Shape your life with hope

In their own quaint fashion, they blamed kalyug — popularly touted as the era of strife, conflicts and all things evil!

Blame games are no fun, though. It only increases ill-will, unhappiness, IQ —Illness Quotient. Like the special, challenged children at the Florence Nightingale School in California do. They don’t cry over spilt milk, they clean up the mess.

They try out different things and they do their best. Then they run up to their principal Clyde Thompson singing their joy, “Look! I did it all by myself!” They heal the environment with their ringing music.

They don’t blame kalyug, they’re too busy creating kaalyug if you will, where the two a’s — atma and artist — converge. They engage the body-mind-soul in using all their skills, talents, intelligence, interest to make their lives into works of art.

Are you?
Ponder deeply. Are you playing politics at your workplace? Drop it. Are you being cussed with somebody to “teach him a lesson”? Drop it. Are you creating potential blame-engendering conditions overtly or covertly? Drop it.

Drop it even if somebody else is making your life stressful. Simply stop looking at what the other person should do for you and start looking at what you can do for yourself. Don’t get mad, get fit. Decide to live in a stress-free space full of goodwill and well-being.

Practise decency . Decency maintains a sensitive, sensible humane balance, an environment that fosters a sense of serene safety, an “I’m-okay-you’re-okay” acceptance.  Practise hope. Hope ensures that no situation slides into a hopeless state.

Hope resurrects lost dreams and powers your vision. As a pastor once said, “Shape your dreams with your hopes, never with  hurt.”

Meditate on hope’s vision: Close your eyes gently, stop all negative thoughts and picture the ideal situation as you’d have it. Visualise it happening vividly in front of you. Let your ideal situation glow and sparkle as you breathe life into it with your imagination. After several moments, open your eyes to a beautiful new world suffused with healing.

For years, a brave woman I know practised this successfully. Her husband had Parkinson’s disease. He was deteriorating in front of her eyes. It was painful, frightening. So, daily, when she sat with him, with her eyes shut, she visualised he was strong, healthy, pacing briskly up and down the room. She did this every day without fail. And shaped their lives with hope, instead of fear and hopelessness. She remained cheerful and fresh. So did he. When he finally left his body, it was peaceful.

Hope keeps the doors open for all the creative, cohesive and curative life-forces to enter and weave their magic. Hope resides in every heart. Invite it into your mind as well. Meditate on it, with it. As the master said, “Meditators are not in paradise. Paradise is in the meditators.”

(The writers are authors of the book Fitness for Life)