Romancing the soul

Good morning friends. In everyone’s life, we experience many things. We encounter the hardship in life even if we did our best. The important is that we should know how to cope with it.Life has been a great learning experience.It has taught me that there’s something wrong if spiritual practice and demands from daily life are not in harmony.

Spirituality should be able to put the

Everyone has their way of connecting with God and for me it’s through prayers. I have always drawn strength from prayers, without which I feel incomplete.

For me, a spiritual lifestyle and a material one are two different things. It may not be a conscious philosophy, and one may even declare that they’re non-believers, but in the depths of one’s consciousness, there is a spiritual stream of energy that’s constantly in motion.

Comprehension between both worlds is necessary as the entire spiritual trip is a fantasy, a hallucination — one sceptical question from a doubter and one’s whole spiritual life collapses like a house of cards.

One doesn’t have to lead a simple life to be spiritual. For me, romance with my soul is important as the way to attain contentment. Suffering of the innocent gives me a lot of pain.

Spirituality does not manifest in our clothes, it’s within us. One will find happiness and joy if one learns to balance both spiritual and material lives wisely. –The Times of India

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The only way out is in, so look deep within (2 of 2)

The nature and basis of your experience is within you. Pain and pleasure, joy and misery, agony and ecstasy happen only within you. The very seat of your experience is within you. So why try to extract joy from outside? At best, the outside can provide a stimulus.

If you depend on the outside to bring joy to you, understand that the outside never happens a hundred per cent the way you want it. Those who think that there is something like an ideal situation are not in touch with reality. No situation or person will ever happen a hundred per cent the way you want it. But at least you should happen the way you want yourself to be. Then there would be no need for you to be in pursuit of your happiness. So the question is not of intention or direction, but of doing that which works.

If you did happen the way you want yourself to be, joy would be the natural choice. What we refer to as inner engineering means not seeing joy as something that we could achieve in our life but seeing joy as the very basis of our lives. Joy is not the goal; it is the square one of our life. Other things can happen only if there is joy. Otherwise, you will live constantly with the fear of misery striking at you.

What great things you achieve in your life will depend on your capabilities, the situation, and the prevailing times. Regardless of what you do or don't, my wish and blessing is that your experience of life is pleasant and graceful. - The Times of India

The only way out is in, so look deep within (1 of 2)

Good morning friends. We constantly seek a deeper experience of life, one way or the other. Whatever one may seek God, alcohol, drugs, meditation or an thing that one feels will provide relief, give pleasure or fulfillment you are only seeking to have a larger slice of life.

The intention is always the same, somehow to have a deeper experience, to extract a little more out of life, to find access to that which is not yet for you. The question is not of the intention as the intention is always the same; it is only of whether it works or not.

Everything you've done in your life so far has been in pursuit of joy career, business, making money or starting a family. From when you were a child till now, is your joy increasing or decreasing? Now that you have grown up, you have your own life, your own family, your own bank account, everything of your own ^ has your joy multiplied? In the last 24 hours, how many moments of joy have you known?

When you came into this world, you came with no investment. So whatever happens in your life, anyway you are in profit. But the reason people are in various levels of distress is because there is no life-sense, only ego-sense. If you are miserable, it is because life is not happening the way you think it should happen. If everything happened the way you think it should, the whole existence would happen within the limitation of your limited thought. Is it not wonderful that so many things that you could never imagine are happening? What you enjoyed, your parents were distressed about. What you are distressed about, your children are enjoying.

Live life joyfully (2 of 2)

Odds are that if you're reading this you have enough to eat. Most of us don’t eat gourmet food three times a day, but we are blessed with sufficient food, and I don’t just mean enough to provide the basic calorie intake to keep us alive. We are blessed with all the associations of a loving mother that comes with the taste of some food, the memories of discovering new wonderful tastes every time we eat them again, and the love that we imbibe with food made by those who care enough about life to prepare good food, a spouse or a friend. I believe that food made by people who love to feed people has special nutritional properties.

If you think that nobody cares enough about you to prepare delicious food, let me invite you to go and get a banana, and pay attention to it.

What a marvel of packaging, flavor and nutrition. I am not implying that that particular banana was grown just for you as an act of love, or maybe I am. It grew, it made its way to you and it will sustain you. Now I can hear you arguing that it was provided by a chain of commerce. What if that chain was forged to get that banana to you without any of the links being aware of the chain’s purpose? Might be, and even if it isn’t, the banana is still pretty amazing in its color, utility, taste and ability to keep us alive. I once knew a man named Rudy who only ate bananas, all different kinds and he was very healthy. And think about bread. I know that it is not much more than grain and salt and water but think about what that means. Bread, naan , chapatti, tortilla, pain, hobz, brot, or whatever you call it provides us with the elements of the earth. The process of growing, threshing and milling the grain transforms the earth into a form that we can use. – The Times of India

Live life joyfully (1 of 2)

Good morning friends. No matter what happened to our life, good or bad, with sorrow or happiness, we have to live our life joyfully. It’s not easy to do, but if we will give our best to live with joy, nothing is impossible.

If you are reading this, you have many more reasons to be joyful than you might think. You are alive, which is probably pretty basic, but all too often we don't realize that it is the most basic things that bring us the greatest joy.

We often forget to celebrate the things that are most important because they are so much with us. One of the few really wise people I have ever met once asked with great puzzlement, “Why isn't everyone dancing with the sheer joy of being alive?” Everything we do celebrate is a celebration of life, whether it is a birth, a wedding, or an anniversary. Religious festivals all celebrate some aspect of life as represented by the attributes of the deity, or the passage of some event of our lives. What we need to do is remind ourselves to consecrate every day, take time out at least once a day to quietly experience being alive. And the simplest way to that is to just pay attention to our breathing, which is another wonderful reason to be joyful. Breath is the key to life and almost every spiritual discipline starts and ends with the breath, as does life itself. Every moment we are meditating. With every breath we are partaking of all the mysteries of the universe. Mathematically there are six molecules of Buddha in every square foot of air. A foolish friend of mine used to like to breathe in real deep to try and get some Buddha in him.

It seemed to work for him. Just for a few minutes pay attention to a gentle indrawn breath. Within that action is the key to sustaining our life. How does that happen? Whenever I think I need a miracle just to keep going, I stop and pay attention to one or two breaths. Each breath feeds the fire of the heart. Amazing.

Get connected with the power of silence (2 of 2)

Every week St Francis of Assisi, who is called the second Christ, used to go to a cave in a place called Portiuncula and remained there in silence. M K Gandhi observed silence on all Mondays. For sheer adventure, writes Patricia Clifford in her introduction to Sitting Still, exploring the inner space of the human spirit has to equal the exploration of outer space. Inner space holds a realm of existence not readily apparent when we are in the grip of a strident external world. A powerful launching vehicle for the discovery of the realm within is silence. It is in the vessel of silence that inner transformation can appear.

Silence can be acquired by just letting go of thoughts, distractions, and images. Forced silence is of no use. You can try chanting mantras or prayers what is called centering prayer to enter silence. Attention is to be given to the correct pronunciation and intonation of the mantra. Sacred vibrations by their very nature have the power to put our spirit at rest. To fix our eyes on an object, preferably a sacred object and to gaze at it constantly, is called as icon prayer. What is basic is the act of gazing. Gazing by its very nature has the power of placing our spirit at rest to achieve intrinsic silence.

Just as we care for our bodies with good food and rest, so we must also care for our spiritual selves, that part of us that is connected to God. If we are spiritually ill, our bodies and minds also become sick. This is why regular prayer and times of silent contemplation are necessary parts of our daily lives. Periodic self-examination and learning help too. Meeting God becomes more achievable in an atmosphere of complete silence. - The Times of India

Get connected with the power of silence (1 of 2)

Good morning friends. Sometimes it reached to our life that we want to be alone. We want to be silent in the center of the earsplitting surroundings. Sometimes we want to get connected with the power of silence. With that, we feel that the world suddenly stopped.

What is silence? It is to retreat in wordless prayer, gazing out the window of your heart, and going for slow meandering walks in a garden.

You can look for silence in two ways: inner silence and outer silence. Outer silence helps us find inner silence. But inner silence is more precious. There are two kinds of inner silence: passive and active. In passive inner silence the heart and mind are at rest at the unconscious level whereas in active inner silence the heart and mind are at rest at the conscious level. We are consciously quiet and this is necessary to experience God.

In silence, we feel the presence of God though we may not see Him. Suppose we are seated in a room during the night and talking to one of our dear friends. Suddenly the lights go off. In the darkness as we are seated by the side of our friend, we do not hold our friends hand, we do not talk to him; we do not see him yet we feel his presence and that feeling implies strength, love, joy, peace, togetherness, and support. The same thing happens during the period of silence.

Silence is wordless prayer. Silence transcends thoughts, concepts, images and reasoning. It is a state of consciousness in which there are no words or images. In silence, if at all there are words or images, they should merge from inside and not from outside. Silence recharges body and mind.