The heart thrives on love

FITNESS FOR LIFE

Eternal inactiveness makes possible beautiful activity, say Bharat & Shalan Savur

If you’re a Type A personality, stop competing, start complementing. It’s good for harmony, great for health and a resounding thumbs up for love. How do you complement? Play with your kids not to beat them in a game, but to lovingly participate in their innocent fun.

If your spouse gets recognition, don’t go all sulkily aggro and restless, rather double the joy by lovingly reveling in her success. Complementing a relationship is enhancing, enriching, expanding it.

Oneupmanship and jealousy contract a relationship to ‘me’. It’s no longer a relationship, but two people existing non-harmoniously. There is no love in competition. Instead of two lovers, two friends, there are two adversaries, two egos. And as the Masters tirelessly remind us, “The ego is the iron curtain between two humans.”

So, please c-a-l-m down. Think rationally. Act from the depths of your intelligence instead of the shallows of impatience. Spread amity not anger, serenity not anxiety. For, the Type A personality is always impatient that things get done his way, always quick to anger when things don’t get done his way, always anxious, hostile and suspicious of others’ intentions.

Let’s understand: when your anger, impatience or anxiety is so easily aroused, so quick to spew out its negativity, hormones seesaw wildly, creating imbalance and, at some point, the heart is hit. The heart thrives on your love stories, but when you’re constantly hostile, the beleaguered heart feels attacked. So, open the mind, the heart, open yourself to things getting done in some other way or sometimes not getting done at all.

Re-educate the mind: Rid yourself of this self-important notion that being a dynamic over-achiever is the ultimate. It isn’t. It’s only half your story. Listen to the Masters and you’ll learn that there’s a First Self that’s pure, peaceful, silent, inactive, self-existent, self-enjoying. It supports the second self which is active, dynamic, expressive. Eternal inactiveness makes possible beautiful activity. Eternal silence makes possible wonderful words, thoughts, music. Daily get into the inner stillness, relax in the inner silence, touch base with the First Self where there’s no inkling of competition, only divine peace, only shining bliss… Once you know your whole story, the second self works from a great sense of stability and vastness. In this experiencing, in this knowing, the Type A personality loses its sharp edges, its hostility, its competitiveness. At a deep, subtle level, you are aware that the First Self deserves to give full expression to its beauty, its love, its fullness. And that’s what the second self sets out to do. To live your whole story, take some simple steps:   

- Understand that peace is your anchor, your hub and arrange your schedule around it.

- Do fewer things so that you live as much from the breathing spaces of non-doing as from the packed denseness of doing.

- Eat, think, speak slowly. This ensures slow, health-enhancing breathing.

- Willingly stand in queues and enjoy the leisurely pace patience provides.

- Listen to others wholly without forming any opinion, without rushing into speech.

- Each week, read a quotation and ponder over it.

- Spend time with a tree, feel its silence touch your inner silence. Observe how silently a blade of grass grows. Ah yes, the best growth is in silence.

- Please ease your tensed muscles by taking a brisk walk. Its rhythm also settles and balances hormones and brain chemicals.
 
As the Zen Master says, “The path is paved by walking on it.”