DesiReflections

For All Of  Us, Play Is Simply About Being Totally In The Moment, In The Pure Joy Of Process, With No Concerns About Outcome. It is important for us to loosen up and have some fun. If we play, it sparks creativity and encourages risk taking.   It stimulates curiosity.  To create, we must continually  adapt, invent, and respond. As we experience wonder and possibility play also causes us to adjust and find new ways of doing things. We can accept that life is about change, process, growth, and flexibility. Lila is Sanskrit word that means 'divine play'. Lila is the play of creation, destruction, re-creation and love. Of late the Big Corporate,Business Houses start realizing that play is important for creativity and personal well being, and sometimes that manifests in computer games that develop the whole brain. Brian Sutton Smith is a renowned play theorist, he says that the opposite of play is not work-it is depression. Just think how common depression is in o...

I learned to integrate five universal forces   in my life from a cultural anthropologist. Perhaps there are some you also do each day, while others may be harder. There is no order, and none is more important than the other. Heal Embrace healing each day. It always occurs in a natural rhythm, medium to slow, never in the fast lane.High trust needs rest. We each carry our own unique medicine, and it is our honor and duty to develop it and share in the world. I feel an urgency for each of us to step up and offer our healing gifts. Initiate We can initiate or ignite the spark of learning something new every day through observation. Curiosity and open mindedness. An initiation is often marked with a rite of passage ceremony, celebrating the acceptance or entrance into a group when people have demonstrated they have learned something well enough to be included into it. Create Create something new every day with intention. It could be music, art, writing or food or in the garde...

Now a days it is little difficult to read poetry in India. Reasons are many. The popular weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies have met slow death, now you may find only news periodicals. And TV channels are full of political cacophony, in that space finding some place for literature and that too poetry is difficult. The Kavi Sammelans are meant for only mimicry artists, comedy central or joke cracker kind of people.   But you have to find out some space for poetry. Reason is very simple. Poetry has power to heal the heart and awaken soulfulness in our own voice. I know several doctors who are also poets, and they actually prescribe reading and writing poetry as a  healing practice for their patients. The words said aloud or silently  have resonance that can shift our feelings, thoughts, and even biochemistry, bringing healing and creativity. The rhythm, breath, and sound connect to heart, mind and spirit. A poem expresses something in a distilled and refined manner,...

It is  a common perception that anxiety and depression is a problem of working class. But surprisingly our intense desire to see our children only on the top in class, school, university, competitive exams is a real culprit to spread anxiety and depression in our teens. When some one is feeling anxious, his monkey mind comes up with a lot of reasons why he should not do certain things. When he avoid doing lots of things  that, in his heart, he really wants to do, over time he loose his belief in his ability to them. He feels helpless and hopeless. So lack of motivation is defining future of depression. Think in a teenager's point of view. If he avoid going to parties or other social events due to his social anxiety, he may begin to have  thoughts like, 'I will never make friends or have a boyfriend or a girlfriend.' If he avoid going on trips or to events where there are crowds of people because of his anxiety or agoraphobia, he may think,' I will have to live her...

How to describe depression ? Many a time the symptoms can be misleading. Everyone has felt depression at times over such challenging situations as a setback in one’s career or the ending of an important relationship. In case of majority of people, the sadness is temporary. But the major depressive disorder is more than just a temporary feeling. It is relatively long-lasting, can get worse over time, and significantly interferes with a person’s daily activities. Depression is the most common mental health disorder after anxiety disorders. It affects 7% of adults in US in any given year, with a lifetime prevalence of 21% of all Americans.I am sure such a precise analysis is not available for such disorder in India.The World Health Organization accept that it is the leading cause of worldwide disability. It is also interesting to note that men and women experience depression differently. Women are affected at twice the rate of men, while men with depression are more likely to die by...

I visited Sammamish Art Fair today at City Hall. It is now fall time but the day was sunny. So the Fair attracted big crowd of art lovers. While going from stall to stall, seeing paintings, photographs, artifacts made by the local artists, I decided to sit in a cozy corner to relax for a while. An  attractive  young man was busy in his fixing his guitar and soundbox for his musical performance, a young, attractive tall lady was helping him in the process. He started playing jazz music along with a saxophone and cello player. The lady sat next to me after the everything fixed for the performance. Conversation started. The young guitar player runs a music school in Issaquah downtown. The lady sitting along with me was his wife. It started with a very formal kind of conversation. She asked about my job and background. When she knew that I am from India, her facial expressions changed and I could feel warmth as if she did find some one from her own fraternity. Her name is Huma ...

Cosmic Energy is another name for Life Force Energy. It is the energy flowing throughout everything. Cosmic Energy makes up the Earth, it is the Void, the Divine as well as Space, and it makes up All That Is. Cosmic Energy is responsible for maintaining order and balance throughout the Cosmos. It makes up you and everything else in existence and it is the space between. At the time of your birth, you entered the physical realm as a speck of Cosmic Consciousness, a seed of the Divine, a spiritual energy manifest in the Earth plane to experience life, and to grow, advance and evolve.  Cosmic Energy is also known as ; super-consciousness, higher consciousness, or supreme consciousness, chi, prana, and life force energy. You may call it by any name. Cosmic Energy is essential for you as a physical and spiritual being. It is key to living a happy and healthy life. It is key to awakening spiritually, psychically, and it is key to ascending, and expanding consciousness. Cosmic Energy is ...

Of late, I started reading holy books of various religions. I did find that all speaks a lot about morality, the way people live in peace and harmony in a civil society. Certain fundamental truths are common. But frankly speaking , they talk less about you as an individual and your connection with the  the infinite world. To my mind, the best way to understand that, we have to integrate our knowledge about science with the religion. In fact the word religion is derived from old word relegere that means "go through again" (in reading or in thought), That simply means the religion is not a static thing but it is a process of re-visiting.  So we should begin our quest with little understanding about our brain.   THE QUANTUM BRAIN The conviction has been growing among many physicists that the brain is an interactive system with a quantum mechanical macrostructure as an important complement to the classical neuronal assembly. The classical and quantum components of...

Everyday, no matter what our age or current health status, we have  two clear choices : We grow older  or  We grow younger I mean quite literally. I found many people who do not see aging as a choice-they think they have no control over, just like the passage of time. But believe me all of us have a choice in the age of our bones, our muscles, our internal organs and even our skin. We can decide if we want to spend  our days feeling vital, energetic,, healthy, and joyfully use our body to exercise, travel, play with our grand children-or if we wish to confine to a life of joint and  back pain, limited mobility, and lack of physical strength that keep us sitting on a bench and watching others to do the things we once did. The difference between the two extremes is our mindset and a matter of 30 minutes a day that is all ! Do you know you also possess the power to determine your body's true age. The choice is absolutely yours. Simple, allow the aging pro...

In Western Hemisphere, just as the summer ends, and the only solace before the arrival of winter is the beauty of autumn. Fall colors are seen in deciduous trees and shrubs before they shed their leaves to conserve water in bitter winters. I sitting in Seattle,  enjoy watching the lush greens transition to yellow-red everyday. While taking morning stroll I see the nature's drama unfolding day after day from middle of September. When fall colors are at the peak, it’s like a rainbow on the ground.  The question is why do the leaves present us this colorful visual treat before falling off.  Before I reveal the mystery of these colors, think about how the bacteria in Grand Prismatic Springs create rainbow in the Yellow Stone National Park area. Yes, the answer in this case is also pigments. The pigments responsible for fall colors actually exist in the leaves throughout the year; we just don’t see them! The green color of the leaves is due to a pigment called chloro...