Nothing can go wrong

Do you have any talent in drawing? I remember when I was in my school days, drawing was not my favourite subject at all. I have not been very good at it. I think I don’t have any talent in drawing. I always become very amazed when I look at a beautiful painting or drawing. In my heart I said I wish I had this talent. Those people can express their feelings into very beautiful art works. I really appreciate it as well as envy.

Until last week a friend introduced me to a doodling art. I joined her workshop on doodling. I never heard it before. It was an online workshop via Zoom. Basically you just draw anything your heart wants to draw….any shapes in any colors. You don’t need to erase anything, you won’t make ‘any mistake’, just keep drawing. No worries.

We were given 20 minutes to draw with piano music played as a background. I really enjoyed it. I thought my drawing turned out really well. I felt so good. At the end of the workshop each one of us had to share our drawing and show it on camera.

Someone reluctantly showed his drawing and said “I don’t know what I drawed, I think it doesn’t make a sense”.

My friend said “It doesn’t have to make any sense. Nothing can go wrong in this” This words sound very liberating to me. It is liberating the soul. I wished I heard these words long ago.

Just let the soul express its feeling and emotion freely. You will feel really good about yourself through this doodling.

Thank you Soni.

Your inner kingdom

Each one of us is a king in our inner kingdom, inside our heads. In your inner kingdom, you have three ministers helping you. The three ministers are your mind, intellect and your heart. They are your ministers and you are the king. They should listen to you. They should be always under your control. Are they working well? Are you controlling your ministers? How do you know that you can control them or not?

Hold a meeting with them everyday. Really make time for this. This is to know their well-beings. You have to control them and never let any of them control you or do any mischievous thing. You are the king, you should always sit on your throne. This throne is your seat of self respect. The seat of your wise self. Only when you remain seated on this seat, your three ministers will listen to you and obey your commands.

How do you know that they are under controlled? Your mind will only think what you want it to think. Your intellect will only remember what you want it to remember and your heart will only feel what you want it to feel. You will not say “I don’t want to think about it, but my mind keeps thinking about it. It gets pulled easily.” “I want to forget it, but I can’t.” “I am not peaceful.” This is the language you speak when you can not control them.

The two faces of ego

Ego is the enemy of everyone. It resides in each and every of us. We have to conquer this enemy. How to conquer it? We have to know it. Only when we know this enemy well, then we can conquer it.

Ego has two faces – the inferior I and the superior I.

When you hear the voice of “I am excluded” , “I am not valued”, “They don’t respect me“, “I am a victim”. This is the voice of the inferior I. Can you hear this voice? How often do you hear this voice? This is the voice that brings you down again and again. If you keep listening to this voice, you will become weak. You keep listening to this voice and then you start believing in it. What you believe will become your reality (what you feel). You start feeling isolated, small or weak. Can you stop this voice? Do not let this voice keep echoing in your head. You need power to stop it. This is the power of the soul that you need. Develop this power, so you will become victorious in your internal battle. You are in fact battling with yourself (your ego). Your enemy is not out there, but right here, inside you.

At other time you might also hear the voice “I know better”, “I am more experienced”, “They should listen to me”, this is the voice of the superior I.

Both are the ego. Both are false. Both make you fluctuate internally. The real you is not inferior nor superior. Nothing can pull you down. Remain seated on the seat of the real I. This is the seat of self respect. If you remain seated on this seat, you will experience yourself to be a master. A master of the self. You are the king. You are royal.

Developing faith in life

Why is it important to have faith in life? How to develop faith in life?
Life is what happens. Whatever happens, big or small, it happens to you or someone else, it has happened or it is still going to happen, all is called life. How do you see life of the past and how do you see life of the future? Do you always see it as a good one? Or do you sometimes think that it is unfair or that it should not happen the way it happened? How do you see the future? Does it always look bright? Or does sometimes worry creep into your heart that you are not so sure?

I remember an advice from one of my dear friends who kept saying to me ‘Everything is good’. Whatever happened was good, what is happening is good and what is going to happen will be good. Don’t carry any regret of the past. It passed. No need to think ‘why did it happen that way? It shouldn’t have happened etc etc’. This is how we usually develop regret. It belongs to the past. Leave it in the past. Don’t create fear of the future. Trust that life in the future will be good.

Whatever happens is what is meant to happen. There is no mistake in life. There is nothing to regret nor to be worried about. If you keep saying this to yourself or you keep reminding this to your self everyday, what would happen? You are developing faith in life. You will see everything with your new understanding. You will then accept everything that happen very easily. You will easily forgive and accept.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I am the captain of my soul

“I am the captain of my soul”. You might have heard this many times. I think it was said by the late Nelson Mandela. It is a very good quote. What does this quote mean for you? How to become the captain of the soul?

To become the captain means to lead the soul. You need to know what the soul is, only then you can lead the soul. What is soul? Soul is you, the living being in your body. The soul is not the body, but the spirit living in the body. It is in your head. Someone said to me that the soul is in the middle of the forehead. We can not see our soul because it is not physical. Our physical eyes can only see what is physical. Soul is a form of energy. Some say that a soul is a point of light. Very subtle but you can feel its existence. You can feel your existence, do you?

What is in the soul? Mind, intellect and heart. Know your mind and know how it works. It creates thoughts. Know your intellect. Intellect is said to be the eye of the soul. Some call it as the third eye. The eye is for seeing. What does this third eye see? The true and the untrue. It is the intellect that can discern between truth and falsehood. The wisdom is created by this intellect through churning the thought. To churn is to think deeply, then it becomes an experience. It then creates feeling accordingly. You keep that feeling or that experience in your heart. The three (mind, intellect and heart) are in fact in one. It is one with 3 different functions.

So how to become the leader of the soul? Understand the process of creating, churning and experiencing – thought, feeling and wisdom. Take a lead in each process. To take a lead means to be aware. This is internal awareness. This is self-awareness. How much do you need to develop this self-awareness? You have your own answer. I leave it to each one of you.

Have a nice weekend!

Self-Discovery

Where does the self get lost? It is lost in our own head (mind). The mind creates thousands of thoughts everyday. It keeps busy and also noisy. The mind is always occupied with thoughts, ideas, plans and dreams. It is like a jungle, full of thoughts. You might find it very difficult to make it silent for just a moment. The self gets lost in this jungle. You might have heard a story of a queen who lost her necklace. She searched for her necklace around. She kept searching the necklace that she did not realize that it is in fact around her own neck. This story refers to our self-discovery journey. We might have searched for the self “outside” which in fact it is lost “inside”.

Journaling is a way to discover the self which has been hidden behind the thoughts, ideas, plans and dreams. This is an inward-journey. By writing them down one by one, you will experience more clarity in seeing the self. You are removing the veils. You will be able see your true self.

How to control your mind

When you have negative thought about a situation, usually it is followed by negative feelings like worry, fear, stress, impatience etc. Or the other way around, when you notice that you have worry, fear, stress or impatience….it is the sign that you have negative thought. You might have nurtured this negative thought for quite sometime. When you suffer this, your mind is not relaxed. You might experience the thoughts are spinning so fast in the mind. You might soon also notice that your heart beat is increasing. That is what happens when we are stressful. Have you experienced this in your day to day life?

You might have an appointment with someone and you are trapped in a traffic on your way to meet that person. You might arrive late. What do you feel? Stressed. When you feel stressed your thought tends to be faster. You need to control the speed. To control means to slow it down. How? Control the mind. The mind is inside our head, we can not touch it. It is to control the awareness. Be aware that you are the one who is sitting in the control room inside your head. You are holding the switch of your awarness. Keep this awareness.

It is when you forget this, the situation controls you. It controls your mind and also your heart beat.

Heart and Soul

A Japanese friend asked me: “what is heart? and what is soul?” If you got this question, what would be your answer? There are only two aspects of Human Being. The human and the being, the body and the soul, the physic and the spirit, physical and spiritual. Human refers to the body which is physical and Being refers to the soul which is spiritual. We can see the body, but we can not see the soul. We can not see our heart, our mind and our intellect.

Heart, mind, intellect…..all are in one, in the Being, in the soul. The 3 are in the soul, these are the faculties of the soul. Each one has different function. Mind creates thoughts. Mind works like a mirror, it reflects thoughts, it projects thoughts. The second faculty of the soul is intellect. It is called the eye of the soul, it has the ability to “see and understand”. It can see what is right and what is wrong. It has the ability to churn the thought deeply. It experiences the thought. It changes knowledge into wisdom. When the thought is transformed into an experience (a deeper understanding), then the heart does its work – it creates a feeling based on the experience. The stronger you hold one particular thought with your intellect, you think it deeply…..then your heart will create a feeling accordingly.

The key to happiness

What can you see in this picture?

Someone said : “I can see a little yellow plant in a glass filled with water.” Others said : ”a hope”, “growth”, “life“ etc. It is interesting. Each one has different answer. All of the answers are right. It depends on from which point they are speaking. If we see the picture with our physical eyes, we can see a little yellow plant but if we are using the eye behind those physical eyes we might see the beauty of it, something different, something more subtle. The beauty is always hidden behind the facades. It needs the ability to capture what is hidden. It is the inner eye that can capture the beauty. Some call this inner eye as awareness, consciousness, heart, the eye of wisdom, the soul or the spirit. In fact it refers to one and same thing.

The key to happiness in life is the ability to see the beauty in small things around you using this inner eye, not the physical eyes. The physical eye only captures the gross things, but the inner eye can capture the subtle things. Beauty is experienced by the heart. Not many big things happen in life. We might not experience big success so much in our life, but there are so many little things happening in each day. Start seeing the beauty or success in small things around you, do not wait till something big to happen to be happy. Open your inner eye and fill your heart with this.

The Spirit of Creativity

Someone shared her thoughts on how to become creative. She said that we should learn from children to be creative. I notice that most children are very creative. Their spirits are free….to explore everything. They have no worries and no fears in their spirits. They are not aware of what fear is. Each one of us was very creative when we were so young. When we grew up, we suppressed this spirit. We started creating fears and worries of what people might think about us. We started creating fear of being rejected by others. We might then stop doing something because of this fear. At some point in our life we might miss that spirit in us.

I remember when I was in a retreat, I escaped from one of the morning sessions, I went to the garden in the corner of the campus instead. The garden was small, beautiful and quiet. It was really enjoyable to sit there especially in the morning hour. I also could enjoy little birds and squirrels. They were running around on the ground, jumping from one twig to another. Sometimes they went so close to my feet. I really enjoyed it.

That morning I had an appointment with David who stayed above the garden. David is an artist and a musician. He promised to teach me how to feed squirrel at 7 o’clock. I was so excited about it. My heart said “If I can touch and hold the squirrel with my hand, it would be an achievement for me”. We might think that this kind of thought belongs to a child, not an adult. I knew it was the spirit of a little child in me who had that thought. David was ready with bread crumbles in his hand. He then made a little sound to call the squirrels with his mouth. We sat there and maintained silence. We should not make any movement that would create a feeling of threat in the squirells. We created a feeling of love to the squirrels. I said in my mind that we were friends and we loved to meet and play. I held that thought and created a feeling of friendship. We waited patiently and after a while one squirrel came closer to us. It jumped onto David’s lap and started eating the bread. It was so cute. I took the video of it. I hope I can share the video next time here. Then David gave the bread crumbles to me. I held it in my hand and the squirrel came to my lap and started eating the bread. The spirit of a little child in me was so happy.

Nurture this spirit inside you and you will experience so much freedom and joy.