Living Wisely Living Well | With Asha Nayaswami

Make a special effort, today, to break out of some self-enclosure—whether of selfishness, or timidity, or personal preoccupation. The growth toward maturity is a matter of escaping from one’s ego-prison. Expand your awareness to include the needs of others. Then expand your feelings, by sympathizing with those needs. Next, expand your self-identity by helping people to fulfill their needs. Finally, release yourself from self-identity altogether by telling yourself, “It is not I who help anyone: I am only a channel for God’s grace.” The feeling will come to you at last: “He alone is acting through me; He alone is the Doer.”

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See yourself, when you help others, as a gardener watering his plants. Whether the plants be bushes, grass, or flowers, all of them need water. And human beings, whether haughty or humble, harsh or gentle, ignorant or learned, provocative or submissive, dryly brittle or richly humorous: all of them need nourishment. If you nourish them with the nectar of kindness, they will thrive.

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View your problems dispassionately, as if from a mountain peak. Perspective is lost in the valley of personal involvement. How tiny life’s problems are, compared to your spiritual reality! If you allow them to loom large, they may overwhelm you. But if you view them dispassionately, you will see them merely as little specks on the vast panorama of life.

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Be modest—be even self-effacing. But don’t belittle yourself. Self-deprecation, too, brings a focus on the ego. There should be neither superiority nor inferiority complex. Concentrate on the what of things, not on the who.

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Be always, as my Guru put it, “even-minded and cheerful.” Watch a cork bobbing ceaselessly about on the surface of a lake: up and down, up and down, never straying in any particular direction, always keeping to one place. Don’t be like that cork, bouncing with the ripples of emotion. You’ll never get anywhere if you constantly react to what happens around you. Don’t imitate: initiate! Move serenely through life, like a great ocean liner, centered in the Self within.

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Speak from a center of inner silence. Mere chatter is anesthetizing. A man in Calcutta once asked a younger man, “My boy, are you married?” “What do you mean, Am I married? I’m married to your own daughter!” “Oh, I know, I know. I just wanted to talk, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.” Wouldn’t the older man have done better to remain silent? When you speak from the heart of silence, everything you say will have meaning.

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Be thoughtful when communicating with others. Absent-mindedness induces vagueness, which produces chronic failure. Mean what you say, and say it with focused attention. Thus, you will develop the power to succeed at everything you attempt.

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Devote less time than heretofore to being entertained—by watching television, for instance, or by listening to recorded music. Commit yourself to doing things yourself. Don’t work from ego, but offer yourself as a clear channel for the Divine Creator. Passivity is to creativity what floating on water is to swimming. And channeling God’s grace is to egoic creativity what swimming with the current is to struggling against it.

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Look at, or imagine, a river flowing constantly. Then visualize your thoughts flowing similarly—not rippling restlessly; not drifting sluggishly; not frozen in fixed opinions like an ice sheet in wintertime. Adapt yourself to circumstances. The more centered you are in your Self, the easier you will find it to change as the needs arise. Affirm silently: “I adapt like flowing water to new situations and ideas.”

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Think of the setbacks, failures, and disappointments you’ve had in life. Toss them mentally into the air like flower petals, and watch them float away on the wind, diminishing in size until they disappear altogether. Affirm then, joyously, “In my heart, I am forever free!”

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