Archive for the ‘Balance’ Category

Recent events surrounding the video scandal involving the guru Paramahamsa Nithyananda invoked anger, frustration, and outright condemnation from various sectors of the population including some of his former and present devotees. Other devotees of his are calling this a conspiracy against their guru. Some are still in a state of shock… What follows is a reply that I gave my friend.[…]

The sentence, “Stories we tell ourselves” kept rolling in my thought-space for the past few days. As I contemplated on this, I realized the stories we tell ourselves, and others, to justify the status quo, to justify our behavior, to justify why we are resisting change, why we want to give up on something that we are doing, or to never start something that we always wanted to do. Stories, […]

I have been contemplating about the concept of free will for a while. I looked back into my life, into all that happened and all that I accomplished. When I contemplated on things that just happened it felt like I had no control over them. However, when I looked at things that I felt I accomplished—at least felt that way at the time of their accomplishment—initially, I felt I had done them out of my own will—free will. […]

How can you do by being? What does it mean by being? Being sounds like just sit and do nothing. Is it being lazy? What is it? Doing by being is the most helpful in any creative endeavor. “Creation” by definition means “to make or bring to existence something new; something unprecedented.” But, fears arise, because mind can only cope with things that already known. When encountered with something new, it goes into a panic mode. In some people it is more stifling than in others. […]

This is another installment of articles written in the series Creation and Manifestation. In this article, I discuss what helps you to make your wishes and dreams come alive. You may be wondering why I am advocating manifestation of desires, as opposed to dropping all of them on your way to enlightenment which is the traditional view. That is a topic by itself to be covered in a separate article. For now, trust me that it is better to manifest your desires and experience the results to bring wisdom into your life to create an Expanded Sense of Self (ESS), than trying to drop them which may cause more inner conflict. […]

Most of us are incessantly bombarded with random thoughts. We end up connecting these random thoughts to create a story. We create an identity for ourselves based on these stories. We don’t even realize that we derive our identity from these stories. The stories could be coming from feelings of dejection, rejection, defeat, fear or […]

One of the main ingradients of spiritual practices is to be detached from the objective world. What is detachment really? How is that different from indifference or apathy ?

A couple of years ago in my Babaji’s kriyA yOga (See sanskrit transliteration scheme) initiation class, we were doing an exercise on the identifying of emotions and […]

One of the readers asked me, “Why should we be present? What does that mean? How does that affect our lives?” Volumes have been written on and much talked about this subject.

In this article, I will elaborate my own understanding of the subject. What does living in this Present moment or Now mean? Aren’t we […]

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Abundance means different things to different people. For one it may be money, for another it may be health. I define abundance as having all material enjoyments—health, money, cars—in a balanced, detached way, having a grounding that does not make you greedy and selfish and helps you evolve and work for the greater […]

(Here is the Transliteration scheme for sanskrit.)

Universe is an Illusion
brahman is Real
Universe is brahman
— Adi SankarAcArya

The above quote has a profound meaning for me. When I started off my yoga practices, about 5 years ago, I did not understand this seemingly contradictory statement. However, I understand […]