Seven steps to bliss

Coming into good health is just like coming home. So decide, with every ounce of your determination, that you’ll develop your physical, mental and spiritual strengths. Every day, lighten up and shrug off some of that burden, purify yourself and become more aware.

Willingly tweak your lifestyle, make small changes, introduce simple, easy practices and *ever ever stop a healing, beneficial practice once you’re into it. Now, let’s start:
*Nibble on neem. To strengthen your immune system, to minimise allergic inflammations, chew two neem leaves or have two neem capsules daily. It truly has startling and visible effects. Add neem leaves to your tea. Grind kadi patta (a sweeter member of the bitter neem family) into your chutneys.

*Define yourself as a pure soul. Don’t limit your world to your designation — executive, homemaker, etc. — as that attracts empty egoistic factors like status, hierarchy. Regain your rightful soul stature. There is much ease, relaxation, freedom in being a nobody. Spend a quiet quarter-hour staring with a silent mind at a plant. Silence is soul food. Silence is being fully in the present. It is in silence that you access more subtle, healing energies.

*Meditate on a mantra to focus the restless mind on the frequency of peace and bliss. Surrender thinking, analysing, processing to rhythmic sounds. And the mind rests, for once, not having to think and plan ahead. You come out of this meditation peacefully centred, as if nothing will shake you. In time to come, nothing will. Carry this restfulness into your daily tasks. Smoothen all irritable twitches into serene smiles.

*Renounce inactivity with exercise. As a pond is landlocked, your blood, your pranic energy becomes bodylocked and stagnates into disease if you are sedentary.

No, no, no, please get into a set of exercises that you enjoy so that your body fluids flow like a river and remain ever-fresh, ever-healthy. Workout while watching your favourite TV programme.

*Get stevia smart. Though sugar can be substituted with jaggery and honey by those who don’t have diabetes, take a smart, preventive step. Add crushed stevia leaves to your tea/coffee. Add a quarter teaspoon of stevia to a fruit raita — it tastes like nectar.

*Switch from materialism to minimalism. You’ll experience nirvana when you actually do it. Learn to do without things. Be content with what you have. The fewer things you have to think or worry about, the more life you get to live. Instead of holding your breath, take a long breath.

Instead of stressfulness, you have zestfulness. And small events become experiences of great joys. If dinner is overly delayed, do without it. In any case, the metabolism slows in sleep, thus food sits and festers in the intestines. The materialist wakes up to a bloated, heavy morning; the minimalist to a blithe, light one. Sleep in luminosity. It’s beautiful to sleep deeply, but it’s amazing to sleep in luminosity. At bedtime, silently chant any short mantra 108 times.

*Method: Each finger has three natural divisions. In all, the five fingers have 15 divisions. Chant by keeping count on your left hand divisions. As you complete each round of 15, keep tab on your right hand’s finger division.

Thus, 15 chants done seven times add up to 105 chants. Do three more and you get 108. When you fall asleep on divine chants, your head rests on a luminous pillow. You wake up fresh and need fewer hours of sleep. Just try it.

(The writers are authors of Fitness for Life and teachers of the Fitness for Life programme)