WHAT NOT TO DO TO BE HAPPY

This chapter is an excerpt from my book SPIRITUALITY IN EDUCATION (NOTE..SPIRITUALITY DOES NOT MEAN RELIGIOUS WoRSHIP OR Ritual) Chapter 13- Teaching What Not To Do To BE Positive. “Learning what not to do or achieving an outcome is as important as learning what to do. For example, you learn how not to walk backwards, as a toddler, while learning how to walk forward. Likewise, you learn how not to be negative, as an evolving soul, while learning how to be positive “ Positive health and peace are a cumulative result of staying happy over a period of time by a choice to not be negative. Staying worried increases negative thinking and reduces positive energy flowing freely in life. However, children are trained into becoming worried by society. We become negative habitually as we are taught to focus on all the bad things happening in our lives and around us so that we can improve those situations. However, very often, we are helpless over circumstances and can do nothing on an individual level to change the negative scenario in our environment or in the world. When nothing can be done to change an external situation, it is necessary to develop detachment from it than go on worrying about it and absorbing in the negative energy of sadness. For example, you may feel very distressed about poverty in the world but may not be able to do anything much to eradicate poverty. In that case, you need to focus on worrying about poverty and think about it if and only as much as you can help. If you cannot help due to your circumstances, you need to detach from the negative vibrations of poverty and rise to feeling positive vibrationally. You cannot help the world by being dark yourself but you can contribute to increasing happiness in the world by being positive yourself through creating a chain of positive impulses which have a cumulative effect on the world. While teaching children how to be positive, it is essential to teach them how not to be negative. The following criteria need to be noted while teaching children how to work and think so that they do not behave negatively or think negatively, if it can be avoided by simple instructions. Exercise 60 (PE 13.1) – What not to do to Concentrate better Do not over-stress. If you over-stress, you will lose motivation. Any activity needs to be done only as much as it is not forced. Take a thirty seconds break whenever motivation decreases and restart your work. Take a longer break when you feel that your concentration is dropping off. Concentration increases overtime by using mental exercises. The most easily applied exercise is a simple focus on silence. Start with a single point focus for thirty seconds. You may focus on your navel point or the area under your nostrils or on your crown chakra at the top of the pineal gland or on your feet. You may choose any point of focus where you feel most relaxed & least distracted, while focusing. Time with an alarm clock. Do not exercise arbitrarily as the mind will not focus with all its strength if no clear finishing line is given. Exercise 61 (PE 13.2) – What not to do to study/focus better. Avoid participating in distractions like chatting with friends, watching television etc. even if it is going on the side while you are studying . . . Do not strain all your sense organs at the same time. Detachment from enjoyable, glittering, ritualistic activities is necessary to find peace in your inner self. Your desire to study or focus on a creative task would be less if there are too many sounds or exciting visions around. Try to move to a silent place for studying, obtaining inner peacefulness and meditation. However, if there are distractions which pull you, and you should concentrate on your inner self for studying or meditation or painting etc. . . . . ; You need to learn how to detach with force. Detachment often requires more skill and effort than concentrating. Obtaining a ZERO state of mind is necessary to move to a positive state of mind from a negative state of mind. ZERO frequency of mental vibrations lies between a restless state and a focused state of mind. Detachment is a ZERO state of mind, where you choose not to get involved with others’ problems to focus on yourself and raising your inner positive frequency from restlessness to centeredness. The following technique would help in detachment: Create imagined walls around your ears so that the sound from others does not distract you. You can create imagined walls by meditating in silence with focus on your ears. Keep your hands up, elbows parallel to the ground and palms adjacent to the height of your ears. This posture blocks thought waves from entering and relaxed the brain . While meditating, you can imagine walls around the ears on both sides … In your meditation, you are connected to your subconscious mind. Mentally, ask the walls to insulate you from distracting noises. You can also ask the walls to stay as long as commanded and to dissolve only when told. You may also ask the walls to re-activate whenever commanded silently. Meditate for thirty seconds every morning in silence and before sleeping at night to make these silencing walls a part of your repertoire. Exercise 62 (PE 13.3) - What Not To Do While Preparing For A Goal? Focus more on the feelings desired than the physical acknowledgement you seek. Get in the space of BEING more than doing and having. A focus on only getting acknowledgment in the physical world will distract you from getting inner satisfaction along with the outer goal you seek to attain . For example, if you want to be selected to dance in a school performance, focus on why you want to be selected. When you focus on the why, you will not feel disappointed if you are not selected and you will be able to work with more enjoyment when you are selected. When you seek a goal, you always have a feeling which you desire BEING while in that role. For example, if you want to go to a picnic with your friends, you want to be a fun loving person who is relaxed and cheerful. Similarly, if you seek a relationship with a person of the opposite sex, you want to be that person who is loved and admired. Often, in adult lives, it is found that the external goal is achieved without the feeling desired attained. For example, you may go to a picnic and feel lonely or you may attract a relationship but feel more criticized than loved. Your craving for the feeling you seek to attain continues till the BEING is satisfied. Hence, while desiring a goal, it is better to focus on the feeling you desire to BE than on the desired picture .The picture of success is meaningless if the inner feelings are not attained. It takes longer to attain inner satisfaction with external effort but the waiting is worth the effort than attaining success with feeling dis-satisfied. Exercise 64 (PE 13.4) - What Not To Do While In A Task Driven Atmosphere? Do not become a slave of other people’s thinking, or of popular competition, of fashionable food or of trendy enjoyment, in your mind. Be careful that you do not acquire a slave mentality where you keep obeying without thinking in fear of losing popularity, punishment or argument. Always remember that your first duty as a soul, is to evolve your own consciousness to a higher level of inner satisfaction, peace & happiness. In today’s world, there is a tendency to push around. Everybody wants you to work for goals designed by a super-structure. However, you may not agree with all these task driven strategies and may do several tasks half-heartedly because you are trained into obedience … To avoid becoming a slave of other’s thinking, take time off to meditate for a few seconds every hour. Take ten seconds out for yourself with awareness, whenever you can. Roll your eyes up and smile while feeling the energy in your stomach during these ten seconds. This habit of breaking from routine will prevent another’s mind from dominating over yours. You will be able to detach yourself automatically from obeying orders blindly. Detachment will help you decide what your goals are and why they are different from another’s goals. Work with focus is possible only if the feelings you desire as satisfaction are the same as the feelings desired by the other in authority. If the person in authority is confused, anxious or biased by religion/ traditions/ old rules etc... , then the feelings desired would not lead to optimum satisfaction for anybody who is involved. You will suffer as everybody else if you obey blindly a structure which is creating more dissatisfaction and disharmony than peace because of rigidity involved in its thinking. To be able to think with clarity, do not allow invasion of strong negative thinking which comes on as a wind with force. Insulate yourself by keeping walls on ears or filter out the words from the strong, assertive tone by focusing away from the sound with detachment. For example, whenever another person scolds you or abuses you, take your mind away from his words for ten seconds and look up into the sky. Then, try to be in the sky and gauge the situation from an observer’s perspective. That will help you decide whether the person abusing is correct and you could obey and whether the other person is being unjust or negative by temperament and you could disobey, as well. If you keep taking ten seconds off, to be silent inside your mind, you will detach automatically. With detachment, you will not be forced to obey under pressure of a public image. Also, if you have to obey even if you disagree, detach from negative feelings and do the task mechanically so that it does not become a part of your repertoire. Detachment develops if you react after a gap. For example, before choosing to feel sad or angry about a situation, take ten seconds off. Delay your inner reaction by ten seconds. The ten seconds break will remove the steam of emotions rising inside you and you will be able to react to the situation from a calmer perspective. Do not allow the atmosphere to rule you so much that you become a slave to your own reactions to another’s pressurizing attitude. Often, you may become controlled by other people’s dominating energies if you do not learn to detach automatically with practiced mind training. Taking the ten seconds break several time s a day from all thinking activity, will allow you to choose positive feelings over negative; and leave activities which make you feel non-intelligent or dis-respected. Exercise 65 (PE 13.5) - What not to do while exercising or dancing? Do not exercise or dance continuously without taking a break to rest. Always meditate for a few seconds after a rigorous training of a few minutes. Heavy exercise or dancing will create a hormonal imbalance in your body to burn your stamina. Your heart - rate, blood pressure, adrenalin flow etc. will rise during the exercising activity. However, if you do not regulate this rising hormonal discharge, it will suddenly clamp down and make you depressed or lethargic. The hormonal balance needs to be balanced deliberately by combining exercises and dancing with meditation/ maintaining silence in the inner self. Also, meditating with awareness during exercises helps to reduce weight more effectively or improve performance than continuous, harsh exercises. Slow exercises combined with silent meditation and deep breathing help the blood flow to the brain thus improving concentration and mental skills like intelligence, problem solving etc. As a routine, give a break of two minutes after ten minutes of fast exercise. Give one third or one fifth of the exercising time for being in silence in your mind with focus on your breath going in and out. Try to keep your eyes rolled up and smile inside during the meditation time so that your mind does not escape into brooding or worrying. Smiling will release positive hormones in the body which will make you feel fresh during the exercise. Exercise 66 (PE 13.6) -What not to do while Having Fun? While each person likes to relax by having fun, the elements of relaxation often go missing from the activities which constitute fun. Do not have fun by becoming addictive to it. The element of detachment is critical while having fun. Fun is that which is not compulsive. If the need for fun becomes compulsive, it becomes an addiction and makes you lose self-control. Fun is relaxing when you can leave the act of having fun anytime without feeling sad or depressed. The relaxation obtained during the fun activity helps you be positive, if the relaxation continues after you leave the fun creating activity. If you feel addicted to the increase of adrenaline flow, then the fun creating activity may become harmful to your inner hormonal state of balance. Therefore, fun should be indulged in with breaks to detach from its addictive/unbalancing element. For example if you have fun while watching cricket, you should not allow yourself to get over-excited or depressed if someone else loses or wins a game . www.shivaswati.com