A gentle shift in awareness is like moving the steering of car by 1 degree. It changes the course of our life effortlessly.
Resolutions are very harmful for you when they fail and they do fail, it makes you feel more hopeless and unworthy than before.
Here are 10 areas which if you keep in attention, will bring shift in your well-being and health on its own without any effort. Next year on the same day, you will be glad that you read this blog. I wrote this piece 2 years back. Editing a bit for better clarity and to make it contemporary.
1. Well-being and not Wellness
When few days back Remo Dsouza, the famous dancer and choreographer got a heart attack, his colleagues tweeted- ‘It is shocking. He was always a fitness freak and most of all, his work is all about physical fitness’. His colleague is as much naive as Remo was life. Heart is matter of regulating emotions and fitness has nothing to do with it.
Wellness or fitness is important to keep our body agile and shed some emotional load. There is very little which translates into health. Health is a function of well-being and well-being means spiritual, emotional and mental being.
2. Meals plan not Diet Plan
Two facts- 1. Our body has 18% carbon by mass. This means if you weigh 70 kg, 12.6 kg of you is carbon. 2. Our body throws toxicity out in every breath including Metabolic process which has to extract waste from the food. Metabolism of the body demands that it chooses on its own to process what is toxic for our body and throw it as a waste through various ways. This is based on what is available in nature and we eat as food. Even in that case, it must retain 18% carbon and yet throw out the toxicity to keep the fine engineering working. Diet means, you are interfering with its wisdom. Do you know, your emotional and mental toxicity is more damaging than junk food you eat?
Align with the nature of your body by harmonizing your 5 senses. It will automatically transform greed into need and you do not need to exercise control on your hunger. Eat everything your senses crave for. Just enough or a little less. Eat in silence. Cook your own meal. Remember, the best food for you is the food your body is attuned to since childhood. Food is not just for survival, it is a spiritual experience because it defines our existence. Your mother has coded love, vision and blessing in the food you ate as a child. Try this- prepare your meal and meditate on it before eating. witness the emotions you experience. You will be surprised what you experience.
3. Yog and not Yoga
When Maharishi Patanjali wrote Yog Sutra, it was complete health system, and it still is. It is badly distorted including the way you do Pranayama. In its present form, it has become a circus. YOG postures are designed to release hopelessness stored in specific part of your body by taking breath to that part which otherwise is not able to reach. So, when you are in a specific posture, observe your breath. It is a gentle and subtle process to attain that posture and observe your breath. You can witness the emotions which that part (organ) of your body was holding and making you toxic. By doing so, spirit-body-mind begins to come in union and that state is called Yog Nidra (Meditation). Try it. You already know various postures by now and see the power of YOG. Yes, Baba Ramdev and Modi Ji are doing Pranayam in distorted way.
- Desire and not Ambition
Desire is the expression of spirit. Go ahead and desire anything you wish to experience. This awakens your spirit. The desires have its own nature. More you breathe your desires; authentic desires gain power to manifest on its own and toxic desires fall off. It is a way to get intimate with yourself.
But if you turn desire into ambition, you begin to suffer. By doing so, you move away from the source of desire and stay in your mind. For ambition to manifest you require total attention of your mind on the ambition. Your mind is already scattered. You are now trapped between helplessness and desire to see manifestation. Likewise, you will see two kind of founders or start up or leaders- Driven by vision or driven by ambition. The one struggling are those who mix both.
And we still did not tell you about INTENT. When the INTENT and desire becomes one- it manifests on its own.
5. Aesthetics and not Grooming
Aesthetics enrich your spirit. Grooming enhances your ego. Immunity is inversely proportional to EGO. Aesthetics is simple to understand. Anything which you touch with your thought, action, or emotion if you leave it better than before, you have aesthetics. Be it the washrooms, public places, kitchen, an interaction or a relationship. You heard that song- You decorate my life…
6. Within and not Without
According to Meta- Gallup survey, representing 77% of the world adult population reported that 1 in 4 people feel lonely or very lonely. More you go away from you, more lonely you feel. Turn in before you burn out.
7. Stability and not Blind Growth
Vice-President of a luxury car maker told me during a talk in the early days of pandemic, that if I could live without visiting a restaurant for two months and still be happy than I have now understood what is essential for life. You know it all. We are brainwashed that year-on-year growth is life.
8. Femininity and not Feminism
In the last 5 decades or so, that we worked on feminism, it gave our women more PCOD, infertility and broken hearts than before. We confused femininity with feminism. We fought while there was no war. Yet the places where we wanted more safety and security to experience new-found freedom, much remains to be desired yet.
Believe in your inherent strength of being a woman and do not play a match on other’s turf. Play with your inherent strength. Your strength lies in your 4 attributes. A strong woman is the woman who has well-groomed attributes, and everyone wants to be with her.
9. Contentment and not Fulfilment
The problem with looking for fulfilment is that you are assuming that you lack something. Contentment is feeling complete with what is given or achieved. Contentment comes from consolidation. If you want to climb up to the third floor, arrive at the 2nd floor first. Contentment is the base for fulfilment. Nurture it and sustain it.
10. Regenerative Sleep and not just Crash:
Sleep is prevention and sleep is cure. Before anything goes wrong in your life, your sleep is disturbed, and your dreams are distorted. Not any sleep, but regenerative sleep. Regenerative sleep is when our breath rate reaches 8b/m in NON-REM stage of sleep. Its process starts with Saanjh (watch web series at www.saanjh.ai). This is how our ancestors remained healthy and now our children can grow healthy.