loudly. Just chant it in a relaxed manner. As you chant, simply witness whatever happens inside or outside your Being. Remain in this relaxed state with a smiling face and blissful mood. During this time, there may be many experiences; just watch them as you would watch the television. Watch your mind thought by thought. Don't focus on the muladhara at any time during the meditation, as this will create fantasies, which you are trying to remove.
The first two parts of this technique are actually a preparation for this third part that is the actual meditation. When you come to the third part, you will see that the mind becomes silent effortlessly, by itself. Silence cannot be forced upon you; it can only happen by itself.
Part 2: Instant Tools for Blissful Living