Happiness comes after unhappiness

Good morning friends. Do you believe that happiness comes after unhappiness? Many said thein all our sad moments of life there is always a happy times afterwards. I did proved of that in my own experience.

God is in the small things. In the smile of a new-born baby and in the gaze of my grandmother whose face is lined with a smile. I can’t see God everywhere. I feel Her in spaces small and large.

What stops us from being sexy, as well as religious; materialistic, as well as spiritual; happy, as well as sad? We’ve forgotten that our Gods, Rama and Krishna, were princes and wealthy. They lived in luxury and their women, Sita, Kausalya, and Urmila were regal. Jewels, personal maids, expensive wardrobes and luxe living surrounded them. Ayodhya was a kingdom encouraging masculinity and war; Mithila, Sita’s home, encouraged education, world philosophy and equality between the sexes.

We can hold on to faith and still live in luxury. We have a warped notion of spirituality and truth as being states of deprivation. In a society that’s aspirational, like middle-class India, one is seemingly from the West (material wealth) and the other homegrown (spirituality). We’re caught in this mire and coagulated confusion.

Hanuman on my crotch makes me uncomfortable. Maybe Durga on my kurta or my sari pallu works for me. My body is my personal space and even God doesn’t need to validate my sexuality. To be open to adventure, to hold on to the bubble of laughter; never to despair and to remember anger and darkness — these are emotions cut from the same cloth from which beauty and harmony are woven. To be conscious of my breath and the feel of my feet on the pavement anywhere in the world.

To be happy means that one has to also experience unhappiness. I can’t be happy anywhere like the yogis and gurus. I need my home, room, garden and rhythm to find my inner flame. I’m easily distracted and need to consciously focus and withdraw from external stimuli to remember that I have every right to be happy every minute of my life. – The Times of India

timeslife@timesgroup.com

Love is a Many-Leveled Thing - 1

Most of us have been confused about love all of our lives. In fact, we often begin the inner life as a search—conscious or unconscious—for a source of love that can’t be taken away. We may have grown up feeling unloved or believing we had to perform heroic feats to deserve love. Our parents, the movies we see, our cultural and religious milieu give us ideas about love that go on influencing us long after we have forgotten their source. When we read spiritual books and encounter teachers, our understanding about love can get even more complicated, because depending on what we read or whom we study with, we get slightly different takes on what love means in spiritual life.

Some teachers tell us that our essence is love: others say love is a passion, an emotion that leads to addiction and clinging. If we’re on a devotional path like bhaktiyoga, Sufism, or mystical Christianity, we’re often taught that the way to enlightenment is to fall in love with God and let that love grow until it engulfs us and we become one with the Beloved. If we’re on a more knowledge-based yogic path, we may be taught to look askance at the feelings of bliss and love the arise in practice, because, we’re told, the spaciousness that is our goal is beyond such feelings.