Category: Uncategorized

  • Happy Diwali – 2017

    Dear reader: Our sincere and very best wishes for good health and happiness to you and for every one in your family. Festivals like Diwali (Deepavali) are also occasions to rejoice and share the blessings in life we have with every one who matters to us. They are also occasions to think of all those…

  • Desire, Anger and Passion – the forces that we need to contend with.

    Driving on the road is also a great time for observations, reflection and inferences on Spirituality in Practice. We have already noted this in a few essays earlier: https://sipractce.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/on-merging-into-traffic/ https://sipractce.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/why-should-you-vote/ https://sipractce.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/anatomy-of-our-experience-understanding-the-connectors/ https://sipractce.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/habits/ https://sipractce.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/non-attachment/ Recently I was again reminded by my friend on how we can observe events during driving to connect with the larger aspects…

  • What is next after “Yoga” and “Meditation” session?

    This essay is a follow up to our last one where meditation has been described as a sequence of three steps: With this understanding I attempted a Google search on why we meditate and/or practice Yoga? There were several good descriptions. Almost all of them converged on reasons like the following: Why do we meditate?…

  • Types of meditation and their observance.

    Recently a paper titled “Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity – A review” from the frontiers in Psychology was brought to my attention by one of my friends who is a medical professional.   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4171985/#!po=7.95455 For reasons of full disclosure I must admit that I have no…

  • Do you dare to be a spiritual person?

    Who is a spiritual person? To find an answer I googled the images for Spiritual persons! Try and do your own search. You might be surprised as I was! Almost all of the images that came up were all people meditating, sitting in silence in some remote place. The persons you could identify were the…

  • Pressure Vs. Stress Vs. Relief!

    Recently I came across an article titled “Pressure Vs. Stress”.  The author writes: Pressure is not stress. But pressure is converted to stress when you add one ingredient: rumination, the tendency to keep rethinking past or future events, while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts. The process starts with understanding that stress is caused not by…

  • Every house is different; All residents are the same! (Deham vs. Dehinam)

    In a crowded place someone yells out your name. Among the hundreds of people in the crowd, you respond instinctively. There are two or more people in the crowd with the same name – not a common occurrence but it happens. Each one of them responds instinctively. Are we defined as to who we are…

  • Rational approach to irrationality!

    Sometimes things look so logical and rational. Yet, one can find oneself in dire straits at the end of the road. This is like the mirage on a hot sunny day. One who thinks there is water at the end of the road chases it only to find that his thirst has grown with no…

  • Words and their meaning

    In an invocation poem the famous poet Kalidasa (from 4th Century India) describes Lord Siva and his wife Goddess Parvathi as inseparable as the word and its meaning. Proficiency in the understanding of the word and its proper meaning and their interconnectedness enhances the knowledge and skill of any one and in any language. More…

  • Inconclusive Conversation.

    Recently one of my friends referred me to the following story from Mahabharata that he came across while browsing the internet. There are many episodes in Ramayana and Mahabharata where the key characters engage in such reflective conversations: Arjunabhigamana Parva (sections: 12-37)[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vana_Parva This chapter (Parva) introduces Krishna, his accomplishments in the past. Krishna criticizes…