I am bestowed with a wonderful privilege of interacting with several people on a daily basis in seminars and workshops that I conduct. During the workshops many participants come to discuss ways in which to optimize the way they are living.
During one of the workshops I was conducting in Chennai, a middle aged person came and asked me to guide him as to how he can start to live better. He explained that he was married for about twenty years, had a teen age son, and was holding a senior management position in a large company. He said, although he was making good money, had successfully managed to build a house, where he was living with his wife, son and his parents, and had also managed to acquire a three bed room apartment, which was rented, he always feels that he is under pressure, and that every body, at work and home add to his stress levels. Lately, he was finding it increasingly difficult to sleep well, he started to feel depressed and is resorting to drinking and smoking more, and had become more irritable, he was beginning to feel a strange paranoia, and felt that everybody out there is out to get him. He admitted that he had stopped talking to his family members and was becoming more reclusive at work as well.
I took his email address and promised to send him an advice after giving it the due thought and consideration. I emailed him my advice about two weeks back. Yesterday I got a long email thanking me for having given him the direction and how he feels a sea change in the way he is feeling and dealing with himself and others, and in the past few days, he has drastically cut down on smoking and drinking and has started to sleep very well. Yesterday, he requested his wife to go out for an outing, which overwhelmed her as they were doing it after almost a year. He said, that he has started implementing the advice I had emailed him, and it was doing wonders.
The advice I had emailed him after due consideration was:
- Understand others, don`t judge them. When we judge others, we become passive, as we feel that our job is to only judge others. We need to understand that we are responsible individuals, not High Court judges, we need to understand others, and take appropriate action to fine tune the thinking and behaviour of others, be it as a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, or a professional, we need to understand what is right, and then ensure that we do it, and have others do it as well.
- I told him that if we give comfort to others, we need to learn how to take joy in the process, and if we are going to trouble others, it will cause stress. So if we want to have less stress, stop troubling others. The idea is to gain self confidence, to empower ourselves, and not to dis-empower ourselves with thoughts that others are creating stress in my life. Others can`t create stress, they may at times hurt us leading to pain, but they can`t create stress, we create stress in our lives by troubling others, or committing mistakes, so to reduce stress in our lives, we need to learn how to stop troubling others do more of the right and less of the wrong. Yes if others on occasions trouble us and hurt us which results in pain, we need to and can learn ways to prevent others from hurting us. Pain should lead to gain, by learning, and not adding to our suffering. `Pain is inevitable on occasions, but suffering is optional.`
I always suggest to people, that Practice makes you and me better, never perfect, for there is always room for improvement. Let us practice to understand more and judge less, and to realize stress is self created, therefore we are the ones who can reduce it as well. I wish all the readers, happy living.