Like a river. Are You Flowing?!

Are you flowing ?

"Every time you learn something, you change. Old You dies and New You is born."

"The more you die, the more you live. Births and deaths are fractal."- Naval Ravikanth

Photo by Eric Smart from Pexels

People change all the time. It is just that they forget to inform you.
Have you heard of saying ' you can never step into the same river twice'?It means that water that flows is never the same even though the river bears the same name.

Everything changes. your body cells are completely renewed after every 7 years . This means you have a new body in every 7 years. Everything changes.

Look how many times you changed your opinions on big ideas in the last 5 years

Are you flowing ?

Are you embarrassed by your few years old social media posts?

Have you ever been accused of changing your stance by your close friends?

If yes and you can back it up with sound reasoning . congrats. you are flowing!

If no and you take pride of sticking to whatever you were convinced,I have a bad news for you. You are stagnated .

Soon a fowl smell will emerge and others will sense first. It is not a nice feeling when you realize it!
Find out a way to get unstuck!!😊

Note to self - Age gracefully

1. Start moving towards impersonal goals. Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life ( from Bertrand Russel)
2. Watch your Ego - Ego is ok but wrap it up with outcomes than yourself. Learn to change decisions and accept directions from others.
3. Enrich your life with literature(reading) , Music and art .
4. Increase your tribe - Re-estabish your connections with old friends .Make new friends and develop a support system which is independent of your family . Because your family is soon going to be busy.
5. Collect experiences and never miss any chance to get new experiences and live intentionally everyday.
6. Listening : Move Speak- to- listen Ratio towards 1:2. see if you can improve further once you attained this.
7. Think about death -Think deeply about death once in a while .

Things learned in last 10 years - Justin Kan

It’s been a wild ten years for me. Here’s a bunch of things I’ve learned in the last decade:

1. Things that seem disastrous at the time can happen for a reason.
2. Some of my most important learnings came from failures that I thought were the end of the world in the moment. 
3. The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.-This has been more important to my success than having the right idea, the right resources, or anything else. Having the right people around you is the difference between success and failure. 
4. No matter where you are at, you are probably giving up too early. Big things take time to succeed at. 
5. No one does everything well. You are not an exception.
6. Focus on your one superpower and be excellent at that, and the universe will take care of the rest. 
7. There is an endless treadmill of goals.-10 yrs ago we had a small startup called Justin.tv. I thought if I could just make a little $ I’d be set. Thus followed a decade of trying to raise more money, achieve skyrocketing valuations, start bigger cos..it never ends 
8. Achievement of goals won’t deliver lasting happiness.-After hitting many of the goals I set for myself, some beyond the wildest dreams I had 10 years ago, the satisfaction never lasted. It was there in the beginning, but never created a permanent state change. 
9. You can be anxious no matter what your situation is.-I thought my anxiety and fear was situational, but it turns out I’d just map the same level of fears on to whatever difficult experiences I was going through at any given time. 
10. There is no antidote to your fears.-I tried to escape from my fear lots of ways (alcohol, travel, tv). None of those methods delivered anything other than temporary distraction. I learned instead that meditation is key to sitting with your fear and accepting it. 
11. I don’t need to attract people to me to connect.-All my life I longed to connect meaningfully to others, but felt I didn’t know how. Instead I tried to be successful to attract other people to me. But that’s not necessary: I‘ve learned to start with vulnerability and curiosity 
12. Lasting happiness comes from connection to other people, gratitude, and the release of self-tortured striving.

Nothing else. 

Resonating with the Author

 How to get more out of a book - Carver Mead's great metaphor 

In physics , there is a theory that states atoms exchange energy by resonating with each other.Before this energy exchange to happen ,the two atoms must be phase-matched, oscillating in almost perfect synchrony with each other.

If we extend this to reading before the material can resonate, before energy can be exchanged between the author and reader, the reader must already have available a mode of vibration at the author's frequency. This doesn't mean that the reader is already thinking the author's thought; it means the reader is capable of thinking it.

The author and reader must share a close-enough worldview, viewpoint, vocabulary, set of mental models, sense of aesthetics, and set of goals. For any particular concept in the material, if not enough of these are sufficiently matched, no resonance will occur and no energy will be exchanged.

Perhaps, as a reader, one way to get more out of more material is to collect and cultivate a diverse set of resonators, to increase the probability of a phase-match.

Perhaps this explains why only certain books click for us

Inspired from a reading tip on http://worrydream.com/

Book summary - Non Violent CommunicationA Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides)

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides)

By Marshall B. Rosenberg and Deepak Chopra

Benefits of NVC

Non Violent communication (NVC) helps us re-frame how we express ourselves . Instead of habitual and automatic reactions, our responses will become conscious and aware of what we perceive , feel and want. We will express ourselves honestly , clearly while paying others respectful and emphatic attention.

Process of NVC

What we are observing, feeling, and needing, and what we are requesting to enrich our lives
Four Components of NVC

1. Observations
2. Feelings
3. Needs and
4. Requests

First we approach the situation and frame our understanding of the four components of NVC from our perspective . The other part of of communication is to get these four component details from others.We connect with them by first sensing what they are observing, feeling, and needing; then we discover what would enrich their lives by receiving the fourth piece—their request.we establish a flow of communication, back and forth, until compassion manifests naturally.

Communications that block Compassion -

• Moralistic judgments that imply wrongness or badness on the part of those who don’t act in harmony with our values.
• Comparisons, which can block compassion both for others and for ourselves.
• Denying Responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves:
  • Vague, impersonal forces—“I cleaned my room because I had to.”
  • Our condition, diagnosis, or personal or psychological history—“I drink because I am an alcoholic.” 
  • The actions of others—“I hit my child because he ran into the street.”
  • The dictates of authority—“I lied to the client because the boss told me to.”
  • Group pressure—“I started smoking because all my friends did.” Institutional policies, rules, and regulations—“I have to suspend you for this infraction because it’s the school policy.” 
  • Gender roles, social roles, or age roles—”I hate going to work, but I do it because I am a husband and a father.”
• Communicating our desires in the form of demands

Observing without evaluating -

• Maintain separation between observation and Evaluation
• Do not engage in static generalizations; instead, evaluations are to be based on observations specific to time and context.

Identifying and Expressing Feelings -

• By developing a vocabulary of feelings that allows us to clearly and specifically name or identify our emotions, we can connect more easily with one another.
• Distinguish thoughts from feelings

Taking Responsibility of our feelings (needs)

• Connect your feeling with your need: “I feel … because I need …”
• By definition -A need doesn’t refer to a specific action
• If we really want to be of assistance to others, the first thing to learn is to translate any message into an expression of a need.
• Our feelings result from how we choose to receive what others say and do, as well as from our particular needs and expectations in that moment.
• When developing emotional responsibility, most of us experience three stages:
  1. “Emotional slavery”—believing ourselves responsible for the feelings of others,
  2. “The obnoxious stage”—in which we refuse to admit to caring what anyone else feels or needs, and
  3. “emotional liberation”—in which we accept full responsibility for our own feelings but not the feelings of others, while being aware that we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others.

Requesting That Which Would Enrich Life

• Make requests in clear, positive, concrete action language reveals what we really want
• Requests may sound like demands when unaccompanied by the speaker’s feelings and needs.
• It is a demand if the speaker -
  • then criticizes or judges
  • then lays down a guilt trap
• It’s a request if the speaker then shows empathy toward the other person’s needs.

Empathy -

• Is respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.
• Emptying our mind and listening with our whole being
• Empathy with others occurs only when we have successfully shed all preconceived ideas and judgments about them.
• The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing. This quality of presence distinguishes empathy from either mental understanding or sympathy.
• common behaviors that prevent us from being sufficiently present
  • Advising: “I think you should … ” “How come you didn’t … ?”
  • One-upping: “That’s nothing; wait’ll you hear what happened to me.”
  • Educating: “This could turn into a very positive experience for you if you just … ”
  • Consoling: “It wasn’t your fault; you did the best you could.”
  • Story-telling: “That reminds me of the time … ”
  • Shutting down: “Cheer up. Don’t feel so bad.”
  • Sympathizing: “Oh, you poor thing … ”
  • Interrogating: “When did this begin?”
  • Explaining: “I would have called but … ”
  • Correcting: “That’s not how it happened.”
• No matter what others say, we only hear what they are (1) observing, (2) feeling, (3) needing, and (4) requesting.
• After we focus our attention and hear , we may wish to reflect back by paraphrasing what we have understood.
• Paraphrase only when it contributes to greater compassion and understanding.
• Behind intimidating messages are merely people appealing to us to meet their needs
• We know a speaker has received adequate empathy when (1) we sense a release of tension, or (2) the flow of words comes to a halt.
• We need empathy to give empathy. When we sense ourselves being defensive or unable to empathize, we need to (1) stop, breathe, give ourselves empathy; (2) scream nonviolently; or (3) take time out.
• It’s harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources and with those are close to us
• Rather than put your “but” in the face of an angry person, empathize.
• It may be difficult to empathize with those who are closest to us.

The Power of Empathy-

Self hatred

 If the way we evaluate ourselves leads us to feel shame, and we consequently change our behavior, we are allowing our growing and learning to be guided by self-hatred.
This can be replaced with compassion is in our moment-to-moment evaluation of ourselves.When we are doing something that is not enriching life, is to evaluate ourselves in a way that inspires change both (1) in the direction of where we would like to go, and (2) out of respect and compassion for ourselves, rather than out of self-hatred, guilt or shame.

Self-judgments-

If we find ourselves reacting reproachfully to something we did (“Look, you just messed up again!”), we can quickly stop and ask ourselves, “What unmet need of mine is being expressed through this moralistic judgment?” When we do connect to the need—and there may be several layers of needs—we will notice a remarkable shift in our bodies. Whether it’s sadness, frustration, disappointment, fear, grief, or some other feeling, we have been endowed by nature with these feelings for a purpose: they mobilize us to pursue and fulfill what we need or value.

NVC Mourning

It is the process of fully connecting with the unmet needs and the feelings that are generated when we have been less than perfect. When our consciousness is focused on what we need, we are naturally stimulated toward creative possibilities for how to get that need met.An important aspect of self-compassion is to be able to empathically hold both parts of ourselves—the self that regrets a past action and the self that took the action in the first place.

NVC self-forgiveness:

Connecting with the need we were trying to meet when we took the action that we now regret. In that compassionate place, I am able to hold both needs: in one hand, to respond in a caring way to others’ needs, and in the other, to be aware of and take better care of my own needs.
When we make mistakes, instead of getting caught up in moralistic self-judgments, we can use the process of NVC mourning and self-forgiveness to show us where we can grow. By assessing our behaviors in terms of our own unmet needs, the impetus for change comes out of the genuine desire to contribute to our own and others’ well-being. We also cultivate self-compassion by consciously choosing in daily life to act only in service to our own needs and values .If we review the joyless acts to which we currently subject ourselves and make the translation from “have to” to “choose to,” we will discover more play and integrity in our lives.

Expressing Anger Fully -

• The first step is to divorce the other person from any responsibility for our anger.
• The cause of anger lies in our thinking—in thoughts of blame and judgment.
• When we judge others, we contribute to violence.
• At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.
• Consciously replace the phrase “I am angry because they … ” with “I am angry because I am needing … ”
• Steps to expressing anger: 1. Stop. Breathe. 2. Identify our judgmental thoughts. 3. Connect with our needs. 4. Express our feelings and unmet needs.Sometimes, in between steps 3 and 4, we may choose to empathize with the other person so that he or she will be better able to hear us when we express ourselves in step 4.
• As we have seen, our anger comes from judgments, labels, and thoughts of blame, of what people “should” do and what they “deserve.”
  • List the judgments that float most frequently in your head by using the cue, “I don’t like people who are … ”
  • Collect all such negative judgments in your head and then ask yourself, “When I make that judgment of a person, what am I needing and not getting?” 
  • In this way, you train yourself to frame your thinking in terms of unmet needs rather than in terms of judgments of other people.
  • Practice translating each judgment into an unmet need. Take your time.
  • To practice NVC, we need to proceed slowly, think carefully before we speak, and often just take a deep breath and not speak at all. Learning the process and applying it both take time.

NVC Conflict Resolution Steps—A Quick Overview

There are five steps in this process.

• First, we express our own needs.
• Second, we search for the real needs of the other person, no matter how they are expressing themselves.
• Third, we verify that we both accurately recognize the other person’s needs, and if not, continue to seek the need behind their words.
• Fourth, we provide as much empathy as is required for us to mutually hear each other’s needs accurately
• And fifth, having clarified both parties’ needs in the situation, we propose strategies for resolving the conflict, framing them in positive action language.

Expressing Appreciations

Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous—large souled.
Receive appreciation without feelings of superiority or false humility.

Expressing appreciation-

We state (1) the action that has contributed to our well-being, (2) the particular need of ours that has been fulfilled, and (3) the feelings of pleasure engendered as a result.


Excellent book. My rating -🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Book Summary :Awareness: Conversations with the Masters

Awareness: Conversations with the Masters-Anthony de Mello SJ and J. Francis Stroud

Like all great books, it was difficult to summarize this book , There is so much of  great stuff in this single book. This is a result of some great effort .  My Personal favorite. I strongly recommend to read.

Wake up

• First understand you don't want to wake up . Once you understand this, next step is to question the entire belief system of yours .
• Don't fight or renounce any , you only make the desire stronger . Instead understand the desire and it will automatically vanish.
• You only trust the judgement of the person. you never trust anyone . You will be disappointed with the person only when your judgement of the person fails.
• Truth is never expressed in words . Truth is sighted suddenly ,as a result of certain attitude.
• Three things are difficult in this world - Returning love for hate , Including the excluded and admitting that you are wrong.

Learning

• In Spirituality - Learning is all about unlearning and listening
• The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
• The first reaction is one of fear. It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.
• Things don't need to be fixed . Drop your illusions.
• As life of awareness settles on your darkness , Whatever evil will disappear and whatever good will be fostered. This will have to be experienced for yourself.

Selfishness

• Drop your false ideas . See through people - Selfishness in our deepest and first interest. Everyone is expected to be selfish either in crude or refined way.
• Three kinds of Selfishness
  • 1.pleasure of pleasing oneself
  • 2.give oneself pleasure by pleasing others
  • 3.One does something good so that one will not get bad feeling.

Self observation -

    "I" observing "me". "I" is not the body which is ever changing . The Labels attached to "I" is me also changes with time . But "I" the observer is never changes. No matter what labels you can think of , you can only attach them to "me". "I" is none of these. So when you step out of yourself and observe "me", you no longer "I" with "me" . Suffering exists in "me". So when you identify "I" with "me", the suffering begins.

       Think of any suffering , first you can pick a desire under that suffering. Else you would't be suffering . What is that desire? Second, it isn’t simply a desire; there’s an identification there. You have somehow said to yourself,“The well-being of ‘I,’ almost the existence of ‘I,’ is tied up with this desire.” All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.
     What kills the sensitivity is what many people would call the conditioned self: when you so identify with “me” that there’s too much of “me” in it for you to see things objectively, with detachment.

Friendship-

     Enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play.

Self Observation

    Come home to yourself . When you talk to someone, are you aware of it or are you simply identifying with it? When you got angry with somebody, were you aware that you were angry or were you simply identifying with your anger? Later, when you had the time, did you study your experience and attempt to understand it? Where did it come from? What brought it on? I don’t know of any other way to awareness. You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change. But when you understand it, it changes.
What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.

Happiness is a natural state

• Zen masters say, “Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions.”
• Uninterrupted happiness is uncaused. True happiness is uncaused. You cannot make me happy. You are not my happiness. You say to the awakened person, “Why are you happy?” and the awakened person replies, “Why not?
• 4 - step process
• The first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings.
• The second step (this is a four-step program) is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality.
• The third step: Never identify with that feeling.
• The fourth step: How do you change things? How do you change yourselves? There are many things you must understand here, or rather, just one thing that can be expressed in many ways. When you change, everything changes
• Stop trying to push yourself somewhere. Then someday you will understand that simply by awareness you have already attained what you were pushing yourself toward. you need understanding, insight, awareness—you don’t need pushing. You don’t need effort.
• The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.
• Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don’t lead to growth in themselves.Negative feelings, every negative feeling is useful for awareness, for understanding.
• Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to reality.
• “The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”-Confucius 
• Understand another illusion, too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills.
• We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved.

Desire

Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire. And don’t just renounce the objects of your desire, understand them; See them for what they are really worth. Because if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at it and see it for what it is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into what I call a preference. When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake.

Self Concepts 

• So your concept points, but it is never entirely accurate; it misses uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal.Concept is generalization but always misses or omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness.
• When I call a person a woman, that’s true; but there are lots of things in that person that don’t fit into the concept “woman.” She is always this particular, concrete, unique woman, who can only be experienced, not conceptualized. The concrete person I’ve got to see for myself, to experience for myself, to intuit for myself. The individual can be intuited but cannot be conceptualized.
• Second quality of a concept is that it is static whereas reality is in flux. We use the same name for Niagara but water that constitutes it is always different .
• Reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality.

What is love ?

     What is love? Love is sensitivity, love is consciousness. An attachment destroys your capacity to love.What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn’t harden itself to any person or thing. But the moment you become attached in my sense of the word, then you’re blocking out many other things.

      But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone. How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, by the infinite patience and compassion . By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug. What good things? The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and intimacy with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not depend emotionally but whose company you enjoy.
      Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the stars, and the rain. You don’t possess these things; you surrender to them. And surrender occurs when you are aware of your illusions, when you are aware of your addictions, when you are aware of your desires and fears.

How to cope up with anger

     If you are angry, there’s something wrong with you. So you’d better cope with your anger. Stay with it and cope with it. It’s not mine. Whether there’s something wrong with me or not, I’ll examine that independently of your anger. I’m not going to be influenced by your anger. I don’t feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore, and I refuse to feel guilty.” I’m not going to hate myself for anything I’ve done. That’s what guilt is. I’m not going to give myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done, either right or wrong. I’m ready to analyze it, to watch it, and say, “Well, if I did wrong, it was in unawareness.” Nobody does wrong in awareness.

     Your attitude should be: “I want to be aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen; if I’m awake, fine, and if I’m asleep, fine.

Self change 

•  First, insight. Not effort, not cultivating habits, not having an ideal. Ideals do a lot of damage. The whole time you’re focusing on what should be instead of focusing on what is.
• Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged. That is extremely important for the process of change.
• You don’t have to go to the desert; you’re right in the middle of people; you’re enjoying them immensely. But they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable. That’s what aloneness means. In this solitude your dependence dies. The capacity to love is born. One no longer sees others as means of satisfying one’s addiction.

Wisdom

• Wisdom occurs when you drop barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning.
• Wisdom is not something acquired; wisdom is not experience; wisdom is not applying yesterday’s illusions to today’s problems. As Wisdom is to be sensitive to this situation, to this person, uninfluenced by any carryover from the past, without residue from the experience of the past. This is quite unlike what most people are accustomed to thinking.
• When you get a feel for it you change. When you know it in your head, you don’t.
• The root of evil is within you. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you understand.

My Rating  -🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

How are you feeling now - Emotionally aware

How are you feeling now?

 Ask this question to your kids often.

Ask when she/he is happy after a good grade.

Ask when she is a bit down when her close friend is leaving the school.

Ask when she looks bored; irritated ; elated ; upset; or agitated.

But don't start with your sermon after that.Just leave it there with a gentle inquiry.

Idea is to make her aware of her emotions.

By being emotionally aware , she could handle her communications, interpersonal relationships and profession lot better later on in her life .

Else she is going to learn this skill in a hard way anyway.

Even after learning all the skills in this world to survive, she will find this the missing piece in her life puzzle for a happy life.

We don't teach our kids this stuff at home or at school!Even we where not taught!

So ask this is question - How are you feeling now ?

She may answer with her judgments instead of naming the feeling,like ' I feel insulted' . Well, this is judgement. This is not same as 'I feel sad'. Point out the difference and ask her stick to name her feeling.

She may struggle at first. So help her with the vocabulary of feelings. Let her start understanding the subtle differences of those words and start using them .

Rollo May puts clearly as  “the mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones as in the different passages of music in a symphony.” For many of us, however, our feelings are, as May would describe it, “limited like notes in a bugle call.”

If you yourself need to educate on this, Please go ahead and start. Teaching others is the best way to learn.

you will see how your personal and professional world transform, how your communication improves . This awareness will lead to you empathy and then compassion  which are among the rarest now a days.

So Ask this question - how are you feeling now?