Is it Necessary to Stamp out Materialistic Desires to be Happy?

What exactly is the meaning of happiness and how to get it - this simple question has been perplexing even most intelligent beings since ages.  A person can marvel at the ways people adopt to stay happy. Some of us believe buying trendiest clothes, coolest gadgets, and better things can make us happy while others opine possession of worldly things is the root cause of all our problems and we ought to stop accumulation. This is how we can connect to the god and master the hardships thrown to us by nature.

On the surface, all of us look happy or pretend to be happy but deep down there is a feeling of void and we all diligently are in search of something that can fill in this void so that we could have peace, contentment, and happiness. Those of us, who count on materialistic approach and see worldly comforts as the substitute of happiness, often have to flip out for worldly comforts, are transient in nature and nothing but the transformation of worldly sorrows. So, to run only for material comforts in order to gain happiness does not seem to be the legitimate solution. On the other hand, if we detach our self from the worldly obligations, the growth of our society, as well as civilization, will be imperiled and if this is what god had expected from us, he would have not created the world.

So both the theories propounded to stay happy seem to be flawed and wide of the mark. It’s not possible to lead a life without using whatever that belongs to this world; likewise, complete detachment from the world is a potent threat to the development of healthy society. But we need not go berserk as we can always choose the middle way to attain a right balance in life.  We can enjoy all the amenities that world has to offer while being humble, honest, truthful and above all thankful to God. We also have to be vigilant enough to make sure that we don’t exploit nature and natural resources in order to enrich our lives.  We must also not have clandestine agenda for development; all our operations must be aboveboard. We don't need to detach from the world but moderate our actions and revive the swept away values. With insightful talk sessions by Success Guru AK Mishra and the meditation techniques, AK Mishra’s Art of Success training aims to help people connect with their higher self and learn the art of achieving peace, contentment, and success in life.

4 Key Truths About Changing Your Life

Entrepreneurs are often considered larger than life. We are known to take big risks and navigate seemingly insurmountable odds. For many it’s a mindset and lifestyle that seems out of reach.

The truth is, we can all tap into these traits and discover our true potential. This becomes an important task when we feel stuck, like a hampster on the proverbial wheel, in a monotonous, unfocused and unfulfilled life.

Nothing changes until we change. We have to take a risk.

Here’s a look at four key principles you can use to start creating change in your life

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

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1. Break your routine

For many of us, life is repetitive. Every day we go home, have dinner, talk to our family members and fall sleep with very little variation. Break the dull routine and add some leisure activities to the mix. Plan a family trip and come back home with a renewed zest for life.

We all know how important it is to try new things. We’re told to look at the world with a fresh perspective, but we often fail to live that way. Hence, it’s necessary to remind ourselves that challenges help us grow. And without risk, we can never know what we are truly capable of.

A routine gives us structure; but it begs the question: Is your routine actually working (i.e. producing desired results)? As Dan Cumberland, author of The Meaning Manifesto suggests, “Sometimes breaking your routine is really important. Sometimes life, energy, and creativity are found outside of your usual routine.”

2. Choose your own path daily

Your life is your own project. You have to nurture and fight for it daily.

It’s important to expand our thinking capacity. Explore beyond boundaries and conventional beliefs that insist there’s only one way to do something. Some rules are meant to be broken.

It may seem easy to follow someone else’s script for your life, but the results can be devastating. 
People that we care about will always have their opinions; consider them wisely. A the end of the day choose your own path.

3. Experiment with your life

Risk-taking is a common trait among entrepreneurs. Fear of failure doesn’t hold them back. They know that if they take risks and fail, they will be glad that they tried something new.

When we take on new challenges we always have the opportunity to learn. Much of that learning is continued through iteration and experimentation as we find better ways to accomplish our goals the next time. This same mindset can be applied to life.

Ask yourself, “What is holding me back?” Is it your fear of failure or your ego? Maybe you’re afraid of what someone might say? Do you think it’s too late to try something new at this juncture in your life?

Trying something new doesn’t mean you have to flip your life upside down. Start with small changes every day. Experiment with your life.

4. Never overlook the power of little things

Little things that we change can break the monotony of life and help us regain our personal power. Try a new restaurant, take your spouse for a night out on the town, go to an unfamiliar place with friends, try a new hobby, do something kind and unexpected for your parents.

Discover yourself and empower others by paying attention to the little things. Break at least one conventional rule every day and see what happens.

The vastness of LOVE

Whenever we hear the word “LOVE”, the first thing that comes into our head is romantic love, marriage or couple. Even when we google this word, we find thousands of quotes, articles, poems or stories, but none of them talk about the vastness of this word “love”. The love is vast as the ocean; love is the most beautiful emotion which not only enriches our inner soul but also makes people around us feel wanted and adored.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Love is when you understand and admire your parents’ efforts to keep you safe from all troubles, love is when you fight with your siblings but stand by them in all the tough moments, love is when you fight with the world to keep your true friendship alive forever and love is when you choose a person to spend your entire life with. The emotion called love is taught to us by our parents when they lovingly hold us in their arms when we enter in this world. They bring a sense of self-love in us by admiring us the most with those teary eyes.  And the journey of love starts with the self-love which we develop inside.

When we accept ourselves for what we are, we effortlessly love and admire the people around us.

The love is a beautiful emotion which cannot be categorized the way we have been categorizing it until now. On this Valentine’s Day, spread love everywhere and help people understand that love is beyond just the romantic relationships. Thank all the people you have in your life and on this day of love, let your heart be filled with joy, positivity, and love; let the people feel how special they are because they are the ones who indeed make your life complete. Valentine’s Day is celebrated to help people recall that we are nothing without the people we have in our life who love us, who admire us, who accept us and who encourage us. Revive that sense of love for self in you and make your loved ones feel how special they are. Just make a genuine list of people whom you truly consider your loved ones. Let’s transform the meaning of Valentine’s Day by breaking those limited beliefs we have been carrying till now for Valentine’s Day. Wish you all Happy Valentine’s Day.

3 STEPS TO ANGER MANAGEMENT

In all our lives, in a way that’s strange to us; untold, unspecified, secret, mysterious, and dark, hidden, concealed – we are angry at each other. We certainly don’t think an angry man as an optimist, but below the scrub surface – they essentially are, at the cost of being misjudged.

Let’s take an example of Sanjay – He has an8-year-old kid and he has often told his kid to not interrupt him while he is watching his cricket match. For some very good reason, he finds this prohibition annoying. After a long wait, his kid frankly decides to ask when will he be free to play with him?

Now – Sanjay is shouting – because deep inside, beneath all the anger and the disappointment from his kid and life – he’s very hopeful. The problem is, despite all the evidence Sanjay keeps encountering in his life – he devotedly has a faith in a world where his kid understands him, obeys him. The deeper problem is that all these memories of disappointments go back to his childhood – decades in past – where his hopefulness of an ideal world is still not dampened. And he shouts – screams, explode at the world around him.

The ultimate truth is that Sanjay will never be able to remove the frustrations of his life, but Sanjay could, perhaps, if he is wise – learn to change what frustration mean to him. He might learn to accept the darker side of the truth behind reality, that human life is essentially full of sadness, that existence as a human being is not entirely a happy process.

But how should Sanjay do that?

Here are 3 steps for his anger Management and for all of you who get furious at times.

1.       Face the truth

It’s highly advisable to face the truth and be aware of emotions. Your emotional state in anger is a boat which is flooding with water, and if you’d not care about plugging the leak, or remove what’s making that hole – no matter what you do to hold it – your boat will eventually sink. Your negative state cannot be brought down by anyone around you – there is only one who can change it – and that is you!

2.      Embrace the truth

You should embrace the feeling by internally thinking the other person in your shoes and try to figure out what is the triggering element of his emotional bombardment. At the core, most people have the expectation dilemma and do not want to disappoint one another – especially the one they truly love.

We seldom imagine what the others have done that triggered your bad side, understand what they might be going through while carrying their huge pile of emotions. You should acknowledge that’s it’s not about you – it’s about them – and their internal pain.

You always have a choice to diffuse their power by accepting them as a part of you and thank them for helping you surface deep-rooted feelings.

3.       Erase the truth

After you have faced and embraced the truth and the feelings surrounding it, you can lay the rest down. You should understand – the negative reactions will lead to negative energy – and turning a blind eye towards this negativity is telling yourself that you are not worthy.

We should embrace the fact that keeping the focus on you means loving yourself and at the same time, acknowledge that no one is perfect.

There is an immense joy in understanding that everyone around you is doing their best and is on, as per their psyche, their best behavior. And most importantly, love yourself for everything you do right and wrong – because at the end – that is what makes you – YOU

Effective methods to boost your confidence

Since no human being is immune to the feelings of insecurity and self-doubt, it sometimes, become hard to overcome. Also, undoubtedly, everyone at some point or the other, struggles with issues of self-esteem. This could be situational, for example some find themselves insecure and less confident while socializing with new or unknown people, or during public speaking, but could be very confident around the people they know. Some introverted people often feel shy or less confident while partying, dancing or singing, while some may feel lesser confident trying something new at their workplace. But you can certainly give yourself a quick boost in such situations. Thus, here are some simple confidence boosting techniques to follow.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Smile More Often

Your physiology greatly influences your self-awareness and emotions. Moreover, it is a scientifically proven fact that smiling not only makes you more attractive, but also enhances your mood, lowers blood pressure, relieves stress and helps you stay positive. Hence, begin your day with a smile; look at yourself in the mirror with a smiling face and make an effort to smile more often, throughout the day, while talking to other people or greeting others.

Meditate Regularly

Pick a good Buddhist mindfulness guided meditation and try it every day for 10 minutes. It will help improve self-awareness and will drastically enhance your confidence level.

Improve Your Posture

Improve your sitting and standing posture. Research shows that those who sit straight are more likely to generate ideas and believe in their own thoughts, as compared to those who sit hunched over their desk throughout the day. Moreover, standing straight also not only makes you feel and look confident, but also significantly improves your productivity level. When you have an impending socially evaluative situation such as an interview or public speaking engagement, practice and improvise your posture a day before D-day.

Stand straight in a power pose and then after some time, observe which posture makes you feel confident and comfortable while standing straight. The power pose will help raise your level of testosterone (the hormone of dominance) and lower your stress hormone (cortisol) while also making you feel more confident.

Visualize Your Success

By visualizing your success, whether acing an interview or finishing a task or a workout, you can indeed take yourself a step ahead towards your desired success. Although many spiritual leaders have already accepted it as a well-known fact, it has also been scientifically proven that imaging an activity, stimulates the nervous system and activates several same neural pathways in the brain, as you would actually experience in an activity.

Thus, by visualizing yourself overcoming challenges, you can certainly help yourself be more confident and comfortable while dealing with the current challenges which will seem familiar.

Embrace Your Feelings of Low Self-Esteem

Once you are done with developing a habit of visualization, meditation and corrected posture, your next step should be to take the time to embrace your feeling of low self-esteem. Yes, you read it right, embrace your low self-esteem!

Moments of doubts, situations where you encounter low self-esteem, feeling of unhappiness, discontentment are pretty important and required as they are imperative poisons that compel you to eliminate what you do not like and to bring a positive change in yourself. By suppressing your negative self, you’ll end up always moving a step away from your improvement and perfection. So, begin by recognizing your insecurities and instead of improving your feelings of low self-esteem, start improvising your competence. Make yourself abler, learn what causes low self-esteem, where you lack and improve those abilities. You’ll gradually enhance your confidence levels too.

Embrace Your Failures

After learning the skills of accepting your weaknesses that cause self- doubts, re-evaluate how you consider your failures. Failures come as challenges in your life to make you what you truly are and to bring out your true potential, to make you more patient, more experienced, more mature, wiser, more humble, more resilient, more creative and more grounded. It also teaches you a lot about your true self. When you focus on learning, you gain from each of your failures, you take another step towards your desired success and failures become just a part of your journey to your phenomenal triumph.

Improve Your Surroundings

Last but not the least, to improve your confidence levels, expand your social circle. A supportive social circle will always encourage you to move forward and this encouragement truly plays a very vital role in boosting your confidence levels and for you to reach your goal. Thus, keep a distance from those who discourage you for your dreams and spend more time with the people who believe in you.

Understanding Love Relationships

Love is an emotion of enormous power. All long-term relationships go through a variety of phases.  If the relationship continues, it settles into a more stable time of building a history as a couple. If children or teenagers enter into the picture, that is entirely a new phase. Later, there is another phase of being together as a mature couple with the wisdom of experience.

People say Love and relationships in present age do not have that passion like old days. But were the relationships in old times really perfect? The truth is there was a perception set in everyone’s mind that relationships should last forever, at least once we're married to someone, the societal obscurity that we have to be with that person, no matter whether we are happy or not, but just because we have circumscribed with the vows of marriage. Although we are not too different from those people who lived centuries ago, our core desires are still the same. But we have become practical in our lives.Imagine being in love, maybe you have been in love or you hope to be in love. We figure out things quickly, we make quick decisions, a number of emotions rush together so quickly, but then what happens? 50% of marriages get failed? Why? Have you ever tried to discover the answer? 

Sometimes, two people come out to be completely different, maybe the female could be goal oriented but fallen in love with the guy who wants his girl or wife to not to work, or go for some other job or any other similar thought. The moment when love rules our mind, we don’t let our brain function, and we just flow with the storm of emotions. We agree to such mundane things, the kind of behavior we don't expect from ourselves. We get ready to sacrifice, sacrifice our ambitions, our dreams, our actual self, but the truth is one can never change his true personality, and hence it results in divorce, break-ups, and range of relationship problems.

We have the prefrontal cortex brain which takes rational decisions, located near the front head, is involved in decision making in response to emotions. The prefrontal cortex controls what decision a person makes when faced with an emotional reaction. The same part of the brain controls addictions and the feeling of love. But what happens our feeling of being in love gets too strong which starts controlling even our brain and mind, and we become unable to take rational decisions in love matters and accept even the wrong. And this is what happens when we realize, that the person in front of us is not the right, and we should stop here or should contemplate the situation, but suddenly the other part of the brain which is controlled by the feeling of love suddenly comes and tell the brain to knock it off, we don’t let the prefrontal cortex brain control our heart -- let alone the feeling of love.

The most important thing one needs to understand is, never fall in love, and always rise in love. Let the person accept you as you are. Love is supporting each other, fight for each other’s dreams to make them true. Remember, attachments are always against love. As long as you are attached to someone or have a fear of losing someone, you can never reach to the unconditional boundaries of love. The key to a properly functioning love and a lasting relationship is trust. It does not require rituals to follow or get circumscribed with vows of marriage or rituals which bounds you to be with the person and not to exit the doors even when two are not happy together. 

Love is about two people committing themselves to the fullest.  Often people are so lost in their search for the custom or traditional love they believe in, that they forget commitment and love are truly important to make things work. The dream of the perfection which exists in the mind of people keeps them away from the reality. One must understand the perfection comes with the true understanding of unconditional love. 

So now, do you understand love? 

5 MORNING ROUTINES TO WIN THE DAY

Tim Ferris, author of ‘the 4-hour Workweek’, has his 5 favorite morning hacks to maximize his productivity. As per Tim, positive momentum and a distraction-less start of your day don't come naturally, rather it’s manually earned every day by following a strict routine. After Interviewing hundreds of ultra-successful people, from the famous chess prodigies to athletes to billionaires – he has picked the common denominator out of all and made a list of his top 5 routines.

Out of his top five routines, he claims that even if he gets to three routines per morning – he wins. And as the famous saying goes, “if you win the morning, you win the day”.

Tim Ferris is an efficient all-rounder – he fluently speaks 5 languages, is a national Chinese kickboxing champion, holds a world record in Tango and is a best-selling author. That’s a big list for a single man – and getting demotivated from a long list of someone else’s achievement is not the point. Rather, it is a proof that the only thing that’s stopping us from succeeding in any field is our mental limitations, and Tim has a way out.

There is a lot we can learn from Tim, and his belief that single individual can achieve greatness, and with a right set of mind – can reach the pinnacle of his field. So, let’s get started.

Top 5 Morning routines

5. Make your bed

It might sound like an unimportant ritual, but it gives one a sense of control at the very beginning of the day. It’s a form of strategy that helps you to deal the intangibles and curveballs that life throws at you. No matter how complex your day is planned ahead – you can always make your bed and straighten at least one thing.

4. Meditate

He states, ‘more than 80% of the world class performers I’ve interviewed practice one form or the other of mindfulness’. As per Tim, there are few who go to Headspace, few who opt for guided meditation, and others who stick to traditional meditation techniques.   

3. Do Pushups

Tim says, doing any kind of physical exercise first thing in the morning helps you to stay prime, and wake your complete body at a go. He prefers to do the pushups, but he recommends any kind of exercise – sit-ups, lunges, and squats. Doing so quiets ones’ mental chatter and effects the mood dramatically.  

2.  Hydrate yourself

You need to water yourself and take out the dryness of the entire last night. He recommends titanium tea which is one teaspoon of turmeric, some ginger shaving and a teaspoon each of black tea and dragon tea. He recommends it for excellent cognition and weight loss. He personally prefers it with a glass of cold water, but even warm water would do the same trick.   

1. Write a Journal

The most important trick in his list is to write a journal for whatever is going in your head. You can plan your day or prioritize things or just express gratitude for the various labels in your life. When Tim writes his journal, he broadly considers four categories; opportunity for the day, some small goals, yesterday’s achievements and relationships.