Guided Meditation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGnB3w80b8M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu-qZugHXfc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNjaB0DoA_g&feature=related

Mean Girls 2.0

When I was young, my friend's mother once told my mom, that I and her daughter are like Potatoes. Potatoes or Aaloo in India is a vegetable that is believed to get along with any other veggies. We were the ones who used to get along with everyone. But as I grew older, I had lesser and lesser people I really chose to be with. If it were based on any merits worth mentioning, I would really be proud of myself; rather I just choose to be with people, who are fun. While I do not think I need to apologize for liking people who are fun, I do think that I need to be less judgmental. I have had fun with all of them at different times...so I really don’t know what brought out this change in me. Just the other day, some of us had gathered together for dinner after a movie and we began making fun of some of our friends. The reaction in one of our friend’s face…was what made me hit myself and say, “I cannot believe I’m doing it again”. I realize that it is very mean to make fun of anybody…let alone our friends, but I don’t know why I do it over and over again. It started with one of the couples, who were the standup comedians in the group. But they would do it, one, on your face and two, be totally unapologetic about it. I on the other hand, do also tell these thing on their face (in a dead serious manner, which I also intend to change) but still continue making fun of them when they are not around.

This is ‘Mean Girls’ all over again; hence the title. But I never ever dreamt of being this person in a hundred years and still, here I am facing the issue for an umpteenth time. One might be wondering why I posting it on my blog rather than making a promise to myself that I would never do it again. Well, I guess it would be because I have made and broken the promise many-a-times already. I even asked my husband to correct me so that I let go of the habit…but it doesn’t seem to help. One, because he is rarely ever listening to what I’m saying, and even if he does…I already would have said it…and realized it before he even gets a chance to point it out.

The other enabler for this issue is that I have a live, enthusiastic and participating audience. As always, I have a few selected friends who are always chipping in with their own anecdotes of what happened when they were doing this or that…rather than just giving me the plain, “Are u out of your mind?” look. And on occasion like the after-movie-dinner the other night when I do get this look, I vow to myself that I will never ever do it again, but as time goes by…the strength of the vow fades out and the need for a funny conversation creeps in….and there I go.

I think this is where the basic problem lies, in the fact that I consider it funny rather than it being mean or malicious. But that being said; I don’t think of it as an excuse for my doings. I really want to apologize for all the mean things, I ever said…and I want to make up to it by promising never ever to do it again.

Wishful thinking

Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat, Pray, Love talks about happiness in the words of her guru's teachings. "People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, you strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it." She calls the process 'Diligent Joy'.

This is a familiar concept for me. I see it reverberated in several other books and teachings, especially in Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Rhoda in her book mentions that one needs to consciously seek happy thoughts. She calls it a frequency which one has to constantly tune into. The moment we realize that our minds have wandered off to the unpleasant memories, we have to deliberately draw our attention back to happy thoughts…thoughts of abundance, love and gratitude. This idea is also mentioned in yoga and meditation. Our yoga instructors use breathing as a form of meditation and ask us to constantly bring our attention back to our breath…and to the awareness that our breath is a source of good energy cleansing away our body and soul.

If this be true, which I am most certain about…then the way to happiness is by leading our lives in constant meditation. Now it might seem like a very difficult task…I think it is, but still one can at least make the effort to stay away from brooding over distressing thoughts. I find the part very interesting where the author Gilbert, tries to meditate the first few times. Her wandering trail of thoughts, that go from one to another till they find that one thought which makes one finally quit, is often the case with anyone who has ever tried meditating. It often makes me wonder, how easy life would be if each one of us stopped trying to control the circumstances around us and instead focused on controlling our own minds…Pulling our own strings, instead of pulling others’.

Beauty is Truth

I am reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Truly a wonderful book, very well recommended. She is in India now, but before I write about her experiences there, I need to blog about her stay in Italy.

In her last chapter in Italy, she travels to Sicily- the mafia headquarters and apparently one of the poorer regions of Italy. Here she discovers why Italians are such worshippers of beauty and pleasure. Why they would tolerate “hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captions of industry, but not incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks and tailors…” For some answers she refers to Luigi Barzini’s masterpiece, The Italians. Barzini’s answer, she briefly encapsulates, has much to do with Italian history of corruption by local leaders and foreign dominators, have led the Italians to believe that the world is corrupted and that nothing can be trusted. She furthers saying, because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should only trust what one can experience with one’s senses…and hence the heightened senses in Italy. She goes on to explain that not too long ago even the Catholic monks in Sicily with in conspiracy with the mafia, so well....who else can you trust? And if you do speak up, you’ll probably end up dead. In a world of disorder and fraud, maybe beauty is the only thing you can trust, and hence creation and enjoyment of beauty then can be a serious business – not to escape reality, but a means to hold on to something real.

Now the reason I bring it up is because even though I have never been to Italy, I completely understand the phenomenon. I think all of us would agree. When nothing seems to go right, cooking that perfect meal, tasting exactly like you had envisioned in mind…or redecorating your home, or dressing perfectly for any occasion just seems to bring home the point that not all is lost. Or that our lives are not completely futile. When one suffers much pain and suffering (which again is relative to one capacity to suffer pain) that often comes to a point when just nothing seems worth doing, it’s in the mere beauty of a perfectly cooked meal, or finding that flawlessly fitting dress, or the beautiful setting sun, that one finds solace. It is where I found mine.

And I wonder if this is what Keats was referring to, when he wrote:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."