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Tolerate

Responsibility as Parents

Radhanath SwamiI remember, I was a little boy 6 years old. Once my mother said, “Your father is a good person and everyone likes him, but we might have to get divorced.” I started to cry. I was so confused. ‘How is this?’

My mother told my father that I cried. So they decided they would never divorce. ‘We can’t do this to our children.’ And last May they celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary.

That is integrity, that is compassion. That is what parents are supposed to do. Marriage is responsibility. Responsibility to each other as husband and wife; responsibility for the mental, physical and spiritual well being of the children. Do you know that 92% of juvenile deliquescence in the United States of America is children coming from divorced or broken house parents? This is Federal statistics. 97% of juveniles in prison are coming from broken marriages. But people like to politely protect their own desires and needs by saying, “We will do it smoothly, it won’t disturb the children.”

Why so much conflict within marriage? Because instead of thinking in terms of ‘we’, we are thinking in terms of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – selfishness, ego.

– Radhanath Swami

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Blog Relationships

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

…Read Articles in preethi’s Blog

 

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Tolerate

The Mirror House

The Mirror HouseSpoilt children get everything they want and therefore expect that for the rest of their life everything will go their way. Of course, they don’t get what they want all the time and so they become irritable grown-ups – Radhanath Swami.

Once a happy little dog entered the House of 1000 Mirrors. When he arrived, he bounced happily up the stairs to the doorway of the house. He looked through the doorway with his ears lifted high and his tail wagging fast. To his great surprise, he found himself staring at 1000 other happy little dogs with their tails wagging just as fast. He smiled, and was answered with 1000 smiles just as warm and friendly. As he left the House, he thought to himself, “This is a wonderful place. I’ll visit it often.” Another little dog, who was not quite as happy as the first one, also decided to visit the house to cheer himself up. He slowly climbed the stairs and hung his head low as he looked into the door. When he saw the 1000 unfriendly looking dogs staring back at him, he growled at them and was horrified to see them all growling back at him. As he left, he thought to himself, “That is a horrible place, I will never come here again.”

After a busy day’s work, with all the physical exhaustion and mental stress, we return back to our homes. How welcome home feels depends on the mood in which we enter it. If we enter disgruntled and irritable, the spouse will catch our mood at least to some extent and home will no longer offer the rest and peace we are looking for. If this happens regularly enough, the thought of home will repel both husband and wife. What a sorry state of affairs would that be! On the other hand, despite the day-long toil, if we enter the house consciously garnering all our jolliness, how admiring would the spouse be? In today’s world, both husband and wife know that the other has busy work schedules. Knowing this well, if even one of the spouses proactively tries to garner the extra strength to be especially nice, what a profound influence would that be on the relationship.

Radhanath Swami explains that a devotee of God is never disheartened by the environment. The temporary environment around us is always changing. Sometimes everything is very favorable at work and home, and sometimes it’s not. We can translate whatever happens in our life into a positive opportunity to make steady spiritual advancement and come closer to God. Whoever we are, things will not always go our way. A true devotee is one who doesn’t complain even when put in the most trying circumstances. Instead, the true devotee moves forward with a grateful heart irrespective of the circumstances.

If we expect that our spouse will tolerate whatever tantrums we throw, then we will suffer. Instead, if we learn to be grateful in all situations, the unwelcome situations in the world would not disturb us too much. We will thus be able to remain joyful. And this joy will nourish the relationship between husband and wife.

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Love

The Imposter

The Imposter“When there is love in our heart, only love will come out” — Radhanath Swami

Lasting relationships are based on love. And yet, why do so many loving relationships see unhappy endings? It’s not because love was lost, but because it was never really love; it was the look-alike, i.e., lust.

The difference between lust and love is that one is selfish while the other is selfless. Lust is based on ignorance and love on truth. Under the misconception that they are mere physical bodies, many lovers seek from their partners sensations that give pleasure to their own bodies. This is selfish lust, because the goal is one’s own pleasure. The proof of such selfishness is that as soon as the partner stops providing enough pleasure, the so-called love vanishes.

But real love is selfless. It’s about giving, not taking; it’s about the beloved, not the lover. True love is based on the truth that we are not mere physical bodies. We are eternal souls residing within our bodies. The eternal nature of the soul is to love God and all His children selflessly. When we understand this eternal nature of the soul, and when we experience the sublime pleasure of giving ourselves selflessly to reach the soul of an­other, then we know what true love is.

“When our desires get disconnected from eternal truth, they become lust. But when our desires get reunited with eternal truth, all of them become an ex­pression of true love.” — Radhanath Swami.

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Tolerate

Toys are poison

Fighting for Petty Things“My mother witnessed her three little sons as they fought amongst themselves over toys. She used to say “toys are poison” because they cause so much trouble” — Radhanath Swami

Adults look at children and say, “Such stupid children, fighting over such stupid things. After all, what is a toy? Just a cheap piece of plastic. And these children are fighting over it!” But adults have their ‘toys’ too, both animate and inanimate, over which they fight—who belongs to whom, what belongs to whom. And sometimes that fight ends in a divorce. If we simply understand the second chapter of Bhagavata Gita, all problems of this world will be solved. This chapter tells us who we really are. We are not this body, for whose needs we childishly fight. We are spirit souls. Our original nature is that we are eternal, full of knowledge, and full of bliss.

As a spirit soul passes from boyhood to youth to old age, at the time of death, the spirit soul will simply enter another body (BG 2.13). Why then should we make such a big deal out of superficial temporary situations? As for the temporary happiness derived from temporary ‘toys’ of this world, Prahlad, a King of Vedic times, said something interesting. “Nobody tries for miseries, but they come anyways. Similarly, even happiness will come anyways. So, why endeavor for happiness?” He goes one step further, “If anybody wants to be happy, it is very easy. Just stop endeavoring to be happy in this material world. Because as soon as we endeavor to be happy, we become implicated by all the causes of suffering. Whatever happiness and distress is going to come, will come anyways, whether you try for it or not. So why not spend our valuable time to cultivate spiritual happiness by turning to God?”

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Blog Relationships

Marriage is like walking on egg shells

Happy marriage Have you ever felt that you are treading on egg shells in your married life? That is, when you feel that you never know when your husband or wife can yell or express disappointment at your behavior, or when you can never understand what reaction to expect. It can be very, very difficult. I know of one couple who always have a misunderstanding or an argument at the end of every sentence. It might seem like an exaggeration but it’s true. In fact, this is quite common and can happen to the best of couples. Maybe it has something to do with staying together too closely for a long time — and that leads to a lot of friction.  But then, after a certain point it becomes too much!

Now, you may wonder what the solution for this problem is. It all boils down to good communication skills. Communication skills are most important for maintaining good relations with your spouse. For ex., how do you respond to your partner when you disagree with what he/she has told you? What if your spouse does something that you don’t like? Do you yell? Give them the silent treatment? Or find ways to punish your spouse?

The response we offer when we disagree or when we are frustrated can have a big impact on the relationship. Recognizing our typical patterns is the first step in deciding how we are impacting the relationship. Think of the last few disagreements and look at how you responded. Examine what you were hoping would happen as a result of your behaviors. For example, did you give the silent treatment for a day in hopes that your spouse “would learn their lesson?” If so, did it work?

Keeping the communication channels open always is most important in a marriage. Mostly out of frustration people tend to complain, criticize or compare with others which lead to further problems. So instead of complaining or criticizing one should express one’s need in a positive and direct way. For example, a wife who wants more help around the house says, “I always have to do everything around here and no one else lifts a finger.” This is not likely to motivate her husband to spring into action and help her clean. However, she could make a direct request such as, “could you please do the dishes tonight?”

Communication that involves attacking your partner will not yield positive results. Instead, it is likely to create more problems for the relationship. Attacking your partner verbally may include obvious forms such as name calling, or it may include more subtle forms in an attempt to manipulate your partner.

Name calling is never productive. Avoid the “you” messages that blame the other person. Statements such as “you never do what I want to do,” are not likely to be helpful. Instead, “I” statements such as “I feel hurt that we don’t ever get to visit my mother together” are more likely to lead to an open and honest discussion. “I” statements do not place blame but instead describe a feeling and can lead to a discussion that helps solve a problem.

So in this way, we see that marriage need not be a battle of words, but a comfortable relationship in which two individuals can express themselves with respect for each others views and desires. As Radhanath swami explains that a couple may have a beautiful house, nice car, so many servants, so much jewelry and furniture and fame and power within society but if the person’s affectionate relationship with his/her spouse is not proper then that person will be miserable no matter what. Everyone does get into arguments and misunderstanding, even children do. But the ‘big’ children are often more foolish than little children. Little children fight and make up when offered some sweet, but when elders fight, they may never be able to trust each other for the rest of their lives!!!

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