Some years ago I saw a couple sitting together. They weren’t exactly young, but the way they were interacting with each other, it looked like they hadn’t been married a long time, maybe 3-4 years. There was so much love in the way they looked at each other. Then a friend mentioned they were married for 30 years.
THIRTY YEARS??? I’ve seen a lot of couples that love each other; no matter how deep the love, it always gets ‘old’ – familiarity sets in, there are aspects of the each other they’ve given up on, etc – what I was witnessing was impossible based on what I had seen thus far. So I had to investigate. I asked her what the secret was. “Never shut down to the other” she said. She gave a few examples but I don’t think I really ‘got it’, back then. As I’ve applied it over the years, I understand a little bit more.
It depends on what you’re looking for in a relationship. If security and longevity is your primary goal, scroll away, this is not for you. But if experiencing love more deeply and more powerfully, and connecting with your partner on deeper levels is what you seek, I have never found better advice than this. The prerequisite is that you are with a person who respects your space and heart, of course, and that you are capable of doing the same.
But the truth is, no matter what you do and no matter how hard you try, you ARE going hurt and get hurt. Normally we ‘shut down’ – build our walls and conclude ‘this person will never change’ and toughen up so that we don’t get hurt. But then you cannot feel the love that deeply anymore either. The door that lets in the pain is the same door that lets in the love. So you feel ‘settled’ in the relationship and there is hardly any pain anymore, but you also forget the intense love you experienced once.
So this Valentines Day, let there be pain. If you want to love more deeply, keep your heart open, knowing that there will be pain, for sure, but it is worth it, and you are strong enough to stand back up. Breathe it in, breathe it out, and hold it in the light of your love. And watch the magic come back to life again.
Happy Valentine’s Day my dear ones. May there be Love.
I never thought I’d write an article on love. It is a topic too vast, and in my opinion a realm where the learning never stops. Nobody can ever claim to completely understand or ‘master’ love, as I see it. So I always thought that writing on it would be a pompous, self-deluding exercise. But here I am anyway, in response to a distraught friend who asked me ‘What is Love?’ at the end of a relationship. It is a question I have asked myself too, so I don’t claim to know the answer. But a little clarity has been there, which is what I attempt to share here.
Emotional abuse is so normalized these days, that most abuse is misconstrued as love. What’s worse, when one tries to call it out, one is often accused of rejecting the other’s love. But the differences are stark and clear, if you’re trying to look for them. So this isn’t meant to be a guide on how to love – that takes years of self-work and healing – but a guide for those trying to figure out if a particular relationship is loving or abusive. Check by studying yourself, not the other person, because love is about giving more than receiving.
You Want to Surrender, Not Control
Control and manipulation are signs of the absence of love and heart energy in a relationship. It means that the person is coming from a space of fear and lack – and someone functioning from that space is not in a position to love.
In abuse, the other person is held responsible for one’s feelings. Osho said that when in love, during conflict the person thinks that there must be something wrong with them. The moment one thinks that there is something wrong with the other person, it is a sign that there is no love anymore. And this is my experience too. Love is acceptance of who you are, as you are, while at the same time calling out your delusions or mistakes – but it does not accuse you or put you down.
You Want to Give
In love, you give for no reason other than it makes you happy and the other isn’t expected to be grateful or to acknowledge how much you do. The statement “I did so much for you, and this is what I get in return” is a clear sign of a lack of love. That was business. There was an investment, and now you’re upset because you didn’t get appropriate returns on your investment. You could be in a relationship for years, and you’d never feel like the relationship was a dead investment – even if it ends badly – because you were never investing in the first place. When doing things for the other makes you happy, then there is no baggage attached to that giving.
What Can I Do for You?
It is always during a conflict of interest when the true colors of love come out. In a loving relationship you will find that both the people are trying to ask ‘what are you going through, and how can I make this right?’. In an abusive relationship, both are defending their positions and accusing the other of not doing enough. Or worse, telling the other person how they need to change.
You Seek a Win-Win
You know how all those stories circulate, about women listing out all the mistakes their husbands have made over the last decade, in every fight? Well that’s normalized abuse for you. It is a sign of an abusive relationship where one demands and the other eventually gives up on trying to comply, or keeps trying, failing, and feeling inadequate. Love seeks resolution so that there can be a win-win – where both partners can be comfortable with a solution. When it’s ‘my way or the highway’, take it for granted that that is not love being manifested there.
Another consequence of seeking a win-win is that it makes it easier to be more forgiving of the other’s mistakes, and also makes you kinder when you’re both hurting.
You Don’t Want to Hurt the Other
Anyone reading this statement is likely to go, ‘Oh I never want to hurt another person’ – and if you just thought that, you’re not only wrong, but you also need to work more deeply with your level of self-awareness. There is a tendency to want to hurt the other person when you don’t get what you want from them, and even more if they are hurting you. Sensitive people are usually more aware of this in others and can feel either deeply traumatized or infuriated when they sense this.
Observe yourself carefully. If you feel like hurting the other person when you feel wronged – either by saying something nasty or mean, or by doing something – even hurting yourself – to bring about pain and/ or guilt in the other, you are not only not coming from love but also being highly manipulative and abusive.
An Apology is Easy. And Meaningful
I think apologies need a separate article on their own, I’ve seen so many people completely screw this up. But you’ll find that when there is love, this comes naturally. When you realize that you’ve hurt the other person, you tend to automatically feel sorry to have put the other person through pain or distress, and you promise yourself that you won’t repeat it. And then you don’t.
“Sorry, but…. ” is not an apology. There may sometimes be an explanation to help the other understand why you acted a certain way and clear the ‘why did you do this to me?’ question in their minds. But there’s a big difference between an explanation and an excuse. An explanation says this is what happened, and I’m really sorry I acted this way and it caused you pain, and an excuse says I’m sorry, but this is why I acted this way, I couldn’t have helped but act like this (and often – if you had acted differently, my words/ actions would not have been hurtful).
There are no rules
We have a tendency to attach rules to love. If it’s true love, it’ll last forever, if it is true love, we’ll never fight, or we’ll never sleep without resolving a fight, true love means never giving up no matter how painful it gets, and so on and so forth. You know what, none of these are true. Nothing is. Love is not bound by a bunch of belief systems. If you’re trying to analyse whether someone else has experienced love, you’re wasting your time and need to find something better to do. If it is your own relationships you’re trying to assess by these standards, let go. Do the best you can, and leave the rest to God. The heart opens bit by bit when the time comes, and you will find yourself more loving as time passes, if you are sincerely working on yourself.
And lastly,
Here’s a video I fell in love with. Botton talks about how love is not ‘natural’ and needs to be learned and taught. Being in a relationship is about patiently teaching the other how to help you feel loved. And patiently and sincerely learning how to make the other feel loved. It is one of the most beautiful videos I’ve ever come across on relationships and I hope you enjoy it too.
Hello Ashwita. Is marriage truly necessary. Concepts like – better half, one’s partner completing oneself and the Hindu concept of Marriage being one of the samskaras. Are they to be followed or is it OK and perhaps good in a certain way to not marry.
I have also heard a spiritual teacher say something like – some people come to this world to fulfill a bigger purpose and they aren’t meant to have a family.
Please share what according to you is the right perspective on this.
Things like ‘better half’, ‘completing oneself’ etc come from a space of deep unfulfillment and rarely bring sustainable joy. Ultimately, it is simple, vinasha kaale vipreet buddhi – when your time is bad, you’ll take all the wrong decisions, shun people who can guide you in the right direction and support you, and turn to those who will mislead you.
You ask ‘is marriage necessary’, and I ask ‘for what’?
As an antidote for loneliness, marriage is useful for about 2 years if you find the right partner, after which you will find yourself back at where you started. Ultimately you are lonely because you have abandoned yourself. The presence and the distraction of a partner can mask this for a couple of years. If you have a child after 2 years, you can mask it for longer, but you are only masking. Of course, if you marry the wrong partner you will simply be miserable and lonely for many years, so the point is defeated.
Many people think that life will become easier after marriage as there will be someone to share responsibilities. More often than not this is rarely the case. If anything, marriage doubles your responsibilities. If you want a man so that you’ll have someone who will.. I don’t know, pay the bills, drive you around, or if you want a woman who will maybe cook for you, do your laundry, take care of your parents – please, just learn to do all this yourself. Be the man/ woman you want to marry first, because if you don’t, any situation where your partner is incapable of fulfilling these needs will tear your marriage apart.
If you want a partner to raise children with, it may not be a bad idea, provided you find someone who will last with you peacefully until they’re old enough. Quite a hard task these days, but it may be worth trying. A child being raised in a toxic household is probably not a good idea, and single parents might just do a better job, so again it is debatable from this perspective.
If you want to ensure you will not end up alone in your old age, then it is pointless because chances are high your spouse will die 10-20 years before you do, your children will likely be abroad or far away and meet you once a year. If your spouse is alive, you will probably not be able to stand each other after a few decades of rubbing each other the wrong way – look at any couple that’s been together for 3+ decades and you’ll know what I mean. Very rare to find people who are genuinely happy spending time with each other and capable of talking to each other deeply after spending decades of growing apart and ignoring each other while they focus on kids and on making money. So in such a case it is better to simply marry when you start getting older so you find someone you are actually compatible with at 50 and someone who looks fit enough to last another 3 decades with you.
To increase the population and make sure human race is not wipedout from the face of the earth, marriage is a useful tool, yes – although this is a purpose that is long gone, what with 7.5 billion of us threatening to wipe out all other species instead.
To keep an order in the society, maybe marriage is a fairly useful tool… probably. As a therapist especially in India I have very little regard for marriage as I have seen marriage more as a tool which pushes people to have extra-marital affairs. People stay in marriage for the sake of the society and go have relationships with whoever they want, too afraid to be honest and open (even with themselves) about what they really want. This is slowly changing but anyone who is open and supportive enough to have friends who share their personal stories knows how rampant this still is.
Is marriage truly necessary if we want spiritual growth? No. For spiritual growth, nothing is truly necessary except brutal honesty with oneself and utmost sincerity and dedication towards the path. Everything else that you need to develop, the universe will bring into your life and you will surrender because you will know that that is right at that point in time, no matter what others, the society or the sacred books tell you. (Note that this is a dangerous thing if one is not brutally honest and completely sincere with oneself because then one can follow one’s wild fantasies in the name of ‘doing what feels right’ – this is what many of Osho’s disciples did and went completely haywire, and I still see a lot of people on the spiritual pathway doing this)
So – am I saying marriage is completely unnecessary? Well, yes and no. Is it necessary? I don’t believe it is, no. Unless maybe you’re going to need the paperwork or moving to Dubai where you will get arrested if you live without marriage, or unless you are having children and your country needs the parents to be married. If you do find a person you love deeply, who loves you back equally deeply and you both want to commit to each other, then marriage can be a truly beautiful, divine thing. But as with most divine things in the world, this is usually just defiled and used as a means to a whole lot of other ends.
Bottom-line? If you meet someone with whom giving seems natural and effortless, and it makes you want to spend the rest of your life making that other person happy, do it. Otherwise, take a good hard look at what you are really seeking and whether marriage really is going to fulfill that need.
The sacred Hindu texts state that the only real obligation parents have to a child is to bring it into this world. Every other obligation is from the child towards the parent because even with a lifetime of seva, the child cannot repay the debt for that one big thing the parents did for it, viz., give it an entry point into this world.
When heard an Indian ascetic tell me this for the first time, I was furious. To me it was like saying that all the bad parenting was fine! However, now when I think of it at leisure I think parent-‘crimes’ apart, there might actually have been some truth to this statement.
Every other day I read something along the lines of ‘what if you’re so busy earning money that you miss your child’s first steps?‘ – or something like that anyway. Yes, what if? How come I never read ‘what if you’re so busy at work that you missed your wife crying at home because your mother said something nasty?‘ Because your wife is not your ‘creation’ of course, and that by default makes her less special and less worthwhile.
Can you imagine how boring it might have been to be born about 60-70 years ago? You would be one among 4-7 children, nobody would know when you took those coveted first steps, had that first scratch, first fight, balanced on a cycle for the first time, and so on. Because you were probably playing outside with all the other kids everyday, since mommy asked you to ‘take the noise outside!’. When you fell, it was probably a sibling, a neighbour or even a stranger that might have helped. And surprise, the world would not have tweeted about this non-event and about your parents’ negligence.
Because that generation had one thing straight – that your child is just one among billions (only about 3 billion, yours will live to be one among 10 by the way). Your child is not the queen bee, just one among billions of worker bees – all unique but really no different from each other. Yes, they knew that they – you – are completely ordinary. And, more than anything else – they knew there was nothing wrong with being ordinary.
What a beautiful, liberating fact that must have been, to grow up with. That nothing is THAT special. Not your baby’s first steps, not your wedding, your first day at work, the first day of the year, because all of these are just another pearl in a gigantic string of events all equally special, or equally ordinary.
This is unfortunately a privilege our children might never have, because they grow up in a world where one has to market oneself to get anywhere and for that, the first prerequisite is a firm belief in a big lie – that one is somehow different, more special than everyone else.
Add to that the fact that they were probably born because their parents needed something to bring more value to their otherwise paling lives, and needed some hope that a little addition will bring that ‘special’ factor in. So they spend the entire childhood letting their life revolve around the child, packing it a different snack everyday, spending hours making it that special birthday cake, fulfilling every desire and leaving no stone unturned in ensuring that it has access to everything that it needs to become its special self.
Barring the abusive type, this is absolutely the worst type of upbringing a child can have. Because one can eventually have therapy to heal from the pain of abuse, but it will take a lot more than that to outgrow this sense of entitlement we’ve given our children. They will spend the rest of their lives moving from place to place, from job to job, relationship to relationship because none of them will make them feel special enough. They might spend their whole lifetime discovering that their entire existence was a lie – they are not special at all. In fact, no one cares.
And actually, people care a lot less today. One, because we are addicted to ‘special’ and the mundane is not care-worthy, but more importantly, because we were never taught to give unless there was some sort of reward. We were praised for every little insignificant thing we did. And suddenly in the real world, the boss, the spouse, the child or the mother-in-law don’t seem to acknowledge anything.
We weren’t taught that everything has to be earned, and that sometimes even after putting in everything you could, you will still fail, and that sometimes you will simply never get that one thing you wanted, and that that’s ok, and you can still be VERY happy anyway.
There is a simple secret to a happy life – one must give more than one takes. But our children might have to go through a great deal of hardship and suffering to come to realise this, because we have left them with so, so much more to unlearn first.
I seldom read the news. And yet somehow the news of yet another child killing himself or herself reaches my ears. It saddens me, but I am barely surprised.
And again today I came across another article where a worried parent compassionately writes to others how to ensure we minimize the risk of our children killing themselves as a result of bullying. And somehow, no one else seems to see anything wrong with any of this.
Face It, We’re Screwing Up
One of the most scariest trends I see today is the desire to be perfect. And far worse than this is the desire to be a perfect parent. Seldom are we willing to admit that we’re failing at parenting. And children learn not from what you say, but from what you do. When children watch parents deny their own imperfections, they deny their own. And this is very, very dangerous.
Was it Always Like This?
Now let us take a step back and see how our predecessors survived. If you know anyone from your parents’ generation that stayed in a hostel through college, ask them about their stories of getting ragged. They’re quite terrifying. But what took me many years to digest is that they’re very good friends with many of those who tormented them, friendships often spanning decades.
Ask your mothers and grandmothers about how their relationship with their in-laws were. I even heard about a woman recently whose husband used to physically abuse her for decades, still emotionally abuses her, and yet she’s happy, healthy and cheerful at 85. No diseases, no signs of trauma. How did a generation like that raise youngsters who need antidepressants because they failed an exam or ended a 2-month long relationship?
Our parents and grandparents grew up with minimal parenting. They learned hands on that the world is a harsh place, getting bullied is common, people have good AND bad sides, and all of this has to be dealt with by oneself – support is seldom there. And they grew a spine.
Children Need Us Less, not More
We have so few kids now a days, and out of such a feeling of lack, that we hold on to them with our dear lives. Every scary piece of news makes us hold on to them harder, thinking that if we’re around enough, they’ll be safe.
In the comments below the article I mentioned, I was so disappointed to find parents saying things like ‘yes, we need to stand up for our children’. Why? Because you forgot to teach them how to stand up for themselves, right? Right. Because you were always there. Because you never let them handle things on their own. Because they always had support, they never felt the need to walk, let alone stand by themselves.
Incidentally, almost all the people I’ve met so far who tried to kill themselves before they turned 25 had parents that were around too much.
The Biggest Curse: ‘My Child Shouldn’t Suffer’
Parents today interfere and do their very best to ensure that their child does not experience any discomfort. Now, we learn best as children. Children that experience a moderate amount of difficulty learn that the world offers both joys and sorrows, and that that is OK. Children who never experience problems until they hit their teens have their bubble suddenly shatter and they have absolutely no idea how to cope. I’ve even seen clients who developed serious mental disorders because they couldn’t digest how harsh the world was.
Is it really a wonder they want to kill themselves? What would you do if you believed for 15 years that the world is a beautiful place, only to suddenly realise that it was more like hell, and that people enjoy hatred more than love. Would you want to continue living?
When we domesticate animals, they become incapable of surviving in the wild. We’re domesticating our children. How will they survive?
Straight, useful trees are the first to be cut. Twisted, useless trees get to live long, long lives.
When I was in school, we had a lesson in English, where the author shared the story of a cousin who was utterly useless, but managed to have a better life than others. Being hailed as a good-for-nothing by family members, it turned out that women always wanted this useless man, giving him access to a lifestyle he hadn’t earned. Eventually, he married a rich old woman, who left him an insanely big inheritance. I think including a yacht.
I don’t know why this story stuck with me. Maybe because everything else we heard those days told us that hard work was the key to success and that life was fair, punishing bad people and rewarding good ones. This story told a different tale. Life was unfair. Unpredictable. It was a hard lesson to forget.
Osho Agrees…
The lesson that people could fall for useless people repeated itself in front of my eyes in real life every once in a while, and I’d remember the story every time, silently shaking my head.
And now, as I read ‘Intimacy’ by Osho, I found something that left my head reeling. ‘Be useless’, he says. (Click here to read an excerpt) The more useful you are, the less love you will have and the more you will be used. How on earth could that possibly make sense?
But when I dwell upon it, it starts to make sense. I’ve said many times before, that love and need are mutually exclusive. And a useful person is needed by many. He is so useful that he attracts people that have use for him. He will eventually get manipulated, used, abused. A useless person, on the other hand, can only mingle with people who have no use for him at all. Indeed. the only reason they would want to be with such a person is because they love him.
And then of course, there are the deeper aspects. Those who become useful, expect returns for their efforts, either materially, physically or emotionally. They help because they want to feel important in other people’s lives. And the compulsion to make this person feel important can be very tiring, very stifling for those receiving the favors. Even more reasons for a lack of love. This relationship is a burden, not a gift. Deep inside the subconscious, this person knows that people are with him because he is useful. It leads to a very unsettling feeling of a constant lack of love.
A useless person on the other hand, expects nothing. There is space and openness for the other person to feel whatever they are feeling.
How Useless is Useless?
So does this mean that we must all drop whatever we are doing, quit our jobs, and sit in wait for someone to put morsels in our mouths? No. We do need to drop our desire to be useful to other people so that they can value us in some way. Stop doing anything because others want you to, need you to. Do it because YOU want to.
We might sometimes be useful in love – but those are actions stemming from a deep love, not from an expectation of gratitude or anything more. These actions don’t commoditize us, but they just might add an extra spring in our step.
Ultimately…
So if you merely want to reinforce your ego and your false sense of security by being surrounded by people you can control because you have something to offer, then by all means, be useful. But, if you want to eliminate egoic, need-based relationships from your life, if you really want to be surrounded by people who just love you, be useless.
The first time I saw a woman distract a child when he fell and was crying, I was confused. Why would a mother want to do that? My mother explained that when distracted, a child stops crying because it forgets its pain. It still didn’t make sense to me. Why would you want a baby to forget its pain? Took me a lot of years to realize that I really was onto something.
Needs Vs Wants
Until a baby is three months old or so, it can only cry every time it has a need. It is either hungry or has wet itself, or there is some other problem. For these three months, a child needs the complete attention of the parent, and mothers often see an (almost) inhuman increase in endurance and capacity during this time.
After this though, the ‘drama’ begins. The child starts to learn that crying has its own merits. The easiest way to manipulate its parent is to scream its lungs out. It drives most parents crazy, and most of them relent, thinking oh come on, how much damage can it do if he gets this one extra toy, or plays that one extra game?
How Much Damage Can it Do?
Children are learning rapidly at this age, and this learning is geared to teach them how to survive in the world. Parents represent the world at this age. Therefore, when we fulfill their needs every time they cry, we teach them that the world is a safe, nourishing and loving place. Every time we give in when they cry for the wrong reasons, we teach them that crying is a fruitful exercise. If you want something from life, just cry.
We can see this in play already. Our own generation was mostly raised by working parents in nuclear families. Depression today is at an all time high, and the numbers are only rising. What did our parents do wrong?
They taught us that it is profitable to cry.
When you really delve deep into depression, you find that it is essentially your fight against life. Life hasn’t given you what you wanted. And now you want to be miserable, because maybe if you are miserable long enough, life will feel guilty enough to give you what you want. When you’re deeply connected with yourself, you realize that you don’t really want to get out of your depression or anxiety or anger, because then you fear that things might remain the same. So you hold on to the misery. Is it worth it?
What are we doing to our kids in the name of love?
Every time we distract a child, we teach it that the best way to deal with pain is to pretend it doesn’t exist, and to focus our attention on something new. Over time, the child has no idea how to handle his/ her emotions and will end up having physical or mental disease when things reach a breaking point.
Every time you give in to your child’s unreasonable cries, you are teaching your baby that whenever it cries, life will fulfill it’s demands. It will grow up to be a miserable, depressed person, because there are many times life doesn’t work out our way, and this child was taught that it is not through hard work but through crying that you get what you want. And the child wasn’t taught that sometimes you never get what you want, and you’ve just got to deal with that.
So what do we do?
Well, the title says it all. Let your baby cry. Not the sort of crying where you look the other way and pretend nothing is happening. Look at your child. Let him/ her cry. Watch. Just don’t reach out and hug or try to comfort in any way. Remain at a distance, and feel your own pain. Let your heart scream. Of course it will, that is natural.
And when you settle into your own pain, without trying to run away from it, you teach your child by example, that sometimes bad things happen, bad feelings come. But if you just sit through it, it will go away. Then you just get up, wipe your tears, and move on.
We live in a community. Sooner or later, someone will hurt us.
Whenever I talk about acceptance and surrender, one question that inevitably comes up is ‘so then how do I deal with this person who is hurting me, do i just stop reacting? Won’t they hurt me more if I stop giving it back? Won’t their egos get bigger?’
It is a relevant question, and one of the hardest life lessons to learn is effectively dealing with those who are hurting us.
It is about you, not them
The first, hardest thing to embrace is that whatever problem it is, it isn’t about that other person. No matter how vindictive, how sick, idiotic or sadistic they have been, it is your own negativity they are reflecting back to you. The whole world is your mirror, and every person reflects back an aspect of you. Some reflect back the nice sides, some the unpleasant. But it is all just you.
Now, one thing to watch out for here, is the tendency to be harsh on yourself. When this realization strikes deeply, one tends to take all the hatred they’ve been directing towards others and turn it inwards. This isn’t going to help. Skip it.
Don’t give your power away
Whenever you insist that someone else needs to change for you to be happy, you are giving your power away. Essentially, you are saying that you refuse to be happy until this person you hate, changes. Does that look like a sensible quest to you?
Let go of Right vs Wrong
It is when we are stuck with ‘I am right and this person is wrong. Look at how ridiculous his/ her actions are’ when it is the hardest to heal. If you are going around seeking confirmation from people that this person IS horrible, you will lose out on the opportunity to transcend the mess and be happy.
It doesn’t matter how many people agree that the person who is bothering you is being ridiculous and needs to change. If you give your power away, then they are in charge and you are hostage.
So, then what next?
No matter what the situation, a problem arises only when we are unable to handle the way this person is making us feel. Once we understand this, we can focus on resolving our emotions, instead of asking the other person to change.
Does that mean I shouldn’t react?
When we react to situations, we are letting our emotions control us. When we respond to a situation, we are letting our wisdom guide us, and doing whatever makes sense. Both the reaction and response might be the same action sometimes.
If someone is hitting you, for example, it may be sensible to fight back, kick and slap. If you do this as a reaction, then your mind will cloud up, prevent you from thinking clearly, and also create emotional trauma for both of you. If you respond, you will be more stable and calm.
Resolving emotions and learning to respond
You will only start to heal the situation, when you take complete ownership for the mess. This is rarely easy, because it is much more convenient for the ego to put the blame on the other person.
Sit with your feelings. If you wish to resolve the issues, spend some time everyday, sitting with how this person makes you feel. Close your eyes, and visualize the person/ situation and allow yourself feel whatever comes up. Avoid blaming or trying to come up with an explanation. Just feel.
Then do it with them. Once you have some practice with surrendering to your pain, you can do it when you are with the person too. Remind yourself that this is not them but their pain acting through them. And allow yourself to feel everything you feel in that moment.
Bear in mind. Surrendering to your feelings does not mean that you scream and shout as you please. Screaming and shouting are reactions that come up when you are trying to avoid your feelings. When you focus on feeling, you may not say much and if you do, it will be effective.
An average person checks email 30 times an hour when at work.
For a spiritual aspirant in the modern age, I think one of the biggest traps is the social media. There are two aspects to this. The attention span, and the desire to listen/ speak.
The Dangerously Low Attention Span
Many zen masters insist on developing deep, intense concentration before they impart any serious knowledge. This is because a flickering mind can accomplish very little.
We, on the other hand, have spent years programming our minds to process as little as possible. The advent of television had already reduced our attention spans to just 12 seconds – Notice how not a single shot on tv will last more than 6-8 seconds. If nothing else, they switch the angle. This makes sure your mind is engaged only for those many seconds. Today, the average attention span of internet surfers is 8 seconds. One second less than that of a goldfish.
We Speak. We don’t Listen
We are now a society where everyone wants to be heard, and no one wants to listen. Earlier, when we sat down for a chat we had to listen. At the most we’d have a cup of coffee in our hands, but apart from that, there was just us and the person we were talking to, no distractions. Have you stopped to observe what our communication today is like?
We’re on a phone call and we’re texting at the same time. Even worse, while driving. We’re skyping, but we’re surfing the web as we talk. Observe really carefully the next time this happens and you’ll realise – you’re not paying any attention at all.
Face it. We don’t actually care. We have no interest in really listening to the stories our loved ones are telling us. We are interested in listening to the extent of reinforcing our identities. For example, if you support a ban on animal slaughter, then you’ll pay a tad more attention to a page or a person supporting your views, than you would to something against it.
How this is Hurting Us
When nobody is listening, conversations become redundant. You talk about something, then talk about it again, and then repeat the same story yet again, and it is still not satisfying. So then we go blog about it, post it on facebook, twitter, instagram and what not, and we’re still not satisfied. Because no one is listening.
Add this fact to the shortening attention span, and it makes things even more difficult. You cannot listen, even if you are interested, even if this is your child talking about a tough day at school or something more painful.
It’s not Hard to Change
Mediation cannot be just an item on your schedule. It has to be a way of life, something you practice every moment.
Stop glorifying multi-tasking. There is nothing cool about multi-tasking. The brain cannot multi-task, and there are gaps between switching tasks, where it is doing nothing at all. This means that the more you switch between tasks, the less efficiently you will be using your brain.
Do one thing at a time, until you are finished. When you are reading an article, for instance, if you have a sudden urge to check your email, watch that desire and drop it. When you are having a conversation, do nothing else, respect the person who’s trying to talk to you.
When we think of relationships, compromise almost seems a synonym. Of course, right? How could a happy relationship exist without compromise? Any relationship – whether romantic, family, in-laws or friends involves different, sometimes diametrically opposite people.
While one likes football, the other may like the Opera. One might seek thrill outdoors while the other might want to curl up under blankets to relax. One might like to get things off the chest by confronting, while the other might be willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. Sooner or later, these two people will have to meet midway. Compromise?
I may be wrong in saying that compromise poisons a relationship. So let me begin with what compromise means to me – to compromise is to ‘settle’ for something less than desirable, often as a result of perceiving no other choice.
But here’s the thing. When you really love someone, it doesn’t feel like one is ‘settling’. These things are voluntary. A friend once mentioned how he watched painfully cheesy romantic films along with his girlfriend. When I asked him why, he said that he enjoyed these times nevertheless because it brought him joy to see her happy. It wasn’t compromise, it was choice. And that makes all the difference.
Choice is voluntary. Compromise is forced, or perceived as such, due to lack of other options. Compromise seeks a payoff, and on not finding enough, it can create considerable resentment. Over time, resentment from compromise builds up, leading to cracks in the relationship.
Choices are most found in parent-child relationships. Parents willingly give up many things to bring comfort, security or happiness to the child. This happens because parents are almost always aware of their love for the child. This is something that somehow disappears in most other relationships.
Look for a win-win
Most times when we seek compromise, the underlying attitude is really about how both can lose equally, ‘adjust’ equally. If we can take a step back here, and go back to love, take the attention to how both people can get the best of the situation, then things change, even if it is the same solution.
Go back to love
The older a relationship gets, the more tedious and tiring it tends to become. Patterns repeat, and we seek easy ways out. If we let this fatigue motivate us to find a solution, we will end up with another tiring mess. Instead, the moment we become aware of a desire to brush things under the carpet, we can bring our complete awareness to the situation. We can remind ourselves of the love we have for this other person, whether parent, spouse, sibling or child, and ask ourselves how we can really resolve this problem, instead of just temporarily ‘fixing’ it.
