And “self” has many forms. There is the body-self which keeps us imprisoned to the desires and appetites of the body. These desires are as a fire which rages within us, robbing us of the joy of life. He who attempts to gratify the senses knows how futile it is to do so. To satisfy the appetites is like adding fuel to the fire. The rishis of the Upanishads had greater insight into life than many of our modern psychologists, who advocate the cult of sense satisfaction, when he declared that not all the beautiful women of the world can satisfy the lust of a single man. The man who has surrendered to his carnal self is never happy.

Then there is the mind-self which binds us to ideas and ideals. And there are subtler formless selves of which every earnest seeker on the path has some experience: they are the selves which we create when we take delight in virtues we have acquired or in the progress we have made in spiritual life. And the more subtle a self, the more firmly it binds us to itself, the more miserable it makes us.

You are that

The true joy of life is in the abiding Self, concerning whom the Bhagavad Gita says:

The senses, it is said, are great
Greater than the senses is the mind
Greater than the mind is the intelligence
But greater than the intelligence is He, the Self!

That art thou! Tat twam asi! Thou art the Self. And this Self is ever pure, ever free. Established in the Self, thou may know the joy that is independent of all outer happenings, the joy that nothing and no one can take away. So Jesus said to his disciples: “My joy I give unto you, and your joy no man taketh from you!”

The body is not the Self. The senses are not the Self. The intellect, which plays such an important role in modern life, is not the Self. Seek your joy in your true, abiding Self.

I recall the words of Upali, the barber-disciple of the Buddha: “The intellect is a clever thing, but it overreaches itself. Do you see that monkey making great commotion like an earthquake in yon tree? See! Now he reaches over and springs to another tree, making a great commotion there also, and nothing does he achieve thereby. Thus it is with the intellect: it overreaches everything, thinking with its absurdly insignificant brain to accomplish things, when all it can do is to bring them into difficult straits.”

Seek your joy in the True Self

It is within you. And the way to the Self is the way of denying yourself. He who forsakes himself, abides in the Lord, such a one hath fullness of joy. Most moving are the words of Guru Nanak:

Behold! In thine own Heart
Dwelleth He – thy King!
And the way to Him Is the way of Love!
Love Him, not thyself!
Think as He thinketh!
Will as He Willeth!
Do as He Commandeth!
Renounce thy little self And
find the fullness of joy
At His Lotus Feet!

Laugh to drive away sadness

When the black mood of gloom and despair creeps over you, perhaps, the best and simplest way to ward it off is to laugh. Laughter is contagious. If you see someone laugh in your presence, don’t you also find it difficult not to laugh?

There is a man who has pinned to his wall pictures of men and women and children laughing heartily. Whenever he feels sad or depressed, he has but to take a look at the pictures on the wall: he cannot help but smile, and immediately feels better.

The story of a man who made patients laugh

I read of a man who rendered immense service to patients in a hospital. All he had with himself was an album which cost next to nothing: it was a collection of laughing pictures taken from discarded newspapers and magazines. With this album he went to patients, many of whom were in the throes of physical agony. They had not known what it was to smile or laugh, for weeks together. At the sight of the laughing pictures, they burst into laughter — they forgot their physical ailments for a while; they felt so very much better. To laugh like this must have helped them in making a speedy recovery.

When you feel sad or downcast, look at your face in a mirror. It looks so tense, so ugly, so unlike the face you would wish others to see. The strain in the face is due to some negative emotion which is playing havoc in the mind. On the other hand, when you laugh heartily, your face glows and spreads joy to everyone around you.

Laughter is medicine. It helps in building moral muscles. It is a spiritual tonic. It has a great cleansing power. So laugh whenever your feel gloomy.

The power of letting go

One way of breaking the force of the negative emotion is to relax. Relax the whole body. As you do so, you will find that the last part of the body to relax is always the face: and of the face, the mouth is last part to relax. So smile and laugh! And you will see how quickly the clouds of sorrow vanish and you are happy again!

The secret of relaxation is in the three words: “Let it go!” Life is full of incidents, both pleasant and unpleasant. When an unpleasant thing happens, we are apt to lose our balance: this creates a negative emotion which expresses itself in a feeling of sadness or depression.

An effective way of dealing with such a situation is to go to the root of the matter and “let go” what is causing the negative emotion. Let it go! Let everything go!

Has my sister failed to understand me? Let it go! Has my brother spoken ill of me? Let it go! Has my best friend turned against me? Let it go! Have I suffered loss in business? Let it go! Have my plans been upset? Let it go! Have I been treated with disrespect? Let it go! Has a dear one passed on? Let it go! Has my health suffered a setback? Let it go! Have I been cheated, robbed, deceived by someone in whom I placed my trust? Let it go! In this world of transitoriness — a world in which things come and go, is there anything worth worrying over? Let it go! The more we let go, the more do we conserve our energies for the constructive and creative tasks of life.

A beautiful story of Aesop

There is a beautiful little incident in the life of Aesop, the great storyteller. One day Aesop is playing with little children, shouting and laughing with them. An Athenian passed by: he expresses surprise that such a grown-up person should waste his time thus. In answer, Aesop picks up a bow and, unstringing it, lays it on the ground.

To the Athenian, he says: “O wise one! Tell me the meaning of this unstrung bow!”

The man is perplexed: he finds no suitable answer.

“I cannot solve your riddle,” he says “tell me what it means.”

And Aesop says to him: “If you keep a bow always bent, it will lose its elasticity. But if you let it go slack, it will be fitter for use when you want it.” Are we not, many of us, like the bent bow, always highly strung? We need to unstring ourselves, relax from time to time, that we may be fitter for use when we are called to action. And to relax we need to learn to “let go.”

The post Dada Vaswani on coping with sadness: Laugh and let go appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

A new study led by UC Berkeley has found a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people performed mundane attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that reveal when the mind is not focused on the task at hand or wandering aimlessly, especially after concentrating on an assignment.

Random chain of thoughts increase alpha brain waves

Specifically, increased alpha brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of more than two dozen study participants when their thoughts jumped from one topic to another, providing an electrophysiological signature for unconstrained, spontaneous thought. Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms whose frequency ranges from 9 to 14 cycles per second.

Meanwhile, weaker brain signals known as P3 were observed in the parietal cortex, further offering a neural marker for when people are not paying attention to the task at hand.

“For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different patterns of internal thought, allowing us to understand the varieties of thought central to human cognition and to compare between healthy and disordered thinking,” said study senior author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Tuning out helps the brain relax and explore

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, suggest that tuning out our external environment and allowing our internal thoughts to move freely and creatively are a necessary function of the brain and can promote relaxation and exploration.

Moreover, EEG markers of how our thoughts flow when our brains are at rest can help researchers and clinicians detect certain patterns of thinking, even before patients are aware of where their minds are wandering.

“This could help detect thought patterns linked to a spectrum of psychiatric and attention disorders and may help diagnose them,” said study lead author Julia Kam, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. She launched the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Knight’s cognitive neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley.

Another co-author on the paper is Zachary Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia who explored the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of mind-wandering as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley.

“If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information. And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights,” said Irving, whose philosophical theory of mind-wandering shaped the study’s methodology.

Irving worked with Alison Gopnik, a UC Berkeley developmental psychologist and philosophy scholar who is also a co-author of the study.

“Babies and young children’s minds seem to wander constantly, and so we wondered what functions that might serve,” Gopnik said. “Our paper suggests mind-wandering is as much a positive feature of cognition as a quirk and explains something we all experience.”

How the study was conducted

To prepare for the study, 39 adults were taught the difference between four different categories of thinking: task-related, freely moving, deliberately constrained and automatically constrained.

Next, while wearing electrodes on their heads that measured their brain activity, they sat at a wacomputer screen and tapped left or right arrow keys to correspond with left and right arrows appearing in random sequences on the screen.

When they finished a sequence, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to seven — whether their thoughts during the task had been related to the task, freely moving, deliberately constrained or automatically constrained.

One example of thoughts unrelated to the task and freely moving would be if a student, instead of studying for an upcoming exam, found herself thinking about whether she had received a good grade on an assignment, then realised she had not yet prepared dinner, and then wondered if she should exercise more, and ended up reminiscing about her last vacation, Kam said.

The responses to the questions about thought processes were then divided into the four groups and matched against the recorded brain activity.

An important step

When study participants reported having thoughts that moved freely from topic to topic, they showed increased alpha wave activity in the brain’s frontal cortex, a pattern linked to the generation of creative ideas. Researchers also found evidence of lesser P3 brain signals during off-task thoughts.

“The ability to detect our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step toward generating potential strategies for regulating how our thoughts unfold over time, a strategy useful for healthy and disordered minds alike,” Kam said.

The post Brain waves can reveal where your mind meanders appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

We work to occupy time. We work to establish our place in the pecking order, to guarantee status and prestige. And, too often, we work because we simply don’t know what else to do with ourselves, because we think we must and should.

Love it or hate it, work sets the pace and establishes the rhythm for everything else we do in life. Even when we‘re not at work, when we’re not on the clock, we consume time by constantly doing things and staying busy. Weekends are whirlwinds of activity. Vacations often resemble a blitzkrieg of organized movement with every moment of the trip preplanned and orchestrated for maximum efficiency and, of course, pleasure! For example—“Twenty-one countries in 14 days: Airfare, ground transportation, guides, lodging, meals, wine but not cocktails, and all tips included!”

James Gleick, in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, reflects on why Americans [and, increasingly, the world] work and play as hard and intensely as they do.

Gleick suggests that we are now manic about speed. The world now seems to operate on five-minute intervals. We are rush freaks. We are time obsessed. “Lose not a minute” is the motto of the age. We are always making haste. Multitasking isn’t an option, it’s a way of life. Hyperactivity is the norm.

It has simply become standard to respond to the conventional salutation of “Hello, how are you?” with some version of the refrain “I am so busy!” Unfortunately, we say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy and our ability to keep going a mark of real character. As theologian Wayne Muller has pointed out: “The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others.” Sadly, to be busy, to be unavailable, has become the model of the successful life.

Here’s the problem. When life becomes an Olympic endurance event [“the Everydayathon”], when the stopwatch is always ticking, when are we supposed to have fun? When will there be a time to be human? As Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, professor of leisure studies, so aptly put it, “Having to go so fast to keep up, we miss stuff—our existence is truncated. Some things simply cannot be done going full speed: love, sex, conversation, food, family, friends, nature. In the whirl, we are less capable of appreciation, enjoyment, sustained concentration, sorrow, memory.”

I think, we all do too much or try to do too much. My mother used to accuse me of having “eyes bigger than your stomach.” She told me that I both literally and figuratively put too many things on my plate. “Alfredó,” she’d say, “You do too much. Slow down, take smaller bites, or you’re not going to enjoy anything. “Piano, piano arrive sano!” [Slowly, slowly, and you’ll get there surely, safely!]

My thesis is a simple one. Even if we love our jobs and find creativity, success, and pleasure in our work, we also crave, desire, and need not to work. No matter what we do to earn a living, we all seek the benefits of leisure, lassitude, and inertia. We all need to play more in our lives.

The urgent importance of leisure

According to the Harvard Health Letter, leisure time has dramatically eroded in recent decades, down to approximately 16.5 hours, per person, per week. A recent surgeon general’s report declared that the lack of “leisure-time physical activity” has become a serious health threat. The most hazardous work-related illness says Joe Robinson, editor of a vacation magazine, is “vacation deficit disorder” or “vacation starvation.” Robinson and the surgeon general are not alone in their warnings regarding the lack of leisure and vacation time and potential health issues. A fourteen-year study of 12,866 men published in The Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine found that annual vacations sharply reduced the risk of death in middle- aged men.

Similarly, a twenty-year study of 749 middle-aged women by the Centers for Disease Control found a direct link between a lack of vacations and a higher risk of heart attack and death. At the University of Essex, England, researchers found a link in women between working more than 48 hours a week for more than three years and high blood pressure, as well as ailments of the arms, legs, and hands.

Finally, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health claims that demanding jobs that give employees little control over their work increase the risk of heart disease.

Conclusion: “Vacations may be good for your health.”

Albert Speer, Third Reich minister of technology and armaments, argues in his memoir, Spandau, that intentions and ideology aside, Hitler’s chief failings as a military leader were overextension, overexertion, and fatigue. Hitler, said Speer, especially when the war began to turn against Germany, never seriously rested or recreated or could find any downtime, away time from the all-consuming particulars of the war. He took on too much, said Speer, and micromanaged too much. He got lost in the details, and his fatigue often blinded him to the obvious logic of the situation.

Fatigue and the frenzy of overstimulation can block objectivity, delimit perspective, and often deaden our ability to calculate and evaluate logically. Vince Lombardi, NFL coach and football legend, is reported to have said that “fatigue makes cowards and fools of us all and more often than not results in mediocrity.” Another American legend, Gary Cooper, in a less than-legendary 1953 film, Seminole, perhaps put it most succinctly: “Never decide or do anything when you’re tired.”

As the reclusive philosopher Baruch Spinoza suggested, in order to gain perspective, we need to step back; insight and wisdom are very often best achieved in moments away from the task at hand.

Even when you love the job you’re doing, you can’t do it all the time without losing something. To do almost anything well, you must have time off from it. Time away from constantly doing it. Time to recover and relax. Time to do something else. Time to just forget about it.

All of us need to “vacate” ourselves from our jobs and the wear and tear of the “everydayness” of our lives. All of us need to get absorbed in, focused on, something of interest outside of ourselves. All of us need escape, if only for a while, to retain our perspective on who we are and who we don’t want to be. All of us need to gain some feeling for, some knowledge of, the differences between distraction and insight, merriment and meaning, entertainment and recreation, laziness and leisure, rest and inertia.

If we are what we do, then to a great extent, as adults, we are defined by our work and our play. Both of these basic patterns of behavior influence not only how we define ourselves but how we understand and interpret reality and how we make ethical choices about our lives and our interactions with others. Therefore, depending upon who we want to be, and how we want to be known, we must be careful in our choices of what we do for a living and how we choose to play.

All of us need to vacate ourselves from our jobs and the wear and tear of the everydayness of our lives

Vacation on wheels

In Latin the word for vacation is vacare, “to be empty, nonoccupied,” “to suspend activity,” “to do nothing.” Work represents the everyday routine, and vacations are temporary interruptions.

On vacations we turn aside, go in the opposite direction, vacate ourselves from our usual course or purpose. Vacations connote downtime, choice, freedom, personal discretion, and activities an individual engages in for his or her own purposes and pleasures. Vacations are seen as an antidote to work. They are medicine, a remedy for counteracting the effects of labor. The psychologist Wayne E Oates believes that vacations offer us an opportunity to “empty ourselves of our multiple roles in life.” Vacations allow us to be away from the job, to change the patterns of our day, to alter our routine, to reconfigure our actions and habits, to rediscover ourselves.

Although it is not true for everyone, we commonly associate vacations or vacationing with traveling. In traveling, we take ourselves outside of ourselves, our normal life, our usual patterns. So where do we all go when we go on our private or familial odysseys? Not so surprisingly, an awful lot of us are pretty pedestrian in the use of our vacation time. It has been my experience that if you randomly survey a hundred people about how they spend their vacations the answers you will get are not scientific, and not always exactly the same, but they conform to a strikingly consistent pattern. Ten percent will gleefully report about doing something incredibly exotic: flying to Cape Town, South Africa, to go cage diving with great white sharks; sixteen days trekking through Tanzania; or a rafting trip down the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Another 10 per cent will report that they did nothing on their vacation. That is, due to lack of interest or lack of funds, instead of taking an exotic trip, they did some chores around the house, took a trip to the zoo, took in a few museums, and spent a long day and night at their closest Six Flags amusement park.

About 40 per cent of those polled will tell you that they had a wonderful time on their vacations even if their destinations of choice were not sites “where no man has ever gone before.” These are the people who try to make it to Europe every third year. These are the hard-core vacationers and tourists who make detailed plans and carefully manage their budgets so that they can take an annual vacation.

And then there’s the surprising 40 per cent of us who report visiting family and friends on their vacations. Going to see loved ones has historically always been a major reason for traveling. And now, given the fluidity of our lives, our mobility, our multiple job changes, more and more of us live away from our families and our friends because they are scattered about everywhere. So naturally, our vacation time may be the only opportunity we have to get together.

Going to see grandma and grandpa, or spending a week with your brother or best friend from college, does not, of course, mean you do nothing else but spend time with them. Visitors usually end up doing a lot of the stuff that tourists usually do—dinners out, shopping, a little sightseeing. The main problem that was reported to me by a number of people who regularly take “family-visit vacations” is what one of them called “vacation- interruptus” or “vacationincompletus!”

That is, going to see family and friends is a vacation of sorts—you’re someplace else, you’re doing things, you’re having fun—but you’re constantly trying to balance your wants and desires with those of others. Because of all this and the sheer numbers involved in the project, the first casualty is usually the possibility of anything resembling “spontaneity” or “adventure.”

Moreover, the concepts of silence, solitude, and rest rarely enter into the equation.

Putting aside my limited survey, I have also found a growing number of people for whom vacations are anything but pedestrian. The past few decades have seen the rise of adventure travel, ecotravel, and archaeological travel, and now there are vacations that “take you to the limit”—extreme sports vacations.

What defines an extreme sport? While there is no exact definition, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all of them have an above-average propensity to result in death, injury, or maiming. Here are just a few examples: rock climbing, bungee jumping, white-water rafting, base jumping [B-A-S-E, an acronym for parachutists jumping off buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs)], bridge swinging, street luge, downhill roller blading, surfing in typhoonlike swells, skiing/snowboarding in avalanche country, and aerobatic parachuting.

Although extreme sports can be a local weekend activity [e.g. parachuting], many of them require time and travel [mountain climbing, skiing] and therefore, most extreme sport athletes dedicate their vacation time to their sport of choice.

Extreme sports is about pushing boundaries, taking risks, leaving safety behind to leap into the void. Extreme sports is about a radical rush of adrenaline. It’s about forgetting about standards of safety. It’s about not being cerebral. It’s about not having control over the elements. It’s not about winning, it’s about not losing, not dying. It’s about elevating risk to the extreme. It’s about living through the experience. Simply, it’s about the afterglow pleasure of survival. Clearly, extreme sports vacations are not for the faint of heart.

I do understand why so many of us are drawn to it: it’s a combination of the thrill of the unknown, novelty, dancing with danger, and the irresistible possibility of the joy of play—no matter what the downside. We are, after all, curious creatures and thrill seekers. According to Eric Perlman, a mountaineer and filmmaker specializing in extreme sports: “Every human being with two legs, two arms is sometime going to wonder how fast, how strong, how enduring he or she is. We are designed to experiment or die.”

My problem is not with what we do on vacations, or where we go on vacations, or how much we spend on vacations. My problem revolves around the issue of what most of us don’t get out of our vacations—the opportunity for solitude. We just don’t do nothing well!

Weekends: Thank God it’s Monday

A few of us, who are really good or just plain lucky in our financial and vocational choices, get to take the whole summer off. Some of us, with sufficient seniority, get a month. Most of us have the standard—but by no means guaranteed—two weeks off a year. Many of us make due with the occasional “four-day-quickie.” And a lot of us take our vacations or what leisure we can find on the weekends—if there is a weekend that week!

It’s been my experience that weekends in most family households are anything but leisurely or restful. In fact, I would suggest that the management of weekends in most “double-income with some kids households” [DISKS] can best be characterized as an experiment in controlled chaos.

Think about it, although you don’t have to go into “the job,” Saturdays are usually just another workday. A “honey-do list” is drawn up, chores are assigned, and you’re both off and running. Take the dog to the vet. Drop off Carla at ballet classes and Jason at little league practice. Pick up the dry cleaning. Stop at the hardware store. Vacuum and dust. Get Carla and Jason, bring them to swimming classes.

Go grocery shopping. Pick up kids again. Take Carla to the mall, drop off Jason at the cineplex. Get the dog. Do a load of wash. Start the sauce for dinner. Get the kids. Finish making dinner. Have dinner. Clean up after dinner. Drop off the kids at friends. Pick up two videos “not suitable” for family viewing. Fall asleep halfway through the first one. Totally forget to pick up the kids until they call looking for you.

And then there’s Sunday [You know the routine. Fill in the blanks as you deem necessary.] Church…lawn and yardwork …Little League game…wash the car…clean out the garage …have dinner with the in-laws…check the kids’ homework …check e-mail for work Monday…and—in the words of the late Sonny and the ever-rejuvenate Cher—”the beat goes on.”

Pop critics and commentators on the workplace keep telling us that the song that best reflects workers’ attitudes about the job is “Thank God It’s Friday” sung in celebration of the end of the week. That well may be so, but after a long weekend of kit, kin, and chores, there are a lot of people singing a slightly different tune—“Thank God It’s Monday!”—in celebration of the end, finally, of the weekend!

Although you don’t have to go into the job, Saturdays are usually just another workday

According to philosophers, pundits, pollsters, and politicians alike, weekends ideally are about freedom. The freedom to let go and let be. The freedom to explore your life, your world, and yourself. The freedom to stop, look, and listen. The freedom to examine an idea, pursue a dream. The freedom to think hard, to be serious, to ponder great ideas. The freedom to be a dilettante. The freedom to be whimsical, play hard, have fun. The freedom to be open to newness or nothing at all. In fact, practically speaking, we spend our weekends in a variety of different ways depending on who we are, what we do, where and how we live, and how much we make and can afford to spend. For most of us, the weekends are usually a mixed bag of relatively mild and pedestrian activities and experiences.

They usually start with the simple pleasure of sleeping in. [Which means, if you are over the age of forty, waking up at the usual workday time but forcing yourself to stay in bed until the deliciously decadent time of 7:15 A.M.!] Weekends mean being able to linger over breakfast, coffee, and the paper. They include a few [if you are lucky] household chores and repairs, as well as a little shopping. Weekends mean a walk, a run, a workout. Taking kids to the zoo. Watching a game. Playing catch in the backyard. Weekends mean turning off the phone, never getting out of your bathrobe, and watching the Sunday TV. Weekends mean breaking up the patterns of the week. Weekends are about going out for lunch or dinner, and maybe taking in a film.

For too many of us, concludes Witold Rybczynski in Waiting For the Weekend, weekends represent a different and sometimes a more pleasant way of staying busy and consuming time. But, he says, genuine free time, real leisure, must remain just that: “Free of the encumbrance of convention, free of the need for busyness, free for the ‘noble habit of doing nothing.’ And clearly, “doing nothing” does not describe the modern weekend!

Genuine leisure is what you need

Because too many of us live in a world of total work, we think that leisure is at least minimally achieved by the mere absence of work. Because we are so eager to escape the burdens of work, we think that any form of nonwork—quiet time, downtime, doing no-thing in regard to a job time—constitutes some form of rest, recreation, and/or leisure. Well, we’re wrong. To be idle, to be without a task, to be doing no-thing are prerequisites but not sufficient conditions for the achievement of genuine leisure.

According to the psychiatrist Leonard Fagin, the concept of control is the crucial psychological distinction between work and leisure. What characterizes leisure is the feeling, if not the reality, of greater control over one’s activity; leisure implies doing what one wants to do with one’s “free” or “non-work time.”

Englishman, Winston Churchill, had a few eccentric passions. Churchill was both an accomplished painter [on canvas, not walls] and a bricklayer. At Chartwell, his rural estate, he built two cottages, a playhouse, and several walls. Both Churchill and Fagin were convinced that leisure meant time free of the encumbrance of convention, free from “business-busyness,” free of the constraints of social obligation and duty.

Josef Pieper, in his cult classic Leisure: The Basis of Culture, argues that leisure is a necessary condition for both individual and communal survival, growth, and progress.

For Pieper, leisure is not simply a form of recreation or diversion, nor is it the natural result of rest, relaxation, or amusement. Although, it is necessary to be free of the toil and moil of the everyday burdens of work for it to occur, according to Pieper leisure is primarily a mental set, a psychological orientation, a condition of one’s soul or spirit. For Pieper, leisure is an attitude of nonactivity, of not being busy, of inner calm, a commitment to silence, meditation, observation, and letting things be. Leisure is a way of life and not just the inevitable by-product of holidays, spare time, weekends, or a vacation.

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality…For leisure is a receptive attitude of the mind, a contemplative attitude…

Leisure, like contemplation, is of a higher order than the vita active [active life]…It is only in and through leisure that the “gate of freedom” is opened and man can escape from the closed circle of that “latent dread and anxiety”…the mark of the world of work.

To be leisurely, said Josef Pieper, is a choice. To be leisurely is to be disengaged from the tedium of tasks—to be open, observant, and receptive to issues outside of self and one’s immediate needs. Leisure is time given to contemplation, wonder, awe, and the development of ideas. Leisure is about creativity, insight, unregulated thoughts. It is about intellectual activity, but not intellectual work or utilitarian problem solving. It is about desire, wonder, and unbridled curiosity.

But we just don’t do leisure well. We rarely deliberately devote ourselves to idleness. Although I know it sounds like a Zen paradox, we almost never slow down enough to experience the experience of not doing anything at all. We rarely attune our inner ear to the needs of our inner self. We usually stay too busy, we usually do too much, and in the doing insulate ourselves from ourselves. As a friend once told me: “Most of us will take time off, but very few of us want to spend time with only ourselves. It’s too boring and scary. It’s a lot easier to do something and just keep busy.”

We just don’t do leisure well. We rarely deliberately devote ourselves to idleness

In an almost completely forgotten book [who’s got the leisure to read anymore?], Solitude: A Return to the Self, the English psychiatrist Anthony Storr speaks to a profoundly neglected human need: the need for solitude. The Random House Dictionary defines solitude as “the state of being or living alone.” Although optimum solitude can occur only in the physical absence of others, the general state of solitude can be achieved in the presence of others. Just as it is possible to be lonely in the company of others, it is also possible to achieve solitude, of a kind, in the company of others.

The state of solitude is about calmness, centeredness, and focus. It’s the ability to get “lost in the present.” It’s about being able to rivet our attention, getting in touch with our deepest thoughts and feelings. It’s about being able to ruminate without distraction, to meditate, to idly muse, to become totally absorbed in thought.

Of course, a lonely mountaintop is always preferable, but solitude can be had about anywhere.

Achieving solitude is easier said than done. As William James pointed out, reality is a “booming, buzzing, confusion.” The excessive busyness of our multitasked lives and the constant overload of outside stimuli are much more conducive to the production of migraines than to the pursuit of meaning.

Nevertheless, suggests Storr, “finding down-time,” “time outside of usual time,” “time to reflect on time,” is a sine qua non condition for emotional and intellectual stability.

Parting shot

It is my hope that we will learn or relearn two complementary and fundamental truths regarding the human situation. [1] Adults need work in the same way that children need play in order to fulfill themselves as persons. [2] Adults need play in the same way that children need play in order to fulfill themselves as persons. An overworked man is an unimaginative one, at best dully completing a routine, at worst making serious mistakes. Far from benefiting his company, he is very likely creating problems rather than solving them—and so making work for other overworked men to boast about. We get new ideas when our mind is allowed to roam in a free and relaxed way around a problem—and for that we need a reasonable amount of leisure and thus a decent annual vacation.

Maybe the European practice of five weeks paid vacation goes too far—but not by much! [John Sullivan, columnist, Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 2002]

The ability to play, to go on vacation, to take long walks, to have a quiet weekend, to have time to think, should not be perceived as a perk or privilege. We need not always be doing. In fact, we must all try to studiously do less, in order to be more.

P.S. To maintain sanctity of the source, this article follows American English.
Excerpted with permission from The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations by Al Gini; published by Routledge.

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Stress is what you make of it. In other words, how stressed you get is in your control, though you may not like to believe it. One of the ways to shrink your stress is through pranayama or yogic breathing. I invite you to try these simple, but powerful, breathing techniques to help you mitigate stress.

Breathing Exercises to Mitigate Stress

Conscious Breathing

Sit still in a comfortable position. Keep your spine erect, shoulders drawn behind [you may keep the back supported if you like]. Close your eyes. Breath in deeply, slowly and rhythmically, keeping your attention on the air entering your nostrils. Exhale even more slowly. Count to three as you inhale and five as you exhale. Aim to increase your exhalation time. While breathing, observe the minor changes in the temperature of the air you inhale and exhale—you will notice that the air that enters is cooler, while the one that exits feels warmer. Also, observe the rising and falling of your shoulders as you breathe. Do this for 10 – 15 breaths. This simple activity is an instant stress buster.

While breathing, you could also place your hands over the diaphragm [the area that separates the chest from the abdomen] with the middle fingers touching each other. As you inhale, feel your chest expanding when the air enters your lungs. Your fingers will move about half an inch apart when the chest expands.

Abdominal Breathing

Assume a comfortable position; you can even lie down. Place your palms gently on the abdomen over the navel. As you inhale, allow your abdomen to relax and expand. Your palms will be pushed away from the body as the abdominal wall moves forward. Then, as you exhale, contract and gently draw the abdominal wall inwards. At first, it might seem confusing because we are habituated to expanding the chest and the diaphragm as we breathe in. Inhale and exhale slowly and deeply. Once you master the technique, count to three as you inhale and five as you exhale. Again, aim at extending the exhalation time—ideally it should be twice the time you take for inhalation.

Single Nostril Breathing

Few people know that though we have two nostrils, we predominantly use just one to breathe. As per yogic philosophy, the right nostril signifies the sun or the heating system of our body and the left nostril signifies the moon or the cooling system. Practicing single nostril breathing helps bring an awareness of which side of your body is dominant and also to bring balance between the right and the left side.

Sit in a comfortable position, keep only the thumb and index finger of the left hand straight and curl the other fingers in. Place the thumb gently on the left nostril and inhale through the right nostril. Now, with the index finger, close the right nostril and exhale through the left. This is right nostril breathing. Repeat this five times. Then do the same with your left nostril.

Chanting with Breathing

Focusing your attention on the breath helps to instantly calm the mind and relieve stress. But keeping your mind from wandering is easier said than done. That’s where chanting helps. While doing conscious breathing, begin to chant ‘let go, let go, let go’. As you chant, you’re literally letting go of pent up tensions and anxieties. You don’t have to speak the words out aloud, just repeat them silently in your mind. You could also chant Aum, So-Hum, or any other chant that you like.

Related » Morning Mantras (Chants) to Awaken the Power Within

Visualization with Breathing

Visualization too helps rein in the wandering mind. The best time to do them is while you’re lying on your bed just preparing to drift off to sleep. Lie on your back with the hands by your side and eyes gently closed. Begin with breathing consciously, taking care to keep the inhalation and exhalation soft and effortless—no deep breathing. Start to consciously relax your body, beginning from your toes, gradually working your way up. Suggest every part of your body to relax. Imagine that your body is weightless and floating in the air or that you’re lying on a beautiful beach with the waves gently clashing on the shore in the background. You could use music to help you with this imagination. Try this with a partner if possible. Each of you could take turns to guide the other into a state of relaxation.

Fix Your Breathing

When we are experiencing stress, the muscles of the neck and shoulders get tensed and breathing becomes shallow and rapid. For a majority of us, this becomes a habit and we continue to breathe incorrectly, even when we are not stressed. Simply learning to breathe the right way can help us handle stress better, reduce anxiety, improve sleep and normalize blood pressure. Our breath [pran in Sanskrit] is our life force. Harnessing its powers can help us restore health and vitality. As the yoga guru Krishnamacharya once said: “Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.”

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So, the question that we need to ask is do these options really give us mental peace? For that matter, does even visiting a health resort or a religious place and taking a vacation, help us find peace?

Since there are so many means to achieving one end, we can safely conclude that no one formula is effective. What is amiss?

If we find what is missing, any method will work. If we don’t find the missing factor, none will.Be it shavasana, chanting, progressive muscle relaxation, guided visualisation or ‘think positive’ auto-suggestions, nothing will work if we are not really relaxed. We may go on chanting or jogging, but if we are not relaxed at the level of our autonomic nervous system, then these clutches will be rendered superfluous.

Your heart, thoughts and breathing may be racing even as you may be chanting a ‘relaxation mantra’, indicating that your autonomic nervous system, on which we normally have no voluntary control, is aroused.

We need a concrete and objective measure of our relaxation, which will tell us how relaxed we really are. Be it breath, heart rate count, thermal feedback [finger-tip temperature reading], or electro-encephalograph [EEG] feedback of our alpha brain waves—any of these methods can be used to get feedback, but it has to be physiologically true. Only then will you be truly relaxed.

In one experiment, the subjects were given false feedback of their heart rate. The feedback signals were intercepted and modified online to convey to the subjects that their heart rate had slowed down when, in fact, it had not.

Another group of subjects was given true online feedback of heart rate. The results showed that the heart rate slowed really in the subjects who received the true feedback.

We may do many things to calm down, but unless we are truly relaxed inside, we are only cheating ourselves. Forcing yourself to relax may, in fact, lead to a paradoxical situation, wherein the more you try to relax the more tensed you get.

You may catch yourself worrying, “I am really not relaxed” and this thought feeds on your inner tension. In such a logjam, the trick is to ‘not relax’. Just give up, just be. Sit for a while if you like, but just be with the honest intention to ‘not relax’. Like Sri Ramana Maharishi had suggested: “Don’t meditate, be; don’t think of being, be; don’t be, you are!”

Let’s call it paradoxical meditation/relaxation because the concept is similar to the Paradoxical Intention Technique used in behaviour therapy to treat anxiety neurosis. Just be patient, stay put, and gradually the autonomic physiological tension will settle down.

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Thai yoga therapy is a healing art, prominently known as The traditional Thai Yoga Massage, that roots back to the days of Gautama Buddha—about 2,500 years ago. Jivaka Kumar Bhaccha [who was the physician to Buddha] was the founder of this therapeutic massage.

How does it work?

In India and Thailand, it is believed that there are 72,000 energy lines in our body and 10 out of these have been selected to be used during Thai massage. Thai Yoga Massage endeavours to channelise the flow of energies in the body, where the practitioner works along the recipient energy lines and pressure points.

Touch is a necessary part of our lives and is a key element in both our physical and mental health. In today’s fast paced life, we often tend to lose touch with our mind and body. Thai yoga therapy is graced by divine life force. The therapy not only provides relaxation and feel good factor, but also creates a great possibility in people to experience wellbeing and meditative state of body and mind. These therapy sessions are continuous ongoing learning process for the giver and a receiver—it is a exchange of energies. These sessions have great potential of bringing the mind in an absolute present moment, which can truly give glimpses of bliss.

What does it do?

Traditional Thai massage does not primarily work with the physical body, but with the energy body where energy points are pressed or general pressure is used.

It is a combination of acupressure, asanas, stretching, palming, thumbing and gentle twisting. This helps in ushering back the balance in the body, deepens the connection between mind, body and spirit, in the giver and receiver.

In Thai Yoga Massage, no oils or creams are used and both the practitioner and the recipient are dressed in comfortable clothing. It is performed on a mat on the floor and begins with the therapists chanting few holy shloka’s for creating a spiritual experience. This helps the masseur to fully centre himself on the work, and the healing he is about to perform. Working in a meditative mood develops an intuition for the energy flow in the body and for the prana lines.

Thai massage usually begins with work on the feet as they are the lowest part of the body [gravity wise] and ends with the face and head. By working thereon feet first, a person’s energy can be moved upward thus helping the circulation of energy. This is important as due to gravity our energy only flows downwards. Massage or inverted postures such as performed in yoga can therefore help to remedy this.

The feet are one of the four reflex areas in the body. The other three reflex areas are the hands, ears and the irises of the eyes. Reflex areas contain points that correspond with other body parts. When these points are stimulated, there is an effect on the corresponding body part.

What are the benefits?

Some therapeutic effects of Thai yoga massage are:

• Enhances your practice of yoga, pilates, and other physical modalities
• Balances the body’s energy pathways
• Increases resistance to injury
• Relieves pain due to arthritis, stress, and overworked muscles
• Improves range of motion
• Releases lactic acid and other toxins from areas of accumulation
• Tones internal organs
• Increases energy and peaceful alertness
• Enriches emotional calming and deep relaxation
• Deepens the connection between the mind and body.

This massage helps relax patients with blood pressure and even asthma. It’s a great way to relieve yourself from stress and even pregnant women with swelling on their body can benefit from it. Apart from feeling physically elated by releasing stress and tension, the recipients experience an inner peace and joy and a feeling of being elevated away from the anxieties that possibly encompass them.

How long does it take?

Thai Massage is based on the holistic point of view that any problem is not simply an illness of a particular part, but rather a disorder of the whole being. All the parts of the body are believed to have an organic relationship, which exists within an even greater whole—nature. Because of this holistic approach, treatments are usually about two hours long so that the entire body can be addressed. There are no known side-effects of same, unless the masseur does not follow the principal guidelines and right techniques.

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The modern mind is bombarded with information not just from mainstream print and electronic media but social media as well. This creates a problem because there is no time to digest it. In the past, this was just the reverse. There was less information and more time to assimilate it – so, there were silent spaces in people’s minds. Today, our lifestyle has changed 180 degrees: much of the information remains undigested. It is as if you go on eating and stuffing your body. That which is not digested by the body will prove to be poisonous.

A really healthy person is one who takes 50 per cent of his/her time to assimilate their experiences. 50 per cent action, 50 per cent inaction – that is the right balance. 50 per cent mental activity and 50 per cent meditation is the cure for today’s men and women.

Meditation, need of the hour

Meditation is the dire need for contemporary life and also humanity.

What is meditation? It is nothing but a time when you can relax utterly into yourself, and when you close the doors of your senses to outside stimulus. You are alone in your innermost being, relaxed, at home. In these moments, all that has become accumulated is assimilated and that which is worthless is thrown out. Meditation functions like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it assimilates all that is nourishing. On the other, it throws out all that is junk.

But, you ask, who has time to meditate? People have to manage so many things that everybody feels the day is not long enough. In these changed times the concept of meditation has taken a summersault. Now, people need meditation techniques that can be woven into their daily routine, which means they should be able to meditate while doing their job.

Sounds impossible? Not at all, if you do it the Osho way.

Osho has changed the whole structure of meditation and has created hundreds of short but effective meditation techniques for busy people. These techniques can be practised while you are working, talking, walking, or doing any kind of activity. Because, basically meditation is not an activity, it is being aware of your activity. If you are watchful of your acts at physical, emotional and mental level, you are in meditation.

Meditation techniques for the busy

Here are some delightful and effective meditation techniques by Osho—for people who have everything, but time.

Razor’s edge

This can be done while you are booting the computer, waiting for the elevator, and so on.

This is literally a one-minute meditation. Hold your watch in front of you. Look at the second hand, witness its movement and try to go on witnessing it. You will find that you can watch for 2-4 seconds – and, the witness is gone, some other thought has come. Then you will be a witness for 4-5 seconds and forget again. In completing one minute you will lose it two, four, or 10 times. If you practise it every day, the span of your attention will increase. If you can watch the second hand for 60 seconds, you will feel integrated.

Rub your ear lobes

When you are feeling sad, worried, or angry, hold your ear lobes and rub them hard; there is no need to pierce the ears. You will find a change in your state of mind.

Warm hands, cool head

Physiologists agree that if you work with the hands, you can change the energy that moves from the head. Your right hand is joined with your left brain whereas your left hand is joined with your right brain.

Try this: whenever you feel that there is too much thinking, and you cannot stop it, rub both your hands fast, make them hot by rubbing, and suddenly you will feel the thinking has stopped, the energy is moving in the hands.

This is the best medicine for people who cannot sleep—better than any tranquilliser. Just close your eyes and rub your hands, and feel them getting warmer and warmer. Support it by your imagination – see how they are getting warmer in your mind’s eye. When the hands are warm, the head becomes cool. Now, you can sleep like a baby!

Throwing the bad mood

Breathing is a powerful tool we have, and it can be used intelligently for managing our emotions. If you are in a bad mood –

• Exhale deeply; as much as you can, throw the air out. With the air, the mood will be thrown out too, because breathing carries the mood. And, then expel the breath as far as possible. Contract the belly in; don’t inhale for a few seconds.
• Then, allow the body to inhale deeply – as much as you can. Again, stop for a few seconds. The gap should be the same as when you retain the breath out. Exhale totally and inhale totally, and make a rhythm.

You will feel a change immediately coming into your whole being. The mood will disappear and a new climate will enter you.

Gibberish and silence

This is a perfect method when the mind is too stressed and you can’t think coherently. Close your eyes and begin to make nonsensical sounds. Just speak any language that you don’t know! Allow yourself to express whatever needs to be expressed within you. Let your body express the accumulated stress, too. Imagine you are emptying a garbage can. After 10 minutes, sit silently. The relaxation and silence that follow will be magical.

Talk telegraphically

For one day, talk telegraphically. Use absolutely only the necessary words, as if you are sending a text message. Use only the essential words. Your words will have more power as you will be uttering them consciously, and the impact will be deep.

Last updated on 23^rd September 2019

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