He was aloof, alone, sitting with his head down in the Ram Temple at Hyderabad. One of my friends, Kiran approached him and asked him to join us for the meditation centre. As a new project we started running free meditation centres at different places with an intention to reach out to people who are yet to experience meditation. We call this club as Meditating Monday. When I initiated this project in Hyderabad in the year 2011, I had no idea about the gravity of this idea until this boy decided to follow Kiran to the room where our team was conducting the meditation. A simple 10 minutes meditation and we could see wrinkled foreheads becoming soothing smiling faces. This is quite a regular experience for us now. People do recognise the peace within them during guided meditations by Sri Sri. All the participants hugged the volunteers and expressed their intention to join us again. This boy did not seem to move. When Kiran approached him, he hugged Kiran tightly and started crying profusely. "I was planning to jump from 6th floor yesterday. Today I came here to say my last prayers." He had no idea then there exists something in this world that can take him out of his depression.
If this is the impact of a 10 minutes meditation, then imagine what the unique breathing technique of Sudarshan Kriya can do to us. "Nice, but I'm not depressed, what can AOL do to me?" Comes a natural question. If a depressed person can get life then can you imagine what it can do to you. Because of all these techniques, normal people have become super dynamic and dynamic people have become instruments of change that are bringing waves of positive energy to masses.
In 2013 after the Uttarakhand floods, a team from Mumbai took out time from their busy lives with a mission to bring some change in people. My sister was a part of that team. Together the team of 8 boys and 5 girls in 8 days reached out to more than 800 people bringing peace in their minds and hope in their hearts. How is it possible to generate this level of dynamism from the otherwise dormant crowd?
What makes us inactive is the inability to handle stress. What really happens when we cannot meet deadlines at our work place? Assuming that the deadlines are reasonable, we tend to reduce our speed in the fight between focus and relaxation. When we get relaxed we lose focus. When we get focused, we get anxious leading to stress. Breathing techniques taught at The Art of Living really increase the focus and at the same time keeps us relaxed. Thus we get more productive leaving us ample time to do all the things that we always wanted to do.
We start with full enthusiasm to learn a guitar. But soon the guitar becomes a wall hanging. We end up spending more time on things that we have to do. Focus comes on ways to earn money and how to survive in the rat race. When we delink stress from our lives, we discover the gaps in our day which we generally miss, since they get covered in anxiety, worry, regret etc. This newly discovered time gives us the opportunity to do things which we always wanted to do. Be it preparing for an extra curricular exam, learning Krav maga or taking up some kind of social responsibility. The Art of Living through its stress management programs have brought in vibrancy amidst so many people that today are leading lives much higher than their potential.
Thanks to these techniques that today we are leading lives that we want to live and not the ones that we have to live.
