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August 10, 2005
Man proposes, re-proposes, re-re-proposes. God yawns.
The check-ins touched upon various points… I shared an insight I had during the 10 day vipassana course I took recently. I found out (experientially) that mindfulness (the art of being in the moment) is very difficult to achieve by reminding oneself to be mindful or even requesting others to remind us every time we display lack of awareness. Such reminders create frustration and anger more than they help refocus the mind. Instead, I found that practicing meditation (that requires one to equanimously observe bodily sensations and thoughts without reacting to them) could create a habit of mindfulness so that...Posted by Ragu at 11:19 AM | Comments (119) | TrackBack
August 16, 2005
De-Conditioning
The check-ins: Vijay said that historically, men have displayed strong left brain characteristics and women, right brain (left being intellectual and right being emotional). When it comes to behavioral changes, often it is men who are asked (usually by women) to choose between being right and being happy. Since men and women don’t seem to have difficulty in understanding that being wrong and being sad go together, perhaps it is time to see that being right and being happy go together too? But often, for the sake of being right, men argue and create unhappiness. And for the sake of...Posted by Ragu at 01:33 PM | Comments (165) | TrackBack
August 24, 2005
TACO for thought
Note: I am not attributing some statements to any name because I misplaced the notepad in which I took notes. Guess I took it home and kept it somewhere. So I am writing from memory. Pardon me if I missed or wrongly associated names to anyone’s inputs. While a single theme did not emerge, there were quite a few powerful streams of thoughts this week: The words we speak, though we intend to mean it in a certain way, have different effects on different people. On the other hand, we tend to interpret what someone else says based on our...Posted by Ragu at 12:30 PM | Comments (106) | TrackBack
August 31, 2005
The 'more equals' reflect
The session started with Soujanya saying that she gets absent minded sometimes. Sreekanth said that in order to not forget something, he made it a habit to do the least obvious thing first. For example, he said he puts the sugar first in the cup before he adds water and coffee and he packs the laptop battery charger first before he packs the laptop. Vijay said he does similar things. I remember that once Viral was asked to deliver a suitcase to Berkeley that another friend forgot in his house. After mindfully driving to Berkeley, Viral discovers that he forgot...Posted by Ragu at 05:53 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack