Mindfulness

Leaves … Like the Lives of Mortal Men

October 23, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Spring and Autumn not only call to mind the renewal of the elements of nature but also remind us of the brevity of life and the temporal advancement of life.

The past is immutable and the future is yet tenuous and undefined. Memories of the past are full of triumphs and regrets while anticipations of the future are full of hopes and fears.

If we lose ourselves in memories of the past or fantasies about the future, we lose valuable experiences that take place in the present moment. As I mentioned in my previous article “Present Perfect,” we don’t remain completely in the present.

The change of seasons reminds us of the Buddhist concepts of transience and impermanence—that everything is impermanent—everything, including our own selves. Somehow, we refrain from acknowledging our own impermanence and resist confronting our own mortality.

In Homer’s epic The Iliad, men die at an astonishing pace in various battles. During the Trojan War, when the Achaean commander Diomedes confronts the Trojan lieutenant Glaucus, the latter reflects,

Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

Source: “The Iliad” (6:171) by Homer, tr. Robert Fagles

Idea for Impact: The passage of time induces us to confront our own mortality. Considering our own morality is a useful tool to guide our present actions. It reminds us to appreciate and live each moment purposefully and wisely.

The Futility of Attachment to Expected Results

August 4, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The Futility of Attachment to Expected Results

Attachments Can Cause Suffering

Hindu and Buddhist philosophies posit that focusing on the rewards or outcomes of one’s actions is a prominent cause of emotional bondage in our material existence.

Buddhism holds that, above all, desire (selfish craving or tanha) and ignorance (unawareness or avidya) lie at the root of suffering (unsatisfactoriness or dukkha.) Desire is the yearning for hedonistic pleasure, affection, possessions, relationships, power, and even immortality.

The Bhagavad Gita on Detachment from Fruits of Labor

कर्मण्ये वाधिकारस्ते म फलेषु कदाचना।
कर्मफलेह्तुर भुरमा ते संगोस्त्वकर्मानी॥
—श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता 2:47

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana
mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te sańgo ‘stv akarmaṇi
—Bhagavad Gita 2:47

Translation: “To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.” [Source: “Bhagavadgita” by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan]

“The wise are not bound by desire for rewards”

This verse suggests that the anticipated results of actions should not be the motivation for the performance of those actions.

Expounding this verse, the Hindu philosopher Madhvacharya (1238–1317) advocated godliness through right actions:

All rewards are factually independently ordained by the Supreme Lord … therefore, it is not correct to imagine that any reward which one receives is due only to one’s own efforts. … So one who is spiritually situated performs actions unattached to reward. Verily such is the way of action. … Actions performed without desire as a matter of duty are full of wisdom. … One should understand that it is fallacious to believe that one is the ultimate controller of their own destiny because the Supreme Lord ultimately ordains all results.

Hinduism (and Buddhism) actively advocates right conduct to attain definitive rewards: liberation (moksha, mukti, or nirvana) and salvation. Another Hindu philosopher Adi Shankaracharya explained that hankering for the fruits of labor results in entrapment in the cycle of birth and death, thus inhibiting liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Buddhism encourages virtuous actions (in addition to the eschewal of bad actions) to beget positive karma for favorable rebirth and perhaps nirvana. While the abovementioned verse discourages attachment to outcomes, it does not imply that a person who performs actions without attachment to the rewards will not receive its rewards.

The Bhagavad Gita on Letting Go: The Power of Detachment

श्रेयो हि ज्ञानमभ्यासाज्ज्ञानाद्ध्यानं विशिष्यते।
ध्यानात्कर्मफलत्यागस्त्यागाच्छान्तिरनन्तरम्॥
—श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता 12:12

śreyo hi jñānam abhyāsāj jñānād dhyānaḿ viśiṣyate
dhyānāt karma-phala-tyāgas tyāgāc chāntir anantaram
—Bhagavad Gita 12:12

Translation: “Better indeed is knowledge than the practice of concentration; better than knowledge is meditation; better than meditation is the renunciation of the fruit of action; on renunciation follows immediately peace.” [Source: “Bhagavadgita” (1948) by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan]

Describing the psychological and spiritual benefits of renunciation of the rewards of actions (“karma-phala-tyagas,”) the Hindu Philosopher Madhvacharya explains this verse:

Superior to meditation with knowledge is non-attachment to performing actions for rewards and the renunciation of the rewards of actions coupled with bhakti or exclusive devotion to the Supreme Lord. … All one’s activities should be intended as an offering to the Supreme Lord because from such activities realization dawns and renunciation of the rewards of action arises and liberation from material existence manifests and the Supreme peace is attained.

Let Go of Attachments to Results

Idea for Impact: Let Go of Attachments to Results

Having no expectations of actions and lowering your expectations of people is liberating and can lead you to a happier life, not to mention of better relationships.

In terms of pursuing goals, freeing yourself from attachments to a particular outcome has to do with comprehending that there are certain things you cannot control. The attachment to a result takes hold when you believe that in order to be happy, you “must have it,” or you “should reach a goal.” Equally this attachment also arises from the anxious anticipation of a strong negative feeling if you do not reach your goal.

Alas, this attitude of letting go of attachment to results is not easy to implement. Psychologically, human beings are habitually driven by our hopes for the future, by desires from our relationships, and by a variety of other optimistic constructs like knowledge, power, status, and glory.

You can start by letting go of your attachments by redefining the form you think the results should come in. That way, should you not achieve the goal as you wish, you will remain content. Though it is an intimidating thought, remembering that many things are outside your span of control can help you let go of steep expectations.

Rather than limit the focus of your goal, a healthy approach is to consider instead your anticipated results as preferred results. By deliberating, “I prefer to have this outcome,” you can be open to anything that happens—good or bad. When good stuff happens, you can count your blessings. When bad stuff happens, you can just change direction without whining and self-pitying about how bad stuff was not supposed to happen you. Lowering expectations and detaching yourself from specific outcomes can reduce disappointment when things don’t go just as you desired.

Complement this philosophy of actions (karma or work) and results from the Bhagavad Gita with,

Artist Vincent van Gogh’s Calvinistic belief that work, like religion, was a way to communion with God.
General Dwight Eisenhower’s awareness that, after ordering his troops across the English Channel during World War II, the success of the invasion of Normandy was no longer in his own hands—that one could control efforts but not outcomes.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to my friend Venkatasubramanian, founder of the Bangalore-based Vyoma Linguistic Labs for help with this article. Vyoma is a non-profit organization devoted to the translation, preservation, and dissemination of rare classic Indian texts. It also produces Sanskrit learning products.

Control Your Efforts, Not the Outcomes

June 30, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

During World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969) was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. On 2-June-1944, he issued a memo to his troops just before the Allied invasion of Normandy:

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely. … The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

Under Eisenhower’s leadership, the Allied forces had meticulously planned Operation Overlord for over a year. For months, Eisenhower’s troops not only rehearsed their D-Day roles and routines, but also went to exceptional lengths to uphold the secrecy of their plans and deceive the German forces about troop movement. The Allied forces even plotted to cut off all roads and rail lines leading to the coast of Normandy and thus block reinforcements for the German troops.

Some things are simply beyond your control—you can only do your best

Despite all the strategizing and training, the success of the Allied invasion depended on the weather across the English Channel—their success essentially rested on something beyond their control.

The Allied aircrafts sought air superiority and would be unable to locate targets if low clouds covered Normandy. In addition, if the tides were high or the seas heavy, the troops would be unable to launch their landing crafts. The success or failure of their landings hinged entirely on suitable weather.

Eisenhower tentatively planned to send his troops across the English Channel on 5-June. The day before, however, the troops predicted cloudy skies, rain, and heavy seas that were inappropriate for the invasion. Eisenhower decided to postpone the invasion by a day, when the forecasted weather was to be more suitable than on 5-June, but not necessarily perfect for his plans. If he did not invade on 6-June, the tides would not favor an invasion for another two weeks, which would possibly give the Germans enough time to get wind of the Allies’ plan.

Eisenhower gave the marching orders for 6-June. It was then that he realized that the success of the invasion was no longer in his hands. Its outcome depended on 160,000 allied troops, thousands of commanders, and hundreds of lieutenants. Eisenhower had done everything in his power to coordinate their efforts and create conditions conducive to the mission’s success. After issuing his orders, all he could do was let those conditions come to fruition on their own terms. After all his efforts, he could not control the outcomes—he let go of the outcomes.

In time, the hard-fought cross-channel invasion was successful—Eisenhower won his wager with the weather. The invasion of Normandy proved to be a turning point in World War II. Despite formidable obstacles and thousands of casualties, the Allied troops prevailed over the German forces in landing at the coast of Normandy. Within days, Allied forces quickly consolidated at the beachheads and built up troops. Within two months, they broke out from their beachheads in Normandy and advanced on the Axis powers. The Allies liberated Europe when German troops surrendered unconditionally on 8-May-1945.

Control Your Efforts---Not the Outcomes

Idea for Impact: Focus on effort and lower your expectations of the outcomes

The wise among us understand what’s within their control and what’s not. They recognize that “you win some, you lose some.”

Success and results are not often within your span of control. However, you can control your effort and ability to create the conditions for success. Focus on your efforts, then let those conditions unfold.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna instructed Arjuna, “set thy heart upon thy work but never its reward” (verse 2:47.) And the Buddha counseled his followers to lower their expectations in order to achieve happiness, a belief that is not without proof in the hurly-burly world we live in.

Moreover, even if you can, don’t go overboard with your efforts. Push yourself to the max only when the stakes are big enough. As I mentioned in a previous article, a 110% effort may not fetch more rewards than an 80% or a 90% effort.

Be committed to your job, but don’t overly invest in it.

Lessons from the Princeton Seminary Experiment: People in a Rush are Less Likely to Help Others (and Themselves)

June 16, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 3 Comments

Vincent van Gogh's The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix)

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37 in the New Testament,) a Samaritan helps a traveler assaulted by robbers and left half dead by the side of the road. Prior to the Samaritan, a priest and a Levite pass the injured traveler and fail to notice him. Conceivably, the priest and Levite’s contempt was because they didn’t sincerely follow those same virtues they espoused as religious functionaries. Possibly, they were in a hurry or were occupied with busy, important—even religious—thoughts. Perhaps the Samaritan was in less of a hurry since he wasn’t as socially important as the priest or Levite and was therefore not expected to be somewhere.

The Princeton Seminary Experiment

Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson conducted a remarkable experiment in the 1970s on time pressure and helpful behavior. They studied how students of the Princeton Theological Seminary conducted themselves when asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The students were to give the sermon in a studio a building across campus and would be evaluated by their supervisors. The researchers were curious about whether time pressure would affect the seminary students’ helpful nature. After all, the students were being trained to become ordained priests; they are presumably inclined to help others.

As each student finalized his preparation in a classroom, the researchers inflicted an element of time constraint upon them by giving them one of three instructions:

“You’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago…You’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” This was the high-hurry condition.
“The (studio) assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” This was the intermediate-hurry condition.
“It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” This was the low-hurry condition.

As each student walked by himself from the preparation classroom to the studio, he encountered a ‘victim’ in a deserted alleyway just like the wounded traveler in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This victim (actually an associate of the experimenters) appeared destitute, was slouched and coughing and clearly in need of assistance. The seminarians were thus offered a chance to apply what they were about to preach.

“Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”

Researchers were interested in determining if their imposed time pressure affected the seminarians’ response to a distressed stranger. Remarkably, only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations helped the victim.

The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable… Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behavior, but being in a hurry decreased it.”

In light of their training and calling, the seminarians’ failure of bystander intervention is probably not due to indifference, self-centeredness, or contempt. (Compare with the plot of the series finale of American sitcom Seinfeld, where Jerry and friends are prosecuted for failure of duty to rescue.) The dominant cause is time pressure. Most of the students who believed they had enough time to stop did so. In contrast, the vast majority of those who thought they were late did not stop to help. In other words, the perception of time pressure or “having limited time” resulted in behaviors incongruent to their education and career: the devotion to help others. Time pressure triggered these well-intentioned students to behave in ways that, upon reflection, they would find disgraceful. The weight of a time constraint caused the students to put their immediate concern of being on time before the wellbeing of someone in need.

We’re in such hurry that we don’t stop to help ourselves

“I’m Late, I’m Late for a very important date,
No time to say hello. Goodbye.
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, and when I wave,
I lose the time I save.”
—White Rabbit in the Disney musical “Alice in Wonderland” (1951)

The Princeton Seminary Experiment offers an even more personal lesson. As the researchers in this experiment expound, when we speed up and feel rushed, we experience a phenomenon known as “narrowing of the cognitive map.” That is, we miss details, we are not present enough in the moment to notice what is really important and we do not make the most beneficial choices for ourselves.

As we make our way through life, not only do we not stop to help others—we also do not stop to help ourselves. We neglect our own needs. We fail to nurture ourselves. We surrender, we settle, we lose hope. We compromise ourselves and become what we often settle for.

Our noisy world and busy lives constantly make us hurry as somebody always depends on us being somewhere. We constantly rush from place to place as if our lives depended upon it. We rush while doing just about everything. We are at the mercy of commitments often imposed by others.

Life moves quickly. And we’ll have missed it.

We fail to nurture ourselves We’re too busy, we’re too hurried and we’re too rushed. When people place demands on our time, our first resort is to cut out that which is most valuable. We are so busy meeting deadlines that we cannot make time for our loved ones. We abandon physical exercise to get to meetings on time. We avoid medical checkups critical to our well-being. We engage in behaviors that can put ourselves at risk for negative consequences in the future.

As our world continues to accelerate and our pace of life picks up speed, the clock’s finger turns inescapably. Life moves on by quickly, and soon enough we’ll have missed it entirely.

Idea for Impact: Be ever-conscious of the fact that time is the currency of your life

The German theologian and anti-Nazi descendent Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) wrote in his “Letters and Papers from Prison”, “As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty.”

Make the best use of your time. Interrupt your busy life to help yourself by living more fully in the present. Nurture yourself. Your needs belong to the top.

A Timeout from Busyness // Book Summary of Pico Iyer’s ‘The Art of Stillness’

January 27, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Escape from the Mayhem

Our everyday lives are so busy. Our days are so full. Our world is so noisy.

We fill our lives with activities. We are at the mercy of our commitments. We have an incessant need to be occupied. We hasten. We seek to do something—anything.

Often, our identities are defined by mere ‘doing,’ not ‘being.’ Many of us struggle to find a few minutes to just sit quietly and clear our heads. We cannot afford some space to think and just be. We hardly ever pause to contemplate our experiences or reflect on the life we’ve been missing in a world overwhelmed by distractions.

Distractions disrupt our peace. The French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensees, “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries” and added that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

To counter all of our exhilarating movement, we must balance it with an escape. We need space and stillness. When we remain still, we are struck by the realization that our noisy outer world is nothing but a reflection of our cluttered inner world.

Stillness: “Clarity and Sanity and the Joys that Endure”

Celebrated globetrotter and travel writer Pico Iyer’s “The Art of Stillness,” an expansion of his TED talk, is an inspiring analysis of the need to escape the persistent distractibility of the mundane. Iyer makes a persuasive argument for the startling pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.”

Pico Iyer and his family lives in a modest home in the countryside near Kyoto without internet, television, mobile phones, or even cars.

The book’s promo includes excerpts from Iyer’s talk:

We all know that in our undermined lives, one of the things most undermined is ourselves. Many of us have the sensation that we are standing about two inches away from a huge canvass. It’s noisy. It’s crowded. And it’s changing every second. And that screen is our lives. It’s only by stepping back and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvass means.

One of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. I find that the best way I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly to go nowhere … just by sitting still.

In the age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

The Importance of Taking a Timeout From Busyness

Subtitled “Adventures in Going Nowhere,” Iyer’s insightful 64-page book provides several examples of stillness in practice. Iyer gives us glimpses into the lives of a privileged few who have found peace.

For example, legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen discovered the supreme seduction of a monastic life. In 1994, after constant indulgence as an incessant traveler and international heartthrob, Cohen moved to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California, embarked on five years of seclusion, served as an aide to the now-107-year-old Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, and got ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk.

Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life—an art—out of stillness. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. … Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.” … “This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.”

Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.

…

Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions.

…

Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

From the Mayhem of Thought & Action to The Stillness of Being

Iyer contends that the best place to visit in these frenzied, over-connected times is nowhere:

At some point, all the horizontal trips in the world stop compensating for the need to go deep, into somewhere challenging and unexpected; movement makes most sense when grounded in stillness. In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

…

Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

…

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere—by sitting still or letting my mind relax—that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

Iyer’s “The Art of Stillness” isn’t a self-help manual and doesn’t give specific, actionable advice on how to achieve stillness. Quiet reflection and mindfulness meditation could move one’s mind in the direction of uplifting tranquility and natural stillness.

Idea for Impact: Occasionally, Try to Not Do Anything and Just Be

Take a break from your day to reflect, to recharge and to reassess. Take a vacation from your accelerated life. Just be with yourself, genuinely center, and quiet the mind.

You can achieve this centered state and contemplate when your exterior is noiseless. Then, during those still and silent moments you can come to terms with your experiences and struggles, your hopes and despairs, your ideas and judgments, your fears and fantasies.

Two-Minute Mentor #5: Present Perfect

April 25, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In “Awakening of the Heart” Vietnamese-French Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh offers a translation of the Bhaddekaratta Sutta:

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.

Looking deeply at life as it
is in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.

We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?

The quality of your life depends on how you live at this moment. Within the span of a few minutes, you may experience the darkest part of your life or the brightest. In one instant, you may suffer the painful pinpricks of stress; in the next, you may revel in the fullness and mystery of life.

By meditating on these experiences, you will realize that your memories and daydreams are actually illusory. They are not happening now; they are simply mental images flickering in the mind. Most of the strands of your mind’s apprehensions are fleeting and ultimately unimportant.

The first step towards achieving harmony, joy, happiness, and well-being is to recognize that your upheavals are nothing but your own mind’s projections. You are in control and can prevent yourself from being overwhelmed by them.

Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what you are doing right now and letting go of regrets, worries, and fears. Far greater joy is in the living process than in the outcome. Be in the moment.

Idea for Impact: Your past has created the present; create your future by focusing on the present.

The Nature of Worry

August 25, 2010 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“When you stop to examine your thoughts you start to see that they have a life of their own, they come and go, generally in a random, idiosyncratic way. Recognizing the constancy of our endless thinking process is said to be one of the important early steps we take on the meditation path.”
—Bob Sharples, Do the Thoughts Ever Stop

Have you ever realized that most of your anticipated misfortunes never occur, that some of life’s difficult scenarios never come to pass, or that most of your worrying is ultimately fruitless and life goes on?

Below, I present a simple exercise to help you discover the lifecycle of worry. I encourage you to sit down at a quiet place, somewhere you can relax and reflect. If necessary, fetch yourself a journal, special notebook, or a piece of scratch paper.

Mindfulness Exercise

Consider a recent upheaval or stressful event. Go back in time and experience that moment for a minute. How do you feel? What preoccupies your mind?

Under the direct influence of your anguish, your mind is bewildered. You feel disoriented. Your mind is filled with apprehension. Bearing the burden of this stress, you cannot take your mind off the imagined ramifications. The wounds of your sorrow seem incurable.

Now, fast forward to a few days following the stressful event. What do you experience now? Your troubles no longer hold a grip on your life as before. You feel released from that moment’s immediate affliction. As you reflect the situation’s progress, you feel amazed by how your feelings have changed. What happened to the irreparable hardship?

Storms of Distress

Allow another interval of time to elapse. How do your feelings compare now? The original despair is diminished further. The event feels formless; your apprehensions are no longer recognizable. You may even find humor in your past misfortune.

A few days later, you are surprised by how easily these storms of distress passed. You wonder how these depressing emotions could have possessed you. The events are not undone and the external circumstances remain unchanged. What has changed is your mind’s condition?

Idea for Impact: “This too shall pass”

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”
—Benjamin Franklin

It is your mind that relates external circumstances to your internal being. Joy and sorrow, hopes and despairs, elation and desolation, pleasures and annoyances are nothing but outcomes of your sensibility. Outside forces are challenging to conquer—our control over the exterior world is narrow, and merely illusory. However, the evolution of your thoughts and feelings and your responses to distressing situations are within your power.

The next time you experience a hardship—a conflict, a distressing situation, or annoyance, recall what happened with your prior hardships. Recognize that everything happening in your external environment is but impermanent. Say to yourself, “This too shall pass.”

How to Create More Time

May 23, 2009 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Blogger Carla Kay White reflects on how she “found time” by transforming her mindset about being overwhelmed.

… it occurred to me that I’m feeling overwhelmed because that’s precisely the message I’m putting out in the world. I repeat it all day long in different forms “I have no time…” or “I wish I could, but I’m busy…” or “gotta rush…”

But what would happen if I simply told myself, “I have all the time in the world”?

I repeated this to myself anytime I felt rushed. Someone stopped me to chat, I had time. Working late, no problem. Caught behind a slow driver, I chilled and enjoyed the view. In the end it actually worked. I created time.

By sending out a new message “I have time” I’m relaxing, finding a new rhythm and living in the moment. I’m focusing on one thing at a time instead of ten different things. As a result, I get more accomplished, do a better job, and truly do have more time.

So if you constantly feel overwhelmed, ask yourself—are you really? Or is it just a conditional thought that you repeated so often to yourself, you believe it and live it? Just maybe you too can magically create time through your thoughts.

How to Create More Time

The feeling of being overwhelmed is primarily a lack of sense of priority over what we need to do. Follow my three-step process for better time management.

Time Logging: Follow this simple exercise to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.
Time Analysis: Tally up your time logs, analyze how you actually use your time, and recognize non-productive tasks and activities.
Time Budgeting: Follow this simple process to list your life’s values and priorities. Then, create a time budget to help you center your actions on the truly important aspects of your life and career.

[Time Management #2] Time Logging: Log Where Your Time Actually Goes

October 21, 2008 By Nagesh Belludi 11 Comments

Preamble

This article is the second in a series of four articles that presents the basics of diagnosing how you tend to spend your time and how you can develop the discipline of spending your time on what really matters to you. Yesterday’s article established that effective time management is truly not about managing time as such; rather, it is about managing priorities. See full article here.

Log How You Spend Your Time

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”
—Peter Drucker in ‘The Effective Executive’

Before you begin managing your time effectively, you need to develop an idea of how you spend time currently.

Below is a simple exercise to help you track how you use your hours and minutes during a suitably long period of time, ideally a whole week. If you follow a specific routine everyday, you may be able to approximate your time analysis by doing this exercise for a couple of weekdays and a Saturday or a Sunday. Alternatively, you may choose to do this only during your time at work. Again, more data leads to a more comprehensive analysis; hence, try to log an entire week.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Template

Create a simple chart that consists of four columns as in the above illustration. Column 1 contains labels for time intervals, in 10- or 15-minute increments. Column 2 records your activity. Column 3 identifies the project or purpose that activity served. Column 4 rates the effectiveness of time spent. Itemizing all these details is the key to identifying time wasted and time effectively used.
Make as many photocopies of this chart as required for a whole week.
Carry your time log charts around with you wherever you go. Record every activity—significant or insignificant, large or small—during the entire week. Include time spent at your morning ablutions, travel time, time spent chitchatting around the water cooler, time spent helping your daughter with homework, telephone time, time spent on the internet—your sleeping time too.

Time Log Forms

Here are two PDF forms you could download and use:

You need not necessarily stop every 10th or 15th minute to record your activity. You can fill up the relevant rows once every hour or so. If you spend two hours on an airplane, you can mark 12 rows (of 10 minutes each) with a single comment. You need not be very precise: if you spend 7 minutes on the phone with a customer, you can record spending an entire 10 minutes.

Here is what your log should look like.

Log where time actually goes---Time Log Example

Benefits of Time Logging

The immediate benefit of time logging is that it induces a sense of significance of your time. It compels you into the right mindset to consider habits you need to develop, avoid or change and start using your hours and minutes more effectively.

The more significant advantage is that your time logs will serve as a foundation for structuring your time according to your priorities and thus enable effective time management.

Tomorrow’s article will focus on time-analysis to help you review results from your time logs and prepare you for budgeting time according to your priorities.

Mindfulness Meditation for Busy People: Stress-Beating Strategies

September 1, 2006 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Recently, while poking around the internet, I stumbled upon Lorraine Hahn’s interview of Swami Veda Bharati. In this CNN Talk Asia interview from 2002, Swamiji talks about the practice of yoga and meditation and their benefits.

A simple exercise in meditation

During the interview, Swamiji leads viewers into a few moments of meditation. The following simple steps are worth a try.

Wherever you are, right now make no formal effort of any kind. Simply bring your awareness to the place where you are sitting.

Be aware of yourself from head to toe. If your eyes close, let them close by themselves, lightly and simply relax your forehead.

Just relax your forehead, be still and bring your awareness to your breathing. Only bring the awareness to your breathing. Do nothing with your breath, only follow how the breath is flowing.

Pick a name of God or a name of the Buddha or Yahweh or the name of Jesus, in your language, according to your tradition. Exhaling, think in your mind that name without a break. Inhaling, think that name.

Observe how the breaths, the mind and the name are flowing together as a single stream. Continue to feel the flow.

Maintaining the awareness of the flow, gently open your eyes but continue to feel the flow even with your eyes open. Do you feel any change in the state of your mind? A little calmness?

Why meditate?

After several years of being “busy at college”, I recently restarted my practice of yoga and meditation. For me, meditation is a practice of discovering the existential truth and disciplining my thought and action. Meditation helps me deliberate on the fundamental questions of life: the purpose and meaning of life and my role in the complex web of relationships around me.

What does meditation mean to you? Given your traditions and beliefs, do you see a difference between meditation and prayer? Do you consider meditation as a means for inward reflection and spiritual development? Is it deliberation and deep thought in search for the ultimate truth? Or is it mere stress management work-out to help attain calmness and composure? What are your thoughts?

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Mindfulness

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