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Bond that acts as a glue

Bond that acts as a glue

Bond that acts as a glue“We, as parents, must understand the serious responsibility that we have in inculcating love for God in the hearts of children. If our children do not feel love they will not understand God’s love because the love of the parent is translated to the children as the love of God. When they feel their parents’ love, they can actually begin to understand God’s love.” – Radhanath Swami

I was recently attending a workshop on ‘happiness in marriage’ and the trainer asked the gathered members (about 100) how many of us had a happy childhood. Much to my shock, only 3 hands went up and everybody else thought they had a rather unhappy childhood. What do you think? Did you have a happy or an unhappy childhood? The trainer said that in his various training programs across the globe, this has been a common factor–most of us were victims of bad parenting and bad schooling!
Children are an integral part of our married life. We expect that our child will bring good fortune and happiness to us but do we try to give it a loving and nurturing environment for it to grow & blossom happily?

With the start of the school season, I hear familiar morning routine sound coming out of homes with young ones, ‘Get up or you’ll get late for school,’ ‘brush your teeth fast,’ ‘haven’t you finished taking your bath yet?’ ‘hurry up or you’ll miss your school bus!’
Sounds an all too familiar routine? Today, as parents and as responsible creators of a bright future, we seem to be bringing up the next generation in a constant mode of threat and hurry thereby unwittingly pushing the child into a childhood he hardly deserves, a childhood which he would as a grown up man wants to forget fast (just like many of us!)! Place yourself into the shoes of your child just for a day and you will know how difficult it is even for a fully grown up adult to bear & fulfill the constant demands placed on you. We seem to have placed great expectations on the tender child who is yet to learn to fully express himself, who is yet fully blossom into an independent thinker and decision maker.

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness rightly called ‘modern education institutions’ as killer of the soul. In the name of disciplining the child, the free child is forced to sit in rows in a classroom, without fidgeting, without talking and is expected to behave unlike a child and in the name of educating the child, he is overburdened with reading and writing & bombarded with a lot of information, more than his little brain is able to process and his memory is overloaded with age inappropriate study material! Catch them young has made more harm than good. If we teach the child to write, read and spell in preschool, they will not become better writers, readers and spellers by the time they reach 1st grade. According to the physiological developmental of a child, his neurological pathways for writing, reading and spelling haven’t fully formed. The result is greater number of children, particularly boys, diagnosed with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and attention deficiency problems. Research shows strong linkages between learning disabilities and starting schooling way too early. Furthermore, children will develop hatred for reading and writing and will not want to go to school. Reading & writing should be taught in school only after children have developed both their right and left reading centers in the brain (ie by the age of 6+) and have developed the “bridge” pathway that connects the two reading centers (bilateral integration).

The deeper issue is when parents, in their own day today busyness don’t have time for the child! Parents who are themselves ill-equipped to reason out their child’s behavior or invest time and effort in deeply understanding and catering to their child’s needs are looking for quick solutions & sending them to kindergarten or to school at the earliest possible as it seems to be the most feasible option that they have on hand today. Parents’ own rat races, work and social pressures make them anxious about their
kids’ behavior and performance. They are often preoccupied in seeing their child succeed and are intolerant of anything other than excellence, causing far too many expectations on the young child and stretching his natural limits. Mistakes & experimenting seem unpardonable. But, wait a minute….why are we forgetting that our child is just a child who wants his time and space to discover himself! He will, sooner or later, respond to inspiration and perform and give you happiness and joy. Remember, our forceful actions and unrealistic demands on them will only produce contrary results! If you were able to observe this same child at the age of fifty, you should probably find him suffering from terrible sclerosis or arterial hardening, the cause of which will be unknown at that point in time but it was actually planted in him when he was a child of five due to the constant pressures and burdens which robbed away his childhood and brought adulthood and old age early on! We must therefore know how it all adds up forty or fifty years later, of our management of the child.

We are quick to brand a child as ‘attention deficient’ or ‘hyperactive’ or ‘unmanageable’ but have we taken a closer look at our contribution to this as well? Do we know how our fast-paced lifestyle, media heavy culture and fast food culture is affecting
the child’s physiology and psychology? Do we want to know how our children are victims, for want of meaningful learning environment, of the detours erected in our culture, schools and homes? Step into the child’s shoes to really understand what it is looking for? His deepest need is your love, your time and your attention, dear parents and nothing else! Let’s look at how we can create a difference in the life of our child in three different dimensions that affect his/her happiness- a. taking the right decision of his/her schooling b. creating the right atmosphere for his/her natural growth in a stress free atmosphere c. how to be loving authorities as against strict disciplinarians.

Play in the formative years is an essential seed which bears fruit for the whole lifetime. Play dominates the lives of young children. A healthy child wants to play from morning to night. His play bubbles up from deep within and helps keep the life forces, so necessary for his growth. If a child loses interest in play, it is usually a sign of illness. Children who play significantly during early childhood have an advantage in physical development, socio-emotional development and in cognitive development including areas of language, intelligence, curiosity, innovation and imagination.

Children should be taught in a noncompetitive environment to fully blossom their innate talents. They need a regular day today rhythm to develop a sense of security. Therefore, they need to eat, play & sleep at proper times & not according to our convenience. Family time must be introduced wherein the family gets healthy time in the evening to play together at a park or in the playground with the kids and the whole family gets time to eat their dinner together at the table speaking to each other and quietly settling into the night. Such regular and natural rhythms and routines in eating and sleeping as well as daily activities will promote a more relaxed atmosphere and a stress free environment for the natural growth of a child.

In the rigmarole of life, unconsciously and unwittingly, we become bad parents whereas when our precious little one is born, we dream of being his best parents. We can still do it because a child is so loving and forgiving that it takes him hardly anytime to start reciprocating to your new loving ways. Believe me, try it! When the child sees us as loving authorities and not as someone that he is forced to comply to, we will automatically get the result we want i,e the child starts listening to the parent. Its almost like magic. But it will not come easy. You have to invest time and be an integral part of his childhood. It means when the child wants you to listen to him, you have to listen to him! It may be one thousand times a day. This is the single most important investment you will do to secure your child’s future. You will be amazed at how it works. A child learns by imitating and it looks out for adult role models to imitate. Without adult models, children cannot shape their own brains. If you are inattentive when the child wants attention, the child learns to be inattentive and is uninterested in what you have to say to him! When you listen to your child with full attention, the child learns to be attentive.

The child is usually not looking for solutions from adults but is looking for some empathy. So, instead of correcting the behavior of the child every-time the child brings a complaint or shares some unpleasant incident with you, just give him a patient hearing. When you are empathetic to the child and listen to the child, you are laying foundation to establish vital lines of communication between you and your child and slowly the child begins to trust you and will soon start looking upto you to solve his life problems. Secondly, you have to be a part of his childhood in that you must take out time to play with him, read out stories to him, build models/do craft with him, take him out to the park/playground and be involved in his childhood. This is the second most important investment you will do that goes a long way in giving security to the child.

A child feel secure when he knows that you, as a parent, love him and are interested in him. Love is a verb, it is action oriented. When you invest time in building a relationship with the child, he sees it as love. Love isn’t buying him an expensive toy in lieu of your time! Mind you, when you buy him things in place of giving your time to him, he is learning to replace things with people from you! Third and a very important aspect in the art of parenting is to soften the frenetic scheduling of the lives of children, giving them some quiet time to play, to ponder, to reflect and to use their inner voice. Replace your list of ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that,’ by defining large boundaries for them. They have a need to explore and repetitive don’ts will only lead the child to experience a frustrated childhood! Remember it from your own childhood experience, don’t you? As adults need their space, children too need to have their own space and time–a time for them to be with themselves, not with school or studies or homework or tuitions or any other extra-curricular classes that frenzied parents subscribe their young ones to such as violin class, tennis class, bharatanatyam class, karate class or swimming class. You might think that it will provide entertainment value for your child but these classes are way too organized and regulated to provide any entertainment value and must not be enforced upon the child unless the child has some definitive talent and willfully wants to take up to it.

Remember always, parents’ love, time and attention are non-tradable items for the child. When we understand this aspect and not neglect it, we allow the child to grow up and blossom naturally. We then enable them to grow up as confident young adults ready to face the world! Childhood years are foundational to the long term health and happiness of an individual. So, as parents, we hold the responsibility of executing our duty with as much seriousness as we would on our work front. As a society, we might have already lost our traditional knowledge in bringing up kids in a cultured, loving and protective environment but we can, as responsible parents do some soul searching and be genuinely interested in attending to the needs and cares of our child. When we are deeply interested in the child, pathways will emerge. See the world from the hopeful and happy eyes of your child! You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth….Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.- Khalil Gibran

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman

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Transcendence in Relationships

Transcendence in Relationships

Transcendence in RelationshipsThe couple went into the counsellor’s chambers and both of them were determined that they didn’t want to be in this marriage because they didn’t feel love for each other and there was growing animosity with each passing day. The wife said she didn’t sense his commitment to their marriage from the beginning and the husband argued for hours on how each time he was reminded that love is not just a feeling but it’s a commitment.

The counsellor, ripe with age and wisdom clarified, “I do not agree that feelings are unimportant, and there is only commitment. I do believe, however, that commitment should lead the day. Feelings are an important part of the relationship. But feelings come and go. However, commitment is the glue that holds the relationship together. “Love” is choosing to love someone, not just a feeling. I cannot create emotions, as you note. But I can choose to act lovingly when the emotions aren’t there.”

“Are feelings worthless? Absolutely not! But feelings and emotions are fickle. They come and go. The marriage vows are built on commitment through thick-and-thin. We don’t make a promise to ‘love as long as I feel that emotion.’ We promise to love through good and bad times, up and down times, healthy and sick days! We make those vows because we know the emotion will not always be there, so we promise to work through that.”

Marriage experts point out that one of the several possibilities that gets in the way of loving couples is unaddressed anger and resentment built-up over time.

Let’s look at how resentment builds up in a relationship. At the root of it, resentment stems mostly from childhood hurts or hurts from past lifetimes (as past life regressors put it). When you carry hurts from your childhood such as feeling unimportant, not valued, rejected, accused, guilty, powerless, inadequate or being unlovable–such hurts leave impressions in the unconscious mind that distort your view of current reality. When someone triggers one of your deep set hurt, recognizing the pain it might cause you, you immediately want to escape it and thereby take shelter in blaming the other or getting angry and abusive with the one whose action is hurting you. So, people blaming one another are just trying to relieve the pain of their deep set hurts.

Such deep-set hurts create alongside a deep need. A need which turns into expectation in a relationship i,e the person who is carrying a deep-set hurt expects the other person to treat him/her in a certain manner. When the other person fails to treat him/her in that manner, the deep need is unfulfilled and it leads to resentment. Resentment arises from unfulfilled needs. Note that if the expectation is not connected to a deep-set hurt, it will not lead to resentment.

In a husband-wife relationship, need for affection, appreciation, loyalty are some of the deep needs. When such deep needs are not met, there is scope for blaming, anger, and subsequently resentment. When there is resentment, there is blame. When we blame someone, some part of us feels relieved, isn’t it? Unfortunately, blame does not cure the pain, it only masks it for a while. If we are extremely conscious of our acts, we can know that by accepting our part responsibly and by developing a magnanimous heart to forgive the other person of his faults, can we truly experience relief from the pain that bothers the heart.

In his ‘Life of Total Forgiveness’ seminar, Mahatma Das, a monk & renunciant in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition says, resentment is not about what was done to you but about how you responded to what was done to you. He says anger, blame and resentment are emotions on the surface & mostly we are in touch with only these emotions. But if we dig a little more deeper, they have their root in more difficult feelings such as hurt, sadness and disappointment. He advices the participants that healing deep-set hurts is possible when we do a deep emotional excavation and release the emotional tension that we are holding onto by forgiving the person who hurt us. He says, resentment is about you being right and the other being wrong. As long as you need to be right, you won’t forgive. As long as you need to tell others how wrong your offender was, you won’t forgive. When it
comes to forgiving, being right is wrong!

Different ways help different people. When a spouse feels deeply understood and cared for, he or she is able to release some deep hurts. For some people intellectually understanding the direct negative implications on one’s own physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health helps. It is said that resentment is like drinking poison and hoping that the other person will die. If we are holding onto resentment and are not willing to let go of it, we carry it forward to many more lifetimes until one day we have give it up by forgiving the other person. Healers vouch that what we are dealing with in this lifetime, we did not handle it well in our past lifetime. Karmically too, when you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free. A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said, ‘Don’t be angry with the agent of your karma.’

Sincere forgiveness isn’t colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don’t worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time. They say to forgive is divine! It is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.

‘As difficult as it seems, you can be sure of this: At the core of the heart, you have the power to move beyond the old issues that are still hindering your freedom. The hardest things–the ones that push you up against your limits–are the very things you need to address to make a quantum leap into a fresh inner and outer life.’ – Doc Childre and Howard Martin

Radhanath Swami in his discourse on forgiveness defines love as the capacity to endlessly forgive. He explains at length how our inability to make the choice to forgive, creates pain suffering and chaos, not only in the lives of others but ours too!    Without forgiveness, no relationship can be satisfying. This is the real secret of successful relationships–the ability to forgive the other unconditionally! He says that this quality of forgiveness is more illuminating than the light of the sun and those who have that ability to forgive are invested with the power to access the mercy and the love of god.

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman


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What a woman wants

What a woman wants

What a woman wantsA friend called me the other day and confided in me that she is exasperated and is at her wits ends and does not know what to do. She seemed quite depressed as well. So, I asked her to come over for a chat. She grabbed the proposal and was at my door in an hour’s time. When we sat down to speak, all she managed was to cry and much later she told me, ‘my husband, he just does not care to listen to me!’ The poor woman, I realized, had such pent up emotions locked up within herself, which had never found a vent.

A woman needs emotional support from her husband as much as he needs physical intimacy from his wife. A couple needs to strike a balance by meeting each of their needs. A woman can read cues from her husband’s actions and behavior and know his needs exactly but where she goes wrong is in expecting the husband to read her actions and behavior to know her needs and fulfill it. Irrespective of the number of years in marriage, the husband is unable to know ‘what the woman really wants?’ Its a big mystery for him
because it is not his area of expertise, so to say, to read the ‘mind’ of his wife and so he draws a blank, everytime he attempts to fulfill his wife’s need.

To make matters worse, a woman is not enabled to be articulate about her needs, so, she ‘expects’ her husband to know it somehow and when the need is not fulfilled, one can expect an emotional outburst which is generally termed as ‘anger.’ Remember, she has been created an emotional being and therefore, she looks for emotional fulfillment but when she does not find it, the emotions are bottled up and when it reaches the brim, it has to burst out. has to vent out her bottled up emotions unless ofcourse she has a very fulfilling and satisfactory relationship with her husband.

I have a question for all the husbands here. What do you do when your wife bursts out crying during a discussion/ argument?

Well, most likely the wife expects some emotional support from her husband and the plea comes in form of tears but what happens is that generally the man does not know how to deal with emotions. Whenever he is put in an emotionally charged situation, he would like to be left alone. So thinking, he walks away, imagining it to be the best solution. He hardly knows that her tears are in the first place because of feeling ‘alone,’ and if he walks away from her now, she will feel more alone and depressed.

Digging a little deeper, we find that, as little boys they are constantly fed the idea that crying is silly behavior. So, men grow up with this wrong notion and by the time they enter wedlock, their emotional side has mostly eased out of them. They also do not have much training in how they can deal with other’s emotions. Men may think that they can do without this skill but trust me this skill will help you keep your marriage going! This is true because, when a woman finds an emotionally supportive husband, she does wonders to her marriage. You not only gain her confidence and loyalty automatically but you will that she will walk that extra mile to please you, keep the house neat and tidy, bring up the kids in a loving atmosphere, cook nice meals for the family, respect your parents and support you in all your endeavors. Who does not want such a wife? But it will all be yours with a little investment into finding out what pleases your wife the most by addressing her emotional needs.

Do you remember a time when you sat beside your wife, wiped her tears dry and consoled her with sweet words of reassurance that she will always find you besides her whenever she needs you the most. When was the last time you did it? Let me guess, probably when you met her first! And why did you do that? Because it pleased her the most when you said it. Isn’t it? So, what stops you from doing it now? Think deeply about it & you could solve a major jigsaw puzzle in your life!

Every woman’s emotional need is different. To make matters simple for you, I have listed down 3 broad categories of what a woman wants the most from her husband (not in any particular order of priority). This has been culled out of Willard F. Harley, Jr.‘s international best selling book ‘His Needs Her Needs’ wherein he lists out his widely researched emotional needs of spouses and provides a questionnaire to find out your most important emotional need and how effective your spouse is in dealing with this need.

1. Conversation (talking about events of the day, personal feelings, and plans for the future; showing interest in her favorite topics of conversation; balancing conversation; using it to inform, investigate, and understand her) Conversation has three most vital aspects to it-

a. Listening: Just listen to her! Listen and not wait for your turn to talk. Most women just want to be heard, not advised. And most men want to fix, rather than do nothing. So the idea of providing “support” by plain listening, as women want can be difficult to grasp. When she is sharing her day today happenings etc, she doesn’t want you to solve her problems or tell her how to handle it, she just needs you to listen and be sympathetic.
b. Undivided attention (Stop talking to your spouse or answering her questions while answering to an email or while reading the newspaper or while answering another phone call. Donot multi-task! Sit down and look her in the face and actively listen.)
c. Being non-judgmental She needs to know you will not feel or think differently about her for expressing herself. Provide her that forum.

2. Affection & intimacy (the expression of love in words and action, creating an environment that clearly and repeatedly expresses love free from the distinctively sensual element. Creating an intimate space to brings about a sense of fulfillment and feeling of togetherness-need not be sensual).

3. Domestic Support (creation of a home environment for you that offers a refuge from the stresses of life; management of the home and care of the children— including but not limited to cooking meals, washing dishes, washing and ironing clothes, housecleaning etc).

Other needs listed in his book include Admiration, Family Commitment, Financial Support, Sexual Fulfillment, Recreational Companionship, Honesty & openness, An Attractive Spouse. You can find the questionnaire at http://www.marriagebuilders.com/forms/enq.pdf

You can research along with your spouse on her most important emotional needs and work out a commitment plan either stated or unstated and work towards a more healthier married life! Trust me, the very fact that you are genuinely interested in knowing her emotional needs will get her immediately on your side.

Radhanath Swami often gets the newly married couple promise each other that the wife will always be on the side of her husband and the husband will never see a tear in his wife’s eye. He adds that love means to serve and to serve means to please. So, when we serve each other by pleasing each other in our marriage, our home becomes Vaikuntha.

On a secondary note, men are entitled to their emotions–to feel and to express them as well. It does not make you less manly if you do, rather it goes a long way in creating a more beautiful relationship in your marriage.

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman

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Ouch, that hurts!

Ouch, that hurts!

Anger in Love

There is no bigger emotion that makes us most indifferent to our own happiness than the emotion of hurt. We keep apart and keep away from acting and seeing our dreams by hanging onto hurt to a point that it hurts our relationships, our dreams, aspirations and the very fabric of our lives. Maybe you feel ignored in a relationship or severely criticized & put down or there are scars of abandonment that simply wishes to stay with you. Hurt is the feeling that allows you to close the doors to opportunities and protect yourself in a shell of negative thinking. The difficulty with hurt is the infection it causes in the mind, your mind is taken over by obsessive negative thoughts that can last for months, decades, sometimes a whole lifetime. Most of us hang onto hurt for a long time because we expect someone else to fix it or heal it in someway by acting toward us in a kind and loving way. You know which is the single most difficult act in the human experience to overcome? To let go of expecting someone else to do the right thing and heal our pain! But it is exactly what is needed if we are to get out of our obscure corner and march forward on the path of realizing our dreams.

In his bestselling book ‘The power of Now,’ Eckhart Tolle talks about the “pain body” that we all have. He says that this is the collection of all hurts, sorrows, anger, and fears in an energetic field around your body. It’s your baggage that you haven’t dealt with and continue to carry around. The pain body requires more pain to expand and therefore we end up experiencing automatic reactions to situations that become even more painful. So, we go on collecting hurt and make ourselves appear bigger and bigger victims.

Radhanath Swami gives an analogy. He says accumulating hurt is like picking up a hot burning ember of coal in our hands and holding it day after day, week after week, year after year. Inadvertently, we are only torturing ourselves and if we keep that burning coal in our heart, it will burn to ashes all our virtues, spiritual qualities and make us simply miserable.

The way out is when we shift our consciousness from a victim to a healer identity. The victim focuses on damage, hurt and the bad things that you’ve suffered. Because you have been hurt and most likely have walked on eggshells in your relationship, you have an impulse to be resentful, angry, critical, blaming, controlling, or abusive, behavior that cuts you off from your core values and your true self. Whereas when you develop a healer identity you will focus on your resilience, strengths and a strong desire to improve your life and relationships and you can draw from your core values and derive happiness by reconnecting with your true self.

Identify Your “Little and Unimportant Hurts” : More people walk around saying it’s not important or it doesn’t matter when it is indeed a very important and a big piece of hurting emotion buried within them. They will describe this hurt as being small and unimportant. Men tend to do this rather frequently. Take 15 minutes time and write down a detailed description of all the “little and unimportant hurts” that somehow doesn’t go away. Every little hurt that you keep remembering, that won’t go away, regardless of when it happened, must go on this list. Many people have many of these little hurts from childhood. These emotions are buried within creating difficulties with their health. Identifying these hurts will tell you a great deal about your buried and unexpressed emotions. Then deal with them one at a time how important it is for you to cling on to this hurt, whether you want to free your heart and experience freedom by letting go of this particular emotion.

Learn to say ‘no’: Men and women go through many situations telling themselves that “it doesn’t really matter” or “it’s not important enough to argue about”, basically buying peace by agreeing to something that deep down they do not agree with. They find themselves feeling unhappy, disgruntled, and angry with the individual involved. This type of situation when what you say and do is not in sync with what you feel creates unwanted tension, hurt and unhappiness in relationships. Buying peace at any price creates negative feelings within you. If you are habituated to saying ‘yes’ when you want to say ‘no,’ buy time instead of buying peace. You don’t have to immediately agree to something in which you don’t have your heart. Instead you can gently buy some time. In the meantime, prepare your script which is objective and reasonable that enables you to say ‘no.’

Practice detachment : Michael Yapko, a clinical psychologist in his book ‘When Living Hurts,’ talks about identifying pattern know as the ‘therapeutic metaphor,’ as a clinical approach to healing hurts. Usually hurt is experienced as a metaphor by people eg: I have a broken heart. Some of us may experience hurt like a feeling of being stabbed in the heart or stabbed in the back, or that you have been trampled over. So ask yourself what the hurt feels like inside. Instead of feeling like you were stabbed in the back, step out of your body and see the stabbing and the person doing the stabbing and you will notice that he/she is hurt from a former stabbing. Now ask yourself as you are being stabbed, but watching it from a distance how that person is ever going to heal your hurt when he/she is in too much pain? He/she actually need your healing, but not the other way around. When you practice detachment from this metaphor, the hurt no longer affects you and your mind will automatically become much more positive and optimistic. If you can recognize the other person’s hurt and help them see where they are hurting, it might open up new channels of communication in your relationship.

Learn the art of Forgiveness : Forgiveness is something that occurs as a result of owning and releasing your negative emotions. We often reach for forgiveness without doing the work required to release emotions of hurt and anger & we find the hurt linger on. But when we have worked on identifying the hurt (small and big ones) in the above mentioned manner and released them, then we can truly forgive but if we withhold the free choice to forgive someone, then we simply remain a victim of whoever has hurt us or abused us. As we give the gift of forgiveness, we’re healed. Radhanath Swami says forgiveness means becoming well-wishers of our persecutors, and think for their welfare. He says that one who has the capacity to endlessly forgive the other can truly love the other. Forgiveness is something you can do to open the door to love, to compassion, and to free you own heart and be relieved of the poison of hatred, anger and resentment! If we cannot forgive then there is no possibility of any relationship surviving at any level.

The Power of Prayer : Certain emotions just hang on, regardless what you do.  Prayers have great potency and can enable you to experience deep healing of all your hurts and reconnect you with your original nature of happiness. You can pray to the Lord in all your earnest surrendering the hurt emotion to the Lord. You can also ask someone who you trust to pray for you. There is one thing that you can included in your prayers i,e asking for a grateful heart. Gratitude is the antidote to self pity. Self pity is what we indulge in inadvertently as our anchor when we experience hurt but know that it is a downward spiral and a little bit of gratitude can pull us out of that situation. We can be grateful to the lord in every situation and view the hurt as means of purifying our existence to bring us one step closer to the Lord Himself.

Radhanath Swami says, “Pain may be inevitable but suffering is optional.” It is our free choice, whether we want to suffer or not, though the experience of pain may not be a choice. Even though physically the pain might be hurting, we can find deep fulfillment in the gratitude of having been purified, or we can simply suffer.

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman


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Thank you God for everything!

Thank you God for everything!

Radhanath Swami - Thank you God for everything!‘It doesn’t take a great person to blame others or to complain, but it takes a very very great person to thank god in difficulties.’ – Radhanath Swami

According to our karmas (manifest/unmainfest effects of our actions), we have a particular destiny. But however good our karma is, there will be honor and distress, pleasure and pain, success and failure, heat and cold etc because this is a world of dualities. You cannot have one without the other. But if you become attached to the positive side, to that degree you will suffer when the negative side inevitably comes before us. The solution to this is given by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, He tells us that we should transcend the dualities of life. But, how to transcend dualities of love/hate in a marriage or happiness/ distress in the work place or pride/humility when we have competition or pleasure/pain while raising children?

We can transcend dualities by seeing the Lord in everything, by looking upon circumstances in our lives as His mercy that has come to help us grow into a beautiful person, beyond our vision. And when we learn to offer the fruits of our action as an act of service for god, we can instantly transcend the dualities of material existence and enter the divine realm, beyond love/hate relationships and we are then able to see the other person as a gift of God who has come to us to help us get over our own anarthas (contamination’s) that block our spiritual growth.

tat te ‘nukampäà su-samékñamäëo

bhuïjäna evätma-kåtaà vipäkam

håd-väg-vapurbhir vidadhan namas te

jéveta yo mukti-pade sa däya-bhäk.

(Srimad Bhagvatam 10:14:8)

Radhanath Swami explains,“When a person is undergoing serious tribulations, and in that condition with folded palms and tears of sincerity in his heart he thanks god saying I deserved worst, but I know my lord you have a purpose behind this and I am grateful.”

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman

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Blog Relationships

LOVE, FOREVER!

LOVE, FOREVER!

LOVE, FOREVER!What is true love? Does it exist in this temporal world? When one says, ‘I’m in love with you,” what do we really mean? Let me explain a little bit to clearly bring out the essence. The mind is a thing and so is the body. It is not part of a person but it is just the covering of a person. The atma or the soul, also called the Jiva, is source of life & that is a person. So, to love someone really means to love the soul in that person and real attachment in the higher reality means being attached to the source of life or being attached to the soul. For eg: When someone close to you dies, there is no much love for the dead corpse but there is love for the person that has left that body, isnt it?

So, everytime we hear a young lover say, ‘I’m in love with you,’ please note that this is not the real love that we are seeking but it is just an expression of ones attachment to the temporary gross body. In actuality, when one says I’m in love with you, it just means, ‘Please satisfy my senses,’ & if you don’t then, ‘I hate you.’ This temporal world is full of dualities, because even though we are not this body, we identify strongly with it, its pleasures & pains & its needs. Therefore, we find that we are not satisfied.

The reason we are not satisfied is because the soul is hungry for true love. The nature of the soul is ‘sat cid ananda,’ it is eternal, full of knowledge and full of bliss. What is that pleasure? It is the pleasure of prema or love. That is the only food that actually gives satisfaction to the heart–to love and to be loved. Actually, when one aspires to find such love, love that satisfies our soul, then it is the highest we can aspire for in our lives.

But we need to use our intelligence to actualize such high aspirations and when our intelligence is being guided by the actual needs and wants of the soul, then our life is directed toward experiencing the highest form of love and happiness thereby. But when our intelligence is being guided by the mind and the senses as against the actual wants and needs of the soul, it leads us to many a binding karmic situations and the perpetuation’s of illusion, which we misunderstand to be love or happiness and it eventually leads us onto the path of misery and suffering only! Everything that we experience through the mind and the senses is “duhkhalayam asasvatam”–it is temporary & brings us misery! All the things we are attached to–be it people or things, will be destroyed & it will end in due course of time.

But, how do we train our senses and mind? The secret is in perfecting our existing relationships. I repeat – The secret of training our senses and mind is in perfecting our existing relationships. All our relationships happen to us with the sole purpose of purifying our existence. Radhanath Swami defines purification as the means of bringing something back to its natural state. Just like pure water means there is no contamination in it. The vedic scriptures prescribe that we can turnaround our situations and miserable conditions of existence when we redefine our love for someone through the means of serving them selflessly. Through rendering service, developing pure motivations and nurturing a genuine concern of wellbeing of everyone around us, we gradually develop divine qualities and bring our mind and consciousness in harmony with the original nature of our soul. As we purify our motives and our selfish tendencies, we begin to attract divine love back into our lives, the love which is the highest treasure and aspiration in all worlds then begins to shine upon us in all its tenderness, bringing fulfillment and unlimited bliss to our being.

Some Relationship pitfalls :

1. To be judgmental: Being judgmental about each and every action of others is not progressive but it is simply distractive. It facilitates us to be argumentative or angry or at best we end up carrying these burdensome thoughts in our mind and breed them day after day until they explode someday. The simple solution to this pitfall is to be non-judgmental. Judging is a force of habit, so we simply have to turn it around and practice being non-judgmental. This requires us just to be aware of our thoughts and actions each and every moment to begin with and arrest judgmental thoughts using our higher intelligence. For eg: Our neighbors dont talk to us ever (because they think they are superior). Stop your mind before it starts the judgmental thought which is given in the bracket. Instead, you can just repeat the fact that your neighbors dont talk to you & be peaceful with it. Believe me, it works like wonder!

2. Harboring negative thoughts about the other person/s: To be envious/hateful towards another, to wish evil/failure for another etc, all these are demoniac thoughts. They do not have anything divine to offer us but hamper our progress on our path of pure love. Please be mindful of not harboring such thoughts even towards people who you consider evil or towards someone who you think is unworthy of respect. Our tricky mind has from time immemorial played tricks to take us away from our goal but now that we are aware of the colossal damage caused by the mind, resolve to yourself not to give into its ways! Replace every negative thought as it occurs with positive counter – thought, even for people who you consider abominable for every soul is inherently good. Do this exercise religiously for EVERY negative thought, relentlessly, every day and one day you will realize that you no longer harbor any negative thoughts but are filled with positive thoughts for people. Thus, seeds of deep love and compassion for every living being fructifies within you as you get connected to the divine realm.

3. Ulterior motives: We have ulterior motives because we sense some kind of profit or adulation/recognition from the act/situation. However, when we perform action laden with ulterior motives, we cease to be genuine caring persons and we fail to attract pure love which is our ultimate goal of life. The best antidote is to practice speaking the truth in every circumstance i,e speak out loud our hidden agendas, even if they may at first sound selfish or you could also confess about your ulterior motive. The only stumbling block we might sense in purifying our motivations is fear of exposing ourselves. But please remember, this is just a mental concoction; our original nature is that we are eternal, full of knowledge and full of bliss. So, forge ahead and break the habit fearlessly and truth will be on your side! Radhanath Swami reiterates that as we progress on the path of pure love, we are supposed to be developing deeper, pure intentions and that means we are devoid of any ulterior motives.

4. Domineering spirit: Most of us fall trap to being control freaks, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we are aware of it or not! We want to control others, control the situation and control everything that concerns our life. At the deepest level, we do this out of our misplaced propensity to enjoy material nature but the fact is that we are not the controllers and therefore we are frustrated! At a different level, we might want to be in control of situations in our life just to counteract our fears (mostly irrational). However, whatever be the reason, trying to be controller definitely counters our progress. The moment we realize this, we can let go and channelize our energies in developing self-control. Letting go is easier said than done but when we do this as an act of surrender in pursuit of supreme love, it purifies us of our contaminations and then we reflect the eternal nature of the soul.

When you learn to control your mind and your senses, then your mind and senses become peaceful. And in this peaceful state, the true love of the soul can manifest.- Radhanath Swami

– Mrs. Preethi Dhiman

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