From Discontent To Gratitude

The sahasrāra chakra has been called the 'thousand petalled lotus' which has its root in the 'mud of discontentment' complaint, 'what next' attitude, expectations, etc. It can only grow by an expression of gratitude and contentment. The complaints and discontentment can only be dropped as we develop trust in Existence and infuse our being with deep thankfulness for all that Existence showers on us. In actual fact, Existence showers on us all the time, but we block that flow by our attitude of complaint. As we start to feel love and gratitude for the Divine, the sahasrāra starts to open and we are willing to accept more of the love and gifts that Existence has to offer. Let gratitude be your prayer, rather than asking God for material things. See every moment as beautiful. When you feel a connection with Existence, gratitude will become your very essence, your 'fragrance'. When we stop resisting and start to surrender, the Sahasrāra will flower. Gratitude will transform our experience and we will know oneness and ecstasy.

You might think, 'Giving your gratitude can be a social habit. But how can it be a meditation?' You will understand what this means when you actually start giving your gratitude. When you start giving your gratitude, you will understand the value of your life.

Instead of feeling gratitude towards everything around us, we are asking and questioning all the time. We need to get back the connection with Existence. Gratitude can help bring back this lost connection. It can help you find your roots once again. It can help you commune with nature, with Existence.

Whether you want to base your life on asking or on gratitude is entirely up to you. Gratitude is not some kind of morality that can be imposed on you from outside. It is an attitude that has to flower from within, out of a deep understanding of Existence and its ways.

When real gratitude happens, it can transform your whole perception of life and bring lasting peace and joy for you. Simply enjoy everything without questioning. Let enjoyment become your very nature, then gratitude will become your very being. Real contentment is when you feel permanent gratitude towards the benevolence of Existence. Real contentment asks for

nothing more. It simply enjoys everything without a reason; it needs no reason. When you reach this state, you will not know what discontentment is all about.

Just by being in gratitude all the time, every so-called mundane thing in life can become sacred and wonderful! Life becomes mundane only because of your attitude of taking things for granted. Life is not mundane as you think. Every small thing is beautiful. Your mind is what is mundane; your mind does not allow you to penetrate and see the beautiful way in which Existence is flowing.

When you are able to look at things with a wonder-filled attitude, with awe, it fills you with such gratitude and fulfillment because you are not questioning at that point in time. You are not allowing your mind to play at all. You are simply resonating with your heart. It is then that you become a child and when you become a child, nothing is mundane; everything is wondrous!

When you operate from your heart, you are always in gratitude. Do we ever say 'mind-felt gratitude'? No! We always say 'heart-felt gratitude', do we not? We need to move from gratitude of the mind to gratitude of the being.

Every time you feel deep gratitude, you are actually in meditation. Whether you accept it or not, Existence is taking care of you every single moment. If you place trust in it and do your duty, you will simply be showered with the gift of life.

It is only when you start feeling connection with Existence that real gratitude will arise in you. There is no other way. When gratitude arises in this form, it is not directed to anything in particular, it is just there as your fragrance, that's all.

Learn to look at everything with gratitude and awe. Take your own body for example. Just try this small exercise now. Sit down and close your eyes. Visualize that your little finger on the right hand has been cut in a minor accident. Imagine Y

Now just think, how many people are there in this world with so many deformities. There are so many people who don't even have all five fingers! From your head to your toe, even if there were a single handicap, you would miss enjoying some aspect of life. Just try to spend a few minutes every day in your room by yourself, touching every part of your body with love, and thanking

The fact that you are alive is enough to show that Existence wants you here and cares for you. It is only when you don't understand this, you feel dull and depressed and keep asking for more as if you are the most deprived person in the world. Existence showers. If you choose to enjoy it, you will. It is purely your choice.

You choose wrongly and then complain or blame someone else. Remember, no one is responsible for anything that happens to you. Everything is a choice that you make consciously or unconsciously. Because of lack of awareness, you simply make unconscious and monotonous decisions and land up complaining about life.

When you go against the current, you need to put in effort and exercise choices. When you go with the current, you don't need to make any effort. You will not feel tired, you will not feel frustrated. You will only feel a flowing lightness and joy! Everything will then appear beautiful to you.

When you drop the logic of your mind, you will flow like a river choicelessly, effortlessly, joyfully with the flow of the current. You will play your role and enjoy every moment of it. You will understand that you are a part of a wonderful drama, where the more sensitive you are to the director, the more effectively you can play and enjoy your part!

The only way to have a live connection with reality, with Existence, is by dropping your conditioning, your ego and breaking the wall you have built around yourself. Then you will be able to see that the connection was always there! You don't have to do anything special; you simply have to drop what is not, that's all!

When you are loving, flowing, and filled with gratitude, you will always feel the tremendous energy of Existence flowing through you and you will always have a sense of fulfillment, not because of any reason but because it has become your very being! This fulfillment is the ultimate fulfillment that every man is seeking, although he is not aware of it. He searches for it again and again in all material things and keeps missing it.

Daily Awareness Practice

Y Try out this small exercise. For the next two hours, when you are by yourself, keep aside your worries and needs, and focus on all that Existence has already given you.

You will immediately think, 'If I don't worry about my needs, how can I fulfill them? Who will take care of my family? What will happen to my business?' Agreed, you have to think about all these things. But just for the next two hours, take this load off your head.

So just for a few minutes, close your eyes and focus on what has already been showered on you, what you already have. Mentally go over everything you have: your body, your wealth, the people who support and help you, your house, your luxuries, your vacations, everything. Enjoy all of them in a relaxed and grateful way. Take as much time as possible. Don't rush and go over it in a hurry. Just live all of it in your mind. Stay with that feeling. Stay with that wonderful feeling of fulfillment for awhile.

Feel yourself becoming filled with gratitude and overflowing with it. When you open your eyes, you will see that what you have is more than enough to run your life! And you will wonder what more you want!

................................................ Understanding Intelligence

The basic problem with all of us is, we are all ready to believe that God has the shakti or power to give us what we want, but we fail to understand that He also has the buddhi or intelligence to decide whether or not it is good for us! Because we believe that God has only power, we keep on asking and asking.

This is the attitude that gets us into complications. You have to understand that God not only has the power, but also the intelligence to decide what is good for you. When you understand this, you will stop asking.

If you believe that Existence takes care of all your needs, you will be free from any kind of worry. But remember, your needs are different from your wants. Your needs are few but your wants are many. Your needs are automatically fulfilled by Existence. When your wants increase, you lose faith in Existence because you don't see them being fulfilled.

Understand that God gives you what you need, not what you want. If He starts giving all that

you want, you will move from misery to misery! When He gives you what you need, you will move from intelligence to more intelligence and somewhere, the asking will drop and gratitude will happen.

Understand that Existence simply orchestrates the happenings in the universe. All the events are so synchronously conducted that the more aware you are, the more you can perceive the amazing order in what now seems to be chaotic to you. We just need to be aware of this and play our part accordingly, life will then flow like music.

When you become sensitive to this phenomenon, from small events to bigger ones, you will start realizing how things are being re-arranged and made to happen with you being a simple instrument in the whole process.

The power of coincidence will start revealing itself to you in its entire splendor. You will become aware that you are part of a macrocosmic orchestra wherein you just need to flow with the music and enjoy it! It is only when you fight the flow, when you try to go against it, that the problem starts.

When your intelligence grows, you will handle your day-to-day activities effortlessly and you will be in peace. For example, if you are a manager, you have many duties - you hire people, supervise their performance, fix their salaries etc. Are you able to do all these things without getting stressed? With intelligence, you will be able to handle them without getting stressed. You will be in peace. What you need is intelligence, not power. Remember that.

Even in the deepest of troubles and struggle, if you function with unwavering faith and gratitude and use your inner intelligence in moving through them, you will see that you will emerge out of it successfully with only greater gratitude and intelligence!

(Total duration : 40 minutes)

Instructions:

YS tep 1: Chaotic Breathing (Duration: 7 minutes)

For the first seven minutes, sit on your heels with your knees as close together as possible in vajrasana. Keep your eyes closed and hands on your hips and breathe chaotically.

Inhale and exhale deeply and chaotically. Just focus on the breathing. Your entire being should become the breathing. Normally in our body the energy flows from the sahasrara chakra (crown center) to the muladhara chakra (root center). Vajrasana posture helps the upward movement of energy.

YStep 2: Intense Humming (Duration: 7 minutes)

Sit in vajrasana, form chin mudra with your fingers, by circling the index finger to touch the tip of the thumb and extending the other three fingers outward. Then place your hands on your knees. The chin-mudra creates an energy circuit in the body.

Now hum as intensely as possible, as loudly as possible and as lengthily as possible. Put your complete awareness on the humming. Become the humming. Humming reduces your inner chatter. Continuously there is talking going on within our minds. We may not be talking to anybody but internally there is always some activity. Humming is an excellent technique to reduce this inner chatter.

Y Step 3: Chakra Awareness (Duration: 7 minutes)

In this step you can continue to sit in vajrasana or sit cross-legged if you wish. Now put your awareness on each chakra (energy center) starting from themuladhara chakra (root center) to the sahasrara chakra (crown center).

Y Step 4: Be Unclutched (Duration: 7 minutes)

The mind is nothing but a collection of thoughts; one thought after the other coming in succession. By our very nature our thoughts are unconnected. They are like bubbles in a fish tank. The bubbles in the fish tank are not connected; they are distinctly separate. They just appear to be connected. In a similar manner, our thoughts are not connected although they appear to be. Just be 'un-clutched' for the next seven minutes.

(To understand the nature of your mind, you can try a small exercise. Write down all your thoughts as and when they come. Sit for ten minutes silently and simply start recording your thoughts. Don't try to control or stop the thinking. Just be silent and witness the thoughts coming. The moment a thought comes, quickly write it down on paper. Do this for ten minutes. At the end of ten minutes read out whatever is written. You will see that it's a madman's diary. There is utter chaos with no connection between one thought and the next thought.

All thoughts are un-clutched and unconnected. Only when you write down your thoughts do you come to know that the thoughts have no real connection. You may be thinking about having a cup of coffee and the next moment you may think about some office work which is pending. There is no real connection between having a cup of coffee and the office work. Both are

independent events. Even if there are two consecutive thoughts about the same event, the thoughts are unconnected as there is no continuity. There is always a gap between these thoughts. There is a time of silence between the thoughts. The thoughts by their very nature are un-clutched.)

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Just feel connected to Existence and feel the vibrations of the powerful mantras (sacred chants) within your being. The mantras are a way to express gratitude to Existence or the Master for endowing upon us great wisdom, which liberates us from ignorance and helps us attain the state of eternal bliss, nithyananda.

You can perform the Guru puja (offering gratitude to the Master) in this step by yourself, reciting the mantras and doing the rituals.

Sit straight, hold some flowers in your hands and close your eyes. Concentrate on your sahasrara chakra. Forget all other parts of your body. Concentrate only on your crown center and relax there. Wear a smile and relax.

With your whole being, give your gratitude to your mother for giving you this body. Remember and give your gratitude to her with all your being.

Offer your gratitude to your father for giving you this life and providing for all your needs.

Offer your gratitude to all the doctors and nurses who received you when you came to planet Earth.

Offer your gratitude to all the people who built the hospital or home where you were born.

Offer your gratitude to all the people who took care of you when you were an infant.

Offer your gratitude to all those who worked for your food, clothes and living when you were young.

Offer your gratitude to all the teachers who gave you primary education.

Offer your gratitude to all your childhood friends who made your life happy and blissful, who shared their innocence and joy with you.

Offer your gratitude to your brothers and sisters and other relatives for nurturing you and caring for you.

Seek their forgiveness for any hurt that you may have caused them intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously.

Offer your gratitude to all the people who gave you professional education, who helped you in your profession, who gave you the courage to stand on your own feet.

Offer your gratitude to all the people who helped you financially, whenever you needed it.

Offer your gratitude to all the doctors and nurses who took care of your health, who gave you medical assistance whenever you needed it.

Offer your gratitude to your wife or husband for giving you love and security in your life. Forgive them for anything that they might have done to you that hurt you. Seek their forgiveness for anything that you might have done that hurt them with or without your knowledge.

Offer your gratitude to all the people who encouraged you and gave you inspiration in your spiritual life.

Offer your gratitude to all those who have served you in one way or another all through your life: the milkman, the grocer, the laundry man, the garbage collector, your servants, your driver, all these people who you take for granted.

Seek each one's forgiveness for any hurt that you may have caused intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously.

Offer your gratitude to your enemies and those who have hurt you, for making you strong and forgiving. Seek their forgiveness for any hurt that you may have caused them.

Offer your gratitude to all those who helped you physically, mentally, socially, economically and spiritually.

Remember each one of them and offer gratitude taking your own time.

Offer your gratitude to your body and all its parts one by one.

Offer your gratitude to your mind for its miraculous functioning.

Offer your gratitude to the Divine, to the whole, to God, for making all these things possible in your life.

The sahasrara chakra is located in the crown region. It is blocked by discontentment and taking life for granted, and flowers through overflowing gratitude and contentment.

The diagram alongside depicts gratitude in the form of the lotus. The sahasrara chakra has been called the 'thousand petalled lotus' which is why it has been chosen to represent this chakra. In the 'mud of discontentment' complaint, 'what next' attitude, expectations, etc, the sahasrara has its root. It can only grow by an expression of gratitude and contentment.

The complaints and discontentment can only be dropped as we develop trust in Existence and infuse our being with deep thankfulness for all that Existence showers on us. In actual fact, Existence showers on us all the time, but we block the flow by our attitude of complaint. As we start to feel love and gratitude for the Divine, the sahasrara starts to open and we are willing to accept more of the love and the gifts that Existence has to offer.

Meditation is a key factor in this process. Awareness of our thoughts and attitudes from moment to moment is also essential.

Let gratitude be your prayer rather than asking God for material things. See every moment as beautiful. When you feel a connection with Existence, gratitude will become your very essence, your 'fragrance'.

When we stop resisting and start to surrender, the sahasrara will flower. Gratitude will transform our experience and we will know oneness and ecstasy.