Take a minute away from the hustle of life and sit down. Try to relax your nerves and feel calm. Now say to yourself, you are interesting and there is more to you than meets the eye.

GOING DOWN THE MEMORY LANES

Think about that time you went to school for the first time. The times when you won’t go walking with your tiny little legs carrying heavy bag. Sitting in the class with full of chattering, crying and shouting kids you are in your own little world. Until you grow up you don’t realize it’s always going to be so. You will be placed with a group of people with a similar agenda and you must work your way through to fulfill the agenda.

Similarly think about all those little things about you, your childhood, friends, the places you have been to, the times you got hurt or felt happy, things you liked and the food you ate. Find out which are very significant memories that are etched in your mind. When you saw a lion for the first time, may be in a zoo or a safari or in the wild. First time you been to a concert. Similarly try to talk to some of your friends and family members about old times and make it a habit to do so every few weeks. Look at the albums you have in your closet with all those photographs taken from Kodak or Cannon cameras containing the negatives.

Indulge in the activity with your closed ones and cherish the moments. Recreate those memories and relive those moments.

A TO Z MOTIVATION

Accept the reality
Base your thoughts
Carve your path
Dare to dream
Enjoy little moments
Face your fears
Get in shape
Have some friends
Improve your skills
Join a cause
Kill bad habits
Love thy neighbour
Make a choice
Never give up
Oppose the evil
Prove your worth
Quench your thirst
Rise above self
Stay strong
Teach one
Use time wisely
Visit your relatives
Win a heart
Xperience peace within
Your life your choice
Zeal is your guide

How to Shift your Mood when you are having a Bad Mood

Breaking the chain of anger and bad mood.

Beautiful start of the day. Early morning he wakes up and gets ready. He kisses his wife morning, hugs his daughter and eats his breakfast. He takes a ride to office via cab. He wishes good day to the cab driver. He reaches office. He makes his way into the canteen, grabs his coffee and joins morning meeting. Everyone takes note and go back to their desk to complete the assigned work. He joins his colleagues for lunch.

The chain reaction is triggered. Post lunch in a meeting with delegates he is put on spot by his manager and gets a trashing from higher management for incompetency. Since he believed he was not at fault, rage built in him. He went to grab a coffee at canteen. He was mad at the server for the coffee seemed cold. He went to complete his work and found some pending work with his colleague, so he ran into an argument regarding that. Further during evening meeting with his subordinates he was picking everyone for their mistakes and scolding unnecessarily for no apparent reason. Wrapping for the day, he catches a cab towards home.

How it spreads during the day. The cab driver doesn’t accept card and doesn’t find any change with him. He fights with the cab driver and abuses him. He enters home and finds his daughter playing on ground. He scolds her for playing in dirt and shouts at his wife. She tries to cool him down but instead they find that he has forgotten to bring eggs for dinner. They manage something for dinner. He gets into an argument with the neighbors for loud noise from TV. He scolds his parents over phone for not taking care of them. He doesn’t meet his friends for late evening walk.

Day ends in a bad mood. He is in bed. His day has gone from beautiful start to a tiresome dreadful night.

Looking back at how it all started. By continuing with the experience of meeting over the day, he ran into multiple encounters which kept worsening as his outlook, energy and mood detoriated over the day. He kept on flowing that anger onto other persons, who in turn based on their own emotional level get angry on others. Early morning managers wife made a burnt sandwich, which got worse for him by a flat tire in his car, unable to find a ride for an hour and so on.

Negative emotions are our enemies. Everyday we all spread different emotions around us based on our encounters. Most often that not, when triggered by some negative emotions, we drag it for the entire day or sometimes for whole week depending upon it’s gravity. In process we hurt some people along the way, some whom we love and care for. We get hurt or upset on our own. Things might not be so worse often but even a spur of moment and anger bursts out like anything. By words or our actions we cannot undo, we create a scene. This amplifies certain times.

Shifting the flow of thoughts and emotions. We cannot choose what happens to us every moment. We are humans. We react to things. But we can improve. We can choose to observe what is happening around us. We can train ourselves to become more observant and calm. When we notice how our emotions are shifting over the day, we can tell ourselves what went wrong. If we can develop the habit of consolidating actions over the day and identify where things could have been damped down. We can train to respond in a more calm fashion.

Calming your breath is a very effective way of calming your mind. #mindfulness

— Everyday Mindfulness (@MindfulEveryday)

Practicing to respond and being mindful. By frequently choosing to respond instead of reacting to situations and events during the day, we can make our normal response model to be a more generic, joyful and cautious one. By practising mindfulness in small things we can become calm, cheerful, delightful person over the day, over the week and when continued for years, it becomes over inherent nature to be mindful, calm and less angry.

Lessons learned. By breaking the chain of thoughts, encounters and events over the day, we help ourselves from experiencing prolonged negative emotions as well as assist in curbing the spread to people around us especially our loved ones.

DON’T ESCAPE, EMBRACE INSTEAD

Are you at ease with yourself?
Are you travel at a supersonic speed in your mind?
Are you at peace with your past experiences and encounters?

The migrant birds. A lot of us nowadays are not living in the communities they are born and brought up. They go out for education, jobs, marriage or simply for better opportunities and life. In search for something better, smoother and comfortable the land in the city of unknown and from that moment on everything little thing changes.

Battling the inner voices. There are a few souls within the confined boundaries of their life. It might seem they are the lucky ones, but that’s not the case. They are merely lucky for some time, while all the other times they are crushed between the thoughts of flying high, trying to fit it or making a mark. They travel between their thoughts of being in a dreamland vs being at home. They have friends who influence them with fashion, lifestyle, choices, habits and so on which never occurred to them. The TV influences them with the happening around the world. The smart phones have brought the world into their hands and the world they live and love, seems to be slipping out of their hands like sand. They cannot make out the difference between the real world and the comparative world inside their head. Hence they are constantly battling with their thoughts and most of the time they are irritated, frustrated or tired.

Trying to escape but not so good enough. So where ever you are and whatever you have been doing, are their times when you feel lonely, solitude, guilt, pain, anguish, nostalgia or are you stuck in the past at an event you are not able to pin down or have an explanation for. Does that sound like what you feel or what you see your friends feel. What do they do about it.
They watch lot of movies (You may try) to spend their time?
Do they go on trekking or expeditions?
Do they keep themselves occupied with people all the time?
Are they clingy and argue all the time?

This is what I call as Escape Point.

When someone is not able to make peace with their past or their feelings, whether it be bitter, confused or irritating, they try to find some means to ease or divert their thoughts and they try to find some escape point. It can be different for everyone but the common point is they cannot let of something hence they cling on it which troubles them and so they need to escape from it.

It’s not the other way. And let me clear that is are not applicable the other way. I am not trying to say that everyone who goes on trekking is finding a escape point. There are a lot of them who have a passion for expeditions but few of them are actually trying to find or have actually found their escape point in expeditions.

So are you escaping from something?
Do you close your eyes and you travel at the speed of million miles per hour to run away from something?

Embrace life as it is. Don’t try to escape from the past or a certain experience or event. Try to embrace it. Make it part of your life and eat the fruit. Once you are done with it, you will feel better. It might be real tough during the times you are making sense, but don’t fall pray to the escape point forever. You need to stand on your feet and love for who you are. You are much more within that can be seen from the outside. You can shine within that will enlighten what’s on the outside. You need to be firm in your thoughts and let the universe take the course of what’s not so good.

BEST MOVIE TO WATCH DURING  – TITO AND THE BIRDS

Tito and the Birds (2018) is a movie about humans, birds, fear and outbreaks. The relevance of this movie to the pandemic and how fear spreads through our society is captured beautifully.

Consistently perserve what you believe. Tito is a little kid who is inspired by his father to invent, experiment and follow his passion. He feels that he is the reason his father has left them and he wants to bring his father back. He works on the only way he thinks it’s possible by building the machine. Because of his constant believe in such thoughts, it helps him to fight the trouble that lands in their city.

Always be loving, caring and connected. He is always caring for his father, mother and friends. He is concerned about the birds too. He goes far enough into the troubles for protecting and curing his friend. He fights all his while for bringing back his father. His friend, she is always a protector and motivator. The combination of friendship, youth and clean heart is always a winner.

Follow your culture, stories and lessons from life. Tito is inspired by stories and observations. He understands things from different perspective. Sometimes even his Mom does not understand him and scolds him. The cure to fix the ongoing epidemic is hidden in the past and he is able to connect it which his father couldn’t. Being so different is not so bad afterall.

Stay alert, stay safe and stay active. They are little yet very smart. They are active and naive so there isn’t something they think they shouldn’t do. Sometimes they land into bigger troubles because of it, but their self-belief, alertness, bonding with others and selflessness makes them do things that are not seen in everyday life. It makes them some kind of a superhero. Always preserve such feelings in young kids. Motivate and encourage them to face life as it comes and equip them with the resources and mindset to deal with them.

Dreamers are achievers. Dreaming is considered to be not so good in popular culture but some of the great works in literature, science and arts have come from people who were dreamers. Often there is a dream which comes in sleep or some that keeps them awake. People fall their dreams relentlessly to fulfill them. Tito has a dream and it is the key. Even Po has a dream and turns out to be the key in Kung Fu Panda series.

Fear is part of our life but we must always overcome it and let it pass through. There are so many lessons that one can see and learn from this movie. It has so many life lessons about family, dreams, friendship, troubles and culture. There are amazing conversations, motivating lines and captivating dialogues.

Resilience

Question: What can you teach someone from a young age that can help them for the rest of their life ?

Answer: Resilience !

Resilience the ability to keep going on even when it seems to have a very sleek chance. It may seem similar to stubbornness and ignorance to go on, but has got more layers to it.

Resilience can be developed and can be an ongoing process to improve. By going through various challenging situations and getting exposed to certain circumstances, one can learnt to be resilient.

It may seem difficult at the start, but by slowing making a move it becomes clear that by continuous effort more can be achieved or delivered.

When everything is going well, it can become easier to do something more and things seem possible within the reach. But when things aren’t going well, it becomes difficult to continue have a flow and things seem to far to be fetched. During those times, it is the amount of Resilience one shows along with concentrated efforts and focus that make the ends meet.

Hence if you can teach someone one of the fundamental qualities that can help them for the rest of their life – teach them RESILIENCE !

Cheers and warm wishes for winter.