Time with friends and family is always happy time ....

                               

 

I have been spending last few days with my family and childhood friends. And it has been one of the best times of my trip so far. Re living child hood memories is a part of it. But most importantly, it is more about surrounded by people who unconditionally want you to be happy and do well. In this blog, I am going to talk about effect family and friends have on you and how you can tap into their unconditional vibration to take you to happy place.

So far we have seen as to what we, as individuals, can do to be happy. Now let us look how friends and family can help you at that as well. Firstly, this is not about what friends and family can do to you or how they should behave to make you happy. I have seen and experience many times that the same F&F that I am going to talk about have done things that have made me angry and sad in the past. But that was when I was trying to rest my happiness on their actions rather than their presence. Over time I have understood that they are individuals as well who have their own direction of thoughts and own destinies to be fulfilled.

What changed for me was my time away from them. After moving to US in 2004, I soon started to realize how effective F&F were in relieving daily stress and putting you in different state of mind. I also realized how stupid I was to not look at them that way when I had the chance. Over the years, I have spent focused effort on building closed friendships and repairing and maintaining family bonds that uplift me.

This is what happens; when you are with close family and friends, you are not someone you try to project in everyday life. You become yourself. You are in midst of people who have seen you struggle and who have seen you succeed. That removes the judgement lenses that everyday world looks you at with. The comfort of non judgement removes your internal resistance and takes you to a place where you can enjoy the moment. Enjoying the moment is what happiness is all about.

Also, when you are with your F&F, you go back in time when life was easy (childhood) and live those memories together. This helps you understand that your current reality is not that carved in the stone and can change. And this realization helps reduce stress drastically resulting in happy thoughts.

What should I do? Start looking at your Family as source of non-judgmental vibration. Understand that what they provide you is different than anything anyone will. This will let you look past the outside resistance. Yes, they will do things that will agitate you, but at the end of the day, they want best for you. They provide you with best environment to blossom and forget about stress.

Second, cultivate close group of friends that help you forget about your stress and be yourself. This is important especially when you are living away from home. Remember, they can be sometimes annoying and will do things that may counter your upbringing. But what’s important is how they make you feel. If they make you comfortable enough to be yourself, don’t let them go…

Lastly, when it comes to communicating with F&F, get out of texts and IMs. In person interaction is the best. It gets you to know a person at different level. The body language, their emotions, feelings etc. can be assimilated by doing it. If face to face is not possible, pick up the phone and call them. In short, be personal in communication.

I hope this blog will help you maintain your family ties and develop and nurture your friend circle.

 

What is your IP (Inner Peace) Feeling.....

 

To begin with, sorry for not writing an article last Sunday. Some of my readers actually mentioned it to me, that tells me that you all are reading and looking forward to the articles. That makes me feel good. Thank you for that. It was busy work with customer visits, so had to get all the things in order. Customer liked our facility and gave us Kudos making it all worth it.

Back to the blog, one of my peeps and friend asked me about Inner peace. I thought I would take this opportunity to write about what I think about Inner Peace since it is directly related to happiness (if there is any difference).

Throughout human history, great lives have graced this earth and talked about Inner Peace. From the great Rishi Munis (saints) of subcontinent to Buddha to Tao to Plato, everyone has taken a dig at it and lived their lives exemplifying inner peace. They have gone deep into meditations and found out answers to the worlds sorrows and given us a guide line to attain inner peace. BUT, those guide lines and their thought structure is hard to understand for people like me. As a matter of fact, when I read some of their teachings, they seemed much harder than trigonometry and calculus.

I am not going to write about what they thought inner peace was. The greats have already dissected and given a manual for that. I am not at that level. As a mere mortal, I would like to convey my idea of inner peace and what I do to attain it from time to time.

Inner peace to me is sleeping peacefully at night. It is sleeping like a child without anxiety, fear and regret. It is a feeling that runs through your body at different times during the day. It is a feeling when you finally find a clean restroom when you had to go for 4 hours but couldn’t because you kept on stopping at rest areas in western Nebraska. It is a feeling when you see your loved one home safely when you just saw that accident on the road they travel. It is the feeling you get on the last day at work before going to your dream destination. It is a feeling……….

There are two things about feelings you need to know:

a)      Feeling is a physical sensation.  You feel an emotion in your body or a thought in your body and that is why it is called a feeling. Everyone here has had butterflies in stomach or sinking heart or heart pumping faster during different events in their lives. What is that? It is your body reacting to your thoughts. It is a feeling to your thoughts….

b)      Just like thoughts can change feelings, feelings can change the thoughts as well. Diving into science, just as sound creates vibration, vibration can create sound. You cannot feel happy and think sad at the same time.

Inner peace is a feeling and works the same way. Instead of focusing on mind and thoughts and controlling them, you can actually control your body’s reactions which will lead to correct thoughts to maintain the inner peace. For me, inner peace has always felt like my heart is smiling. It has always been a sensation at center of my heart. Whenever I am feeling inner peace, there is a certain vibration that is being felt in heart area. Over time, I have got aquantied with what inner peace feels like in different parts of my body. So when I get bogged down by the external reality and understand that my mind is going down the sad track, I focus my concentration on my heart area. The more I focus there, the more awareness is created of its existence. The heightened awareness emits the vibration that gives me inner peace. As soon as heart area attains a certain vibration, my thoughts start changing. And more and more peaceful and calming thoughts start emerging in my head. This leads me to momentary inner peace. Then it is up to me to control the timing of it. It’s a continuous improvement on attaining longer periods of inner peace. This all sounds simple, because it is!!

So what should I do? For starters, start observing your feelings. Throughout the day, you are bombarded by a lot of thoughts and feelings. Observe feelings that make you at peace. Observe every aspect of that feeling. How does it feel in your heart area? What thoughts arise when you feel it? May be certain music triggered it, or a memory triggered it……etc. Once you have observed and recorded that feeling, try to recreate it as many times as possible. Whenever your mind is in chaos, try to focus on your heart area. Let the awareness of your heart take over.  Try to trigger the feeling you have recorded. It will be a little difficult at first, but more you try it, you will start getting better at it and soon you will be at a point where you will be able to experience momentary inner peace whenever you want it.

Inner peace is not something to be attained at the end of 20 years meditation or by living a complete astute life for 38 years. Inner peace is something that you can achieve right here right now. As a matter of fact, you already feel it several times a day. You just need to be a little observant and start playing with it.