Sunday Marketainment

Sundays become marketainment when one shops for groceries, veggies, snacks and so on. Be it supermarkets or the local vegetable market, the crowd of families and specially with kids is quite a scene. Insistent on pushing the shopping carts, nagging parents for another stationery item, crying until the chocolate is not bought, and tugging at parents’ hands to lift them up in the middle of a crowded queue are familiar sights from the little ones.

The cows seem to occupy a lot of the road space when shopping for vegetables from local markets. The smell of fresh cow dung keeps the flies away from the vegetables while the roads ‘go green’ besides the water sprayed by the sellers on the greens, leafy greens actually to keep them fresh under the blazing hot sun.

One cannot miss the roasted groundnuts on a wheeling cart, corn cooked in portable cookers and raw corn toasted on pieces of coal on simmered fire, tea stalls with whiffs of cigarette to add to the mass market feel, and colorful balloons and toys that attract kids and their cries to this Sunday market scenario.

Be it churches, temples, mosques, or any other place of worship, the religious commitment to reserve quiet on an otherwise plan it all and do it all on Sundays is quite an achievement. Here too the crowd to connect to their Gods and give Him/Her weekly offs is a unique public phenomena. 

The sun seems to set sooner on Sundays as another week gets ready to rise. With a heavy heart to let the curtains go down to wrap up this weekly marketainment, the next 6 days feel longer than the queue in the supermarkets.

Whatsapp Forwards

Whatsapp forwards are like the uninvited guests who we can do without. They give opinions, free advice, and even preach on what are the do’s and don’ts as if they have voices of their own. These mindless voices spoken through whatsapp is an undeleted space that many of us have dedicated in our minds for such forwards.

Forwards may not take our minds ahead as in changing our thoughts and changing our lives kind of way, but would rather preach this through so many group members who are mobile addicts disguised as ‘proactive’ content providers. As a result, you flip through the pages of your mind as if they are random forwards going back and forth between groups, sending forwards or short messages back as acts of mobile diplomacy, and like folded pages in a book to serve as reminders to get back to doing what one left behind get back to try to stay on the same page with home or office work, or work from home as per convenience.

If our mobile trash folders with deleted items were to be retrieved to be assumingly valued in currency, (which even the waste or scrap, or old newspapers of our households won’t be worth as much put together), then we would have gotten a lump sum legacy to leave behind for our future - left, right, and forward, er…centre.

Since our demand for entertainment, infotainment, and all other bytes of focus distractions are fed through such apps, besides tons of channels on TV, Radio, web series, and other virtually streamed content, these forwards supply us with interactive things which we normally can’t come up with to say, to make people smile, or ponder about.

But somewhere between one forward after another in our ‘mobile’ lives, the effort to pick up the phone to say hi to one’s friends, to loosen up the comfort of lethargy that a forward wraps oneself into, and to keep the flow of verbal conversation going is keeping the human voice alive in us. After all, interaction is a two way street, and forwards can just fill in mechanical voids in the groups to say one is active and can just be our echoes, not our true voices.  

Spirituality through Siddhas

Siddhas embody spirituality as a mother embodies her embryo. The Siddhas nurture the essence of truth through their relentless probe into the cosmic play similar to a curious child who has gotten hold of a toy and deconstructs it part by part.

The Siddhas quintessential nature to hide what they see, and to seek those who want to understand the truth in their reality and their life is the breaking open of the shell of the individual.

The Siddhas do not travel through ‘right’ values and ‘wrong’ methodologies, or to a mirage of knowledge dominant and ego centric minds, but to the pure innocence and simplicity in the faith guided and truth thirsty minds.

Hence, what the individual wants even if prayed through ardent rituals does not hold ground, but the ability to love and to surrender no matter what the urgency of the wants will be answered with the right people, right things, and right kind of help happening at the right time to meet our needs.

Siddhas like Yogi Ram SuratKumar are the butterflies that help us emerge from our cocoons. His contagious laughter, penetrating vision into one’s mind, an endearing humility, and a spirit full of innocence and joy are jewels that adorn him, in addition to the green turban crowning his head.

When he raises his hands to shower us with “My father will bless you,” he seems to channel the cosmic universe to shower her grace on the blessed.

He is like an infant crawling his way into the hearts of his followers and is like one’s child that you wish to hold close to your bosom.

Sometimes the guardian, sometimes the child leading the path, Yogi Ram Suratkumar’s heart is like the wings of a colorful butterfly which takes you into its fold and also liberates you from your bondages.

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.