Awakenings from Vipassana

I am not sure what is better liberating, the truth of one's own limitations, or the growing light on one's enormous ignorance over such self limiting habits and attitudes?

Liberation is real, is true in its every fiber. The sensations of discomfort and pleasure that a purely breath centric channeling that the nostrils open one's awareness to dies a quick death as the breath gets deviated to impermanent transcendence of this existential living. Pleasure and pain arising and passing away as waves through Vipassana's art of living is as real as one's breath and as true as one's idea of how to swim through life every day and through every situation but without being overwhelmed by its depth.

We each have died a million deaths not just with crushed egos and wounded spirits, but without knowing how to stay in the now and to be hopeful for tomorrow.

Egos as we meditative souls are aware is an exaggerated version of what we expect of others and what we think we are supremely full of. The more we have gotten protective over guarding our egos to facilitate our habits, our selective attitudes towards learning new things from anyone irrespective of age, hierarchy, or life experience, besides the environments that we grow from, beliefs, faiths, likes, prejudice and so on which shape our personalities to accommodate ego from the outer mind. This feeling of being 'I am ...' is a reassurance to a transient life, a ripple in the constant waves. 

The waves will ebb and rise as they are supposed to, undeterred by the outside disturbances, and the image of one's ego centric world. This passing away of an 'I' from one shore to another, angry, weary and hurt and feeling small all over again at the depths of this subconscious ocean could happen to the destined few who wish to swim the waters of liberation unafraid and totally surrendered to the lifeguard called Vipassana.

Vulnerability-From darkness to light

Vulnerability is not a great place to be but we cannot fight that feeling away with ego, no matter how strong. Being vulnerable means to be not sure where one stands in his/her present life and who wants to assert on this fragile state with a fake sense of confidence which does not grow stronger as expected, but rather pushes one inch by inch to either come out of this cocoon or stay in it, self pity, regrets, weakness and all.

Ego and stubbornness are self destructive enemies in disguise and if  integrated with one's emotional, mental state of thinking can make one become blinded by numb conviction to prove and work towards an ideal personality picture disconnected with true practicality of everyday life over and over again.

Feeling vulnerable as a result is not the sum of situations that make us stay in our cocoons, but our choice to want to stay inclusive of all its entrapments but not taking a call to undoing it through proactive actions.

What are then the proactive steps to take when one can choose to overcome this fragility with adequate strength?

1. Stop feeling inadequate and feeling sorry for yourself.

 No matter how unpredictable  life can be, remember that you have found your own ways to deal with it, problem after problem, one rough tide after another through your own intrinsic survival instincts. Just make sure you reevaluate them that the strengths that you think you have and have trusted them to pull you out of any situation all along are truly self empowering and growing as you age with maturity.

2. Get stronger inside and out

Just as mobile apps need to get updated to serve your practical needs, your body too needs a constant reality check starting with the types of food you eat and how frequently you do so, and how much you exercise your restraint while adding junk to your eating. Therefore it's not just physical exercise that helps stretch us out of inertia, but also how calm and equanimous is your strength of mind to feed on self nurturing thoughts that feed your spirit and not your ego. Practicing mindful awareness of breath from time to time for short spans in a day helps you identify what thoughts you need and what to focus as your awareness sharpens and gradually lifts the toxic thoughts which don't serve any purpose just as the junk food. This 'What thoughts are really necessary for me' diet is another discipline besides daily physical exercises and balanced food.

3.Express gratitude for what you have

Gratitude is a subtle yet an effective way to say how thankful you are for what you have in your life and not what you wish you had and how bad or weak as a result you feel about not having them.

Gratitude can't be acquired for a price, but does great wonders to the spirit boosting its sense of humility and cutting ego out of the feel good in order to stay happy in the now and not have regrets from the past. Money sure can make one gain power, but the true value of feeling good for your life, for what's still there in it, and for what you make of it are priceless.

The closure to this is Vulnerability is not a place of  mental weakness that can be shrouded in the name of fears, emotional fragility, numerous mental blocks like helplessness, defenselessness and so on, but a tunnel that leads one to discover one's own light at the end of it.

From my life to cosmic after life

Sometimes disconnect between self and the people from the past who happen to be family happen for a reason. And the sooner this drift from the sentimental and the familiar happens, the more future changing it becomes. Because we fear to break out of the time tested formula of physical sustenance, emotional nourishment provided by family, we prefer clinging to the all too known family culture, family tradition, togetherness etc.

It is then essential to grow with life's enormous channels through people, relationships, money, health, and also divine interventions and remind ourselves that while we are here let's take each living day as an answered prayer and all that we love and we move away from a blessing in disguise.

In truth, we are afraid to admit that we are able to cope up being alone, and also know from the soul that there is only so much or only so far that a family can support and come along in one's life. It is here that spiritual guides/Gurus can replace this feeling of being lost and wanting to start all over again with a sense of new found purpose and perspective to live the rest of the life and get prepared for what's coming after it.

Since the soul outlives the body, and the bonding with family, friends, pets, needs, wants, likes, dislikes etc after death, it gravitates towards a higher plan of cosmic life proving once more that disconnect happens for a reason. What was once 'My life' is a part of the unknown, the unfamiliar, and belongs to a cosmic family of after life.

The (NH 10's) road to success

NH 10 is a road runner of on- your- face brutality and non stop seeking of justice as a survivor portrayed by the lead Anushka Sharma a.k.a Meera in the 2 hour short movie.

The 30 minute beginning seems like a warm up of a story of a couple, Meera and Arjun (Played by Neil Bhoopalam) who live it out as corporate team not having enough personal time for themselves in a usual male dominated Gurgaon city life. The reality of this patriarchal psyche leaves its dark shadows on Meera who becomes increasingly aware of this growing ugly presence inside of her office as also outside, as she comes face to face feeling sexually cornered and as an outsider for marking her successful career territory.

They decide to venture out on a weekend trip outside of Gurgaon, on the Haryana road map that begins its NH 10 road to a romantic private villa setting arranged by Arjun for cheering up Meera for her birthday. The diversion begins when the duo stopover for a bite at the local dhaba enroute and land up being witness to honour killing in process. It does not stop at that as Arjun, the "brave" knight goes all macho in questioning this brutality meted out on a screaming woman and her boyfriend, who are considered criminals for marrying outside caste and their cries for help is heard by one and all there but no one steps forward. As Arjun is slapped right before the village audience and is provoked to fight back and teach the gang a lesson or two in manners and civility, he is restrained by Meera who urges him to drive on to their villa destination without taking this insult too personally.

As Arjun is all driven to do what he thinks right and swerves to follow this gang who have bundled the lovers in a jeep ahead, Meera fears the worst and anxiously waits for Arjun to return from this no man's land. Her wait is over as she tries to follow her husband's footsteps and is met by a mentally deranged yet harmless member from the goondas, who Arjun perceives as a threat and shoots him point blank, much to the anger of the other gang members. Far from teaching the hooligans and intervening in their brutality of killing their village woman and her lover to a chilling end, Arjun realizes the danger he has gotten himself and his wife into, as this hit and run chase leads to a dead end for even them.

What follows post interval is Meera's singular angst at being help deprived for her violently injured husband Arjun and her run for finding help, but in vain, at the local police station, who are no better than the blindly illegal hooligans. She fends for herself catching a timely glimpse into the senior inspector's intentions to turn her into the hands of the mob, and escapes from this death sentence.
She realizes to her horror that the village Sarpanch is the main rule maker of such "honourable" punishments on the young girl and her lover and no mercy for life is spared even if the girl (Pinky) is the village head's daughter.

Meera's presence of mind and on -her- feet thinking helps her run her way out of this trap and finds shockingly her husband to be dead and killed by the raging rowdies, while she had gone to find help leaving him alone under the village railway bridge.

Meera's emotions as a survivor and now all alone with her dead husband is well played by Anushka, who goes back to finish her unfinished business and rams her vehicle right back at the thick skinned and hard skulled hooligans who meet their violent end in the hands of Meera. This self proclaimed justice in a caste and strife ridden Haryanvi village, outside of the civilized borders of Gurgaon brings the survivor in Meera alive.

What begins on this route is not merely a road to a badly ended vacation, but a crossover from civility to become a law unto oneself as a woman and as the stronger survivor amongst the sexes. 

Thank God for prayers!

Prayers are not proxy for one's efforts  and your physical mind can't command these divine messages of surrender to fix at will. Neither is this about rituals and how obsessive you get about how this worked for you and that how it 'should' work for others too..because they don't. They are not missiles that can get guided at your will.

The calm and the storm of one's life when viewed the same is the eye of the needle which bursts the lies, the ignorance,and the pride in you through being aware of your breath and an amazing tool called meditation which sharpens your divine mind.

Rising above the pains of the physical with equanimity is just as much effective as a surrender to a power higher above and in total faith. The difference is how far do you go to support yourself with focused clarity instead of blind dependence on spirituality, and I believe prayers provide you with a state of mind to accept what come your way than what you expect and what you want within a given span of time. Because God cannot replace self responsibility as much as prayers don't do proxy for your actions and their consequences.

Evening walk

I went out for an evening walk like most other days and took the usual route starting from the 'back' gate of my apartment. I cannot help but second look at the older couple's duplex house facing the gate that stares right back at me as pictures of murder for money and jewelry (the wife, aged 70 was killed a month ago by their car driver on the 1st floor of the house, as the husband, aged 75 was working in the shed from ground-floor and could not hear her) is written all over their mourning place.

The 'front' gate leads to a congested main road that crawls with honking vehicles and muddy slush and shops of every lawless disorder leading to a longer and frustratingly slow warm up for such 'evening' walkers. Parks for walkers and joggers and people of every size and shape was something to look forward to and the 'back' gate was a sooner option to get to the park.

I took the route that my husband had explained from memory and had reached there to find there was a lot more to this 'name unknown' park than meets the eye. One can smell the whiteness of jasmine and rose garlands as the temple adjacent to the park rings its bell of evening chants and i see many exercised maamis, retired and physically fit maamas and a mixed bunch of people walk out the park. The gate that one takes to enter and exit are the same and a small wait for a narrowed way inside, opens my eyes to a wide and slightly unkempt park, which i had never discovered in my walking history.

The slabbed trail that runs through the circumference of a fairly large and circular park is dotted with wild plants, trees and benches that have friends, families and lovers in their own worlds. The serious walkers and joggers seem to sweat it out and pace faster to finish as dark and moody clouds hover from top.

It was a trial walk for day 1 for me and after walking for a while, I took a seat next to a red head, whose dye was next best to the hibiscus flowers in the park. She was easy to talk to and we seemed to hit off from the word go as she belonged to Hyderabad too, which happens to be my native and we could not get enough of it, even if we have moved to Chennai for our own reasons and have grown to like the latter in choice-less reconciliation.
It was like moving into this safety of knowing that I am still hyderabadi enough to bring back my good old self in the Telugu we spoke and I knew instinctively that i am understood and not judged no matter how broken the Telugu, or how lost I was then.


    

Don't be someone else's idea of perfect

Do not try to be someone else's idea of perfect...be who you are and know for yourself that you are complete being just you. Do not submit yourself in the name of humility to another's egoistic anger beyond reason and logic beyond sense. Stretching yourself to others idiosyncrasies is not adapting well..but just dumbing down lower..
Do not give others the power to decide for you what is right and how to do things right...do not ask others to understand you better but stay clear on your line of understanding...do not bend or shorten this line for others lack of sensitivity and choose to move ahead if it still hurts.
There is nothing like very happy or very sad - it's only your mind taking longer to let go when you cling to them to make you feel situationally feel good or miserable about yourself.

Embracing yourself just as you are is hard. That would mean being able to be brave enough to overlook the flaws in your life and not hold anyone else responsible, or being hard on yourself for the missed opportunities to make life better. Challenges do not define who you are as much as appreciation. Realizing your strengths through others opinions does not weaken or empower you either. It's your focused intention to want to learn, grow wiser, more calm and giving and let go memories that don't serve your life in the now that makes you unique as a human and as an evolving person. 
The blessed life we have and are living is already complete, and so are our personalities. Remember, you can never be someone else's idea of perfect.