Category: Balance

Achieving balance in life

Approaching Spirituality

Many people wrote in the comments to the article, How I Contacted Siddhar Thirumoolar, as well as in emails that they were looking for experiences similar to what I described in that article. One of the reader’s had a serious discomfort, after practicing the mantra on that page without guidance. Read the “update” on that article for further details. I am posting this here as a separate article for the benefit of those that may not know I posted an update to that article. When it comes to spiritual techniques one size does not fit all. Not all techniques are...

Stories We Tell Ourselves

Story for The Moment

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, […]

Free Will According to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. […]

Doing By Being

Doing By Being

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. […]

A Surefire Recipe for Successful Manifestation of Your Wishes and Desires

Flame of Desire

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. […]

Simple Techniques for Busy People to Help Access Inner Peace and Joy

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 those of elation, happiness, victory and courage. Still they are thoughts. Some we label as good and others as bad. We do not realize that our true identity is not, “I am happy, I am sad, I am courageous, I am lonely.” We identify ourselves...

Detachment Versus Indifference

One of the main ingredients 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 becoming detached from them. Exercise was that the teacher would say a word and we would write the feelings that come to us on a piece of paper and label them appropriately as anger, happiness, joy, detachment, etc. The word was money. I wrote...

The Power of Presence

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 all living in the now? We say things like, “I want this now. I need to leave for an appointment now.” And, what is so special about it? That which cannot be captured by our minds (or thoughts) is Presence, Existence or living in...

Ways to Attract Abundance and Whatever You Want into Your Life

(Approximately 2800 words) 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 good. In my earlier article, Ask, and Ye Shall Receive, I discussed what you should do when you were faced with a life situation that needed to be changed. It may be a work situation that needed a change—may be you were not recognized...

Can We Lead a Spiritual Life in a Material World and Still Achieve a Balance?

(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 it better now, than I did then. When a person embarks on a spiritual journey, one is first taught that the whole of this universe is an illusion or mAya and that brahman is the only reality. However, upon realization, or at least having a glimpse, of the brahman...