Seekh (Learn) - Keep Learning

I am sure no one amongst us mortals can claim to be faultless and proclaim that they have never made any mistakes in their lives – except for the most narcissistic personalities. So, we all have experienced the feelings of making a mistake, ranging from some very silly ones to the more serious ones, leading to setbacks in life.  And more commonly, when something like this happens, we start to look for reasons and find someone to blame for it. Some just blame themselves, and some try to put the blame on others, including people, systems, government, environment, etc. making mistakes is invariably our essential nature and no matter how careful and meticulous you are, they are bound to happen from time to time Wouldn’t it be nice if typical mistakes were just like writing with a pencil, so that you can erase and leave no trace of it? In some rare cases, they do resemble that ideal behaviour. You can promptly correct the innocent mistake, and no one would know, and hopefully you would ...

Like we mentioned in the previous post, the ill-effects of rage and anger can be extremely harmful, both physically and emotionally. ( Click here to read part 2 )  So, it is important that we also learn how to handle it and find ways of altering our behaviour and better alternatives.  We know that it is not always possible to control the emotions and no matter how calm a person you are, there would be times where things could get on your nerves and elicit an adverse reaction in rage. Here are some of the ways that you can manage anger and your responses to it.  The first thing that might be helpful is to understand is how the brain works and what causes this reaction. Anger is one of the most basic emotions and has been a crucial part of human evolution. It is part of the fight or flight response of the brain, whereby it was also important for survival. The amygdala in the brain releases a series of stress hormones like epinephrine, which affect your overall prepared...

So, continuing from the previous post regarding how anger is one of the most basic emotions and learning to handle it successfully is one of the most important life skills. ( Click here to read part 1 ) But before we learn about the different ways, we can handle the feelings of anger, it is important to understand why we need to do it in the first place. So here are some of the harms and ill-effects that have been studied and proven for people who have issues of anger management.  One of the main things, that you might be able to relate with easily as well, is that, more often than not, we tend to regret losing our temper and getting angry, as soon as we have calmed down a bit. And it mostly does not matter who was at fault and how stupid an action he or she had taken to enrage you. So, even though the anger stayed with you for probably a few seconds or a few minutes – or maybe in some cases for up to a couple of hours – the regret that we feel stays with us for almost the w...

Let me start by sharing a small story from Buddha’s life. Once Buddha was on his daily outings, walking through a village, when he encountered a very angry and frustrated young man, who was particularly upset and confronted Buddha. Believing that this was another one of the fake saints who frequented the village, he started shouting and insulting him, “You are nothing but a fake guru and as stupid as everyone else who has visited before, if not even more. You have no right to come around lecturing people and teaching them things.” As the young man's tirade continued, all through this, Buddha stayed calm as ever, just reacting to the insults with complete indifference, whereby making the young man even more enraged. Feeling that the young man was getting more and more frustrated that his attempts were going in vain, Buddha felt that he must help the man, so he said, “Young man, you seem to be a very knowledgeable man, so answer me one question; if you buy a gift for someone, and the...

If you look at any business, even for the most successful ones, their profits do not always keep going up and up; they must go through some consolidation phases and bear some losses as well at times. So, it is similar in life - no one in life just has it all good, there are phases where they must face the music and go through a rough patch.  So, what is the solution to this? Well, if you could just eliminate the lows completely, would that not be just wonderful (maybe boring, but stable). But unfortunately, that is not really some strategy that one can apply, as you do not have control over all the parameters and circumstances in your life. There might be some control over the way you make your choices in life, so making better choices and anticipating adversities is certainly one way of minimising the pain and duration of the downs in life, even if you can’t eliminate them completely.  When everything’s going good, not many of us really question things or have much difficu...

So, what do you do when your computer or phone is just not responding to your touch and clicks and clacks? Yes, you obviously go for the power button, switch it off and on again and voila it has miraculously come back to life after restarting it. Similarly, in life, work or study projects quite often we just get stuck with things and have no idea how to proceed from there. Whether that is due to the scope of the whole thing, it is overwhelming or you are just generally tired of it and cannot make sense of it. The best way to break that impasse is to just perform a restart. It's not just the fact that you are stuck on it, but it's also about its side effects on your psyche in general, where you start feeling distracted and unmotivated about doing things, or generally depressed about things and have a feeling of having less worth. So, it becomes extremely important that we manage to come out it this rut, and quickly. When I say we need to restart, it does not mean that we thr...

As the saying goes, "Where there is a will, there is a way", once the person has decided what they want to achieve and set that as their life's ultimate burning desire to be achieved at any cost, there is no power in the universe that can stop them from achieving it. Now in one of my previous posts I mentioned there is a marked difference between wishes, desires and goals. A wish or desire is something that a person thinks is nice to have, maybe by looking at others and what they have, maybe due to the feelings of jealousy towards someone who has already got it, or maybe due to a temporary boost of motivation or some arbitrary resolution, like on a new year's day. But that in itself does not transform into a goal for them.  Many motivational speakers say that to turn this wish into a goal, one needs to start with a plan and perform daily actions towards achieving it, only then it becomes a defined goal. As long as you haven't yet taken any efforts towards start...

If you want to understand a character of a person, you just need to pay attention and observe whom they associate with. That is going to be the best indicator, not just for knowing and understanding what kind of a person they are, but also for the direction that their life is going to take next.  Most of us, when we think about the law of karma, we link it to the actions that we take in our life and the effect that it will have on us as a consequence. But there is another aspect to it, whereby the karma of others whom you associate with or keep company of, also influences your life and affects the shaping up of your future self. Like we say, someone else's good luck or bad luck has rubbed off on another person, just by being together or close to them, but this works on a more subtle level than that.  That is one reason why research suggests that when a person goes to jail, even for small crime that he has committed, more often than not the person will then become a lifelong...

  As you sow, so shall you reap - that's one proverb or saying that I have kept hearing since I was a child. It is mostly used to inspire people to always be on their best behaviour, be kind, caring and mindful of doing good for others. From the societal view, that seems like a very convenient philosophy for a good, safe and prospering social engineering. It also puts in the fear in your heart to avoid doing anything bad, as you will get it back with interest.  Now you take a look at any of the major religion and they all have this philosophy embedded into it. Like all the religions that originated in India they have the concept of re-incarnation and that your deeds are carried over into the next life, and you get what's due, even if it's not in this life. For Abrahamic religions, it's the concept of heaven and hell, and that just doesn't seem to for one life, but for an endless eternity. Now those are quite good motivational ideas to get people to do good and build...

Just the other day, I was listening to a review of a book about motivation and they mentioned that taking action, no matter how small it might be, is the best form of motivation that anyone could get.  It did make a lot of sense to me, because no matter how much motivational videos you watch, or how many books you read, or just bathe in a whole pool of motivational stuff, the effects, most of the times, are just temporary, sometimes lasting a few minutes to a few hours.  The only way to make it effective is to get up, shake yourself, make a move and take some action that brings you a bit closer to something that your heart has been wishing for, maybe only by a micrometer, it's still better than no action. The reason being that it gives you a sense of satisfaction and feeds back into your mental ecosystem, which then boosts your confidence and provides you with that much seeked motivation.  So just dust yourself up and go and do a abysmally small thing towards your wish, I...