2020: Seven Secrets for Navigating this New Year

So you have seen off 2019 with all its ups and downs. You have savoured the care of friends and survived the snare of enemies. You tasted both the sweetness of honey and the sting of a bee. You have realized that outshining your boss has proved to be foolish as well as fatal. You have licked your wounds after being back-bitten by your own colleagues who turned out to be secret service agents for the establishment. Through deep self- reflection you have had the right insight: your subordinates who are rolling over in laughter over your sick jokes are doing so only because you write their appraisal reports. Next year, when you may not be in charge anymore, the same jokes will fall flat like stale balloons after the party is over. You have concluded that the ego that has puffed you up like popcorn on the sands of time is your original enemy.

How do you navigate the year ahead with greater ease and joy? 

Here are a few lessons I have learnt from great masters who taught me the art and craft of living:

#1. Shift your identity: Recognize that until this year-end you have lived your mistaken identity. You have confused the infinite and timeless life that you are with this finite jelly of body-mind mechanism that moves from error to error like a blind buffalo inside a dark room. The life you are is not very much different from the life of the bacteria that is occupying a bed and breakfast joint inside your large intestine. There is just one life expressed in infinitesimal forms. Life in your beautiful body will soon become fertilizer for marigolds. So why not shift your identity? Transform your body-mind into engines of service for a more selfless cause than just plotting your own promotion?

#2. Get off your head: All along you have been a blunderful Buddha! Last year, the treasure you called your brain had turned out to be as smart as a faulty weighing machine. The brain has served you at best as a dysfunctional, error-correcting device. Your brain has made you eat the humble pie by forecasting fears and conjuring up pictures that never came true. The intellect is a fine instrument. But one-sided intellectual culture makes you insensitive to the subtle world of your spirit. Like someone rightly said, 'Get off your head if you don’t want to be dead.'

#3 Be a missionary of clarity: Clarity is your life’s spontaneous state. You destroy your natural clarity by using additives such as misperceptions and uncontrolled desire. Many of us are not clear about the distinction between our will and our desire. To simplify, 'If I want to eat another chocolate' (that lasts a few moments on your lips and a lifetime on your hips) is an expression of desire. Yet, 'If I can successfully resist eating that chocolate,' it is an act of my will. If you just get this clear distinction between will and desire you have started out as a missionary of clarity. To summarise, clarity is nothing but your pure human potential minus the pollutants and additives of your mind.

#4 Master the Art of Waiting: Most people do not know how to wait. My favourite book is Hermann Hesse’s classic work, Siddhartha. Siddhartha taught me how one can face most of life’s challenges by learning how to think, how to fast and finally, how to wait. You must go through the circumference of your patience before you arrive at the centre of your desire. Waiting is hard work. The most beautiful things in life take their own time to manifest. It takes Nature millions of evolutionary years to perfect the shape of a flower. An old work of art, like Mona Lisa’s smile, ages the least!

#5  Reduce a million mutinies of your ego selves: There is no one single person sitting within you that is managing your affairs. When you say ‘I want this’, you do not realize that there are millions of small ‘i’s in mutiny with each other. There is an internal multilogue going on inside your head:..i like..i do not like..i am angry..i am not supposed to be angry… i am not happy and i want to be happy and so on. This ‘i’ changes like waves on the sea--one crashing into another on the shore of life. This is the nature of our conflicted inner life. A return to integrity is to observe the mutinies of your million ‘i’s that divide you and deplete you internally. The beauty of self -observation is that the ego fights cease to be when they are observed. This will return you to your sanity and certainty in life.

# 6 Look out of your window: When you are swamped by an avalanche of data, look out of a window. When faced with a window…all you can do is to look in a specific direction. Your window frame makes it impossible to see elsewhere but through the window. You may find small and insignificant things—like an old kite stuck in an electric pole—the most interesting to watch. Your cluttered mind now has a chance to unwind. You will feel a lot less stressed this way.

#7 Create the future in the here and the now. Finally, please drop your mindless new year resolutions to where they belong: in the waste paper basket. You cannot understand or direct the future unless you see the patterns emerging in the here and now inside your own mind. If you can disrupt the old patterns in your own neural network, you have the potential to renew and recreate your future. This cannot happen by elaborate resolutions. Nah! The future is not a bull’s eye waiting for you to hit. The future is created even as I write this and even as you read this writing. Be a passionate playmate of the here and the now! This will make you future-ready.

I wish you, all my readers, friends and supporters an incredible 2020. Thank you for nurturing my creative work by reading, liking, sharing and applauding generously. For this, I remain deeply grateful!

#2020 #New Year #Mindfulness #Leadership #Women #MBA #India#Life #Meditation #India

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