Deep Sleep For Resting The Body

Prayers, meditation, chanting, singing hymns, etc are means of calming the mind.
When mind is calm, we sleep well at night.
When we sleep well, we get refreshed both in body and mind.

When the mind is disturbed, we may not be able to fall asleep as easily.
We may have laboured away hard physically, yet if the mind is also stressed, we find difficulty in falling asleep.

Sleeping is another form of deep meditation where the entire self is resting with minimum activity in continuing to breathe and maybe dreaming a little.

Since all these are inter-related, it is so important for us to rest our mind and body every 14 to 16 hours in a day, depending on how long we usually sleep.

I have watched men labor at real hard work for 8 to 10 hours in various places. I have noticed them (without exception) visiting the roadside bars selling cheap liqour towards dusk, whether or not they have sufficient money to buy the groceries for their families back home.
Have often wondered about this phenomenon. Have come to the conclusion that their muscles and limbs may be aching due to constant labor at work.
Contrary to belief that we will sleep well after a hard day's labor, they might need an external element to refresh their body for the next day's work, meaning they can labour away the next day after their body is well-rested.
Most of the labor force work for daily wages and the need to report to work the next day becomes their necessity if they have to put food on the table. Whether they put food on the table or not they need to drink to forget their bodily aches. It is like an instant gratification.

With time the equation gets reversed!
In the beginning, they need work to survive and need their daily drinks or stuff to forget bodily pain from such hard labor.
Later they need their daily drinks so they need to work for it!!
It's a vicious cycle from which there is no escape when drinking becomes an addiction, whether or not they have work for the day! This is the way a whole family gets affected due to one person's addiction to something.

One is bound to ask what about mental stress. To escape mental stress many take to such addictive habits.

Moderation is the key to balance oneself for everything be it prayers, meditation, chanting, getting used to intoxication. Yes even prayers and meditation which does our minds and bodies so much good, should be done in moderation only, otherwise they too become obsessions.

Look at the wonderful organ called stomach. It can contain only a certain amount of food when we are hungry or ready to eat. Such should be our need for props to calm our mind, body and soul.

Mahalakshmi.

The Power Of Prayers

It cannot be denied that a chant, a prayer, a hymn does have a power over our physical well-being and not just our mental well-being.

Prayers or chanting in any form heals our minds.

When the mind is calm, collected and diverted away from mundane matters, prayers act as a balm for the wounds of the mind. When the mind heals, so does our body. Our aches and pains tend to take a back seat. We recover ourselves faster this way. The obsession for the bodily and mental pains translates into obsession for chanting something positive or spiritual according to the religious beliefs of each person.

If the person does not believe in matters spiritual, he or she could still benefit with some simple phrases like, "There is a way out of all this", "Yes I Can, Yes I Will, "I Will Overcome This Situation", ..." etc. whatever one fancies depending on the problem at hand. We should also realise that when we are doing something new, it does absorb our time and attention, so we must allow ourselves to soak in for some time with that. With time the mind would have overgrown that euphoria too.

I have doubted the power of prayers in my younger days yet that's what helped me most when I was much stressed. Stress manifests into physical discomfort within no time has been my personal observation.

However, the mind has to be strong enough not to get into more problems due to someone who may take this as an opportunity to fleece our time and money leading us to more misery.
Certainly we need a shoulder to cry on. Follow good advice or cousel. Remember we alone can take decisions to solve our personal problems with as little help as possible from others.
No one else can solve our problems for us, we have to do that ourselves. When we look to others to do that for us, it could be short lived, it could be unnecessary dependance on another person who may or may not show the same interest in solving our problems for us, consistently. Moreover, in modern times, who has this kind of time for others!
Ask yourself if you cannot do that for yourself. We are our best well-wishers, so better start utilizing our own services for our own good!

I am putting this in black and white because people who come for such counselling tend to look for all kinds of quick fixes from the counsellor without trying anything on their own for mitigating their problems. One has to go through to learn how to come out of some painful situations. No one will do the hand-holding for us for long. Not forever, at least.

Thank God we have ourselves to help! Arise, awake and get cracking on your problems but do choose the positive path, though it may not offer us instant relief.
Remember it takes time to get into problems, so it takes time to recover from them too.
Time is great healer.
Soon all will be well and we will wonder we ever went through those horrowing times.

Cheers!

Mahalakshmi.

Parenting

In the course of my work I come across people who complain about caring for babies.
For whatever reasons. Its been over a long period of time I have observed some things about managing babies.

Here are some of my personal views on the subject.

When the system of joint families was in vogue not long back, there was comfort in the feeling that you have someone else also looking out for your baby. A grandparent will keep the baby occupied, take him out for a walk, feed, when you had to concentrate on your share of work. All that seems to have disappeared with nuclear families becoming so popular.

Since the nuclear family consists of the father, mother and the baby, with one of the parent, usually the father out on work, most hours in a day, leaves the mother having to care for the baby all on her own.
The caring part becomes difficult if the baby is irritable, cries a lot, does not eat properly or refuses to sleep on time.
The mother gets tired, both on physical as well as mental level. She cannot rest when the kid eats or rests. She must do her other jobs around house, when the baby is sleeping.
She too becomes irritable and wishes she were not the only one to take care of the baby. At times she will gladly trust her baby with anyone who offers to look after her baby, even if it were for a few hours. She could get that desperate and many will blame her for being so careless about the safety of the baby.

Her husband comes home equally tired from office or work. Has time to relax before the TV or sits at the computer, eat, (comment, if the food is not ok!), go to sleep. Understandable. But the woman's condition is never understood in a compassionate way.
This is where the girl's parents come in handy. They not only take care of the baby but leave the couple to have some time with each other. But again there are men who dislike their in-laws staying with them for many reasons, little realising that the wife who stays home is perhaps over-worked than him at office! Its still a man's world.
If the woman is working, then God save the kid and the couple, if there is no help available. It's a life of tension all the way.

I have come across women who have refused to go back to their husbands when they have had deliveries and had demands on their time and emotions from over-bearing husbands besides looking after the baby. Caring for babies is not about following rules and regulations written in books. Emotional stress builds up over a period of time but we all somehow seem to go through it.
When a mother looks at the baby's smiling face, her day is made. It cheers her on to care for her child against all odds. Wonder what single parents without anyone to help, go through emotionally. It could be very difficult indeed.

Mahalakshmi.

Stress in life

Dear Friends!

We all have stress. We have to face it all the time in our lives right from we are this high in childhood.

It is mild and perhaps we have support from our near and dear ones in our childhood so we manage it somehow.
Into our teens we see it in a different way. Stress due to poor marks scored at the school exams, peer pressure for some things and how we deal with it, friends whom we discover are not really our friends! All this plus those embarrassing questions from our parents who want to know what's happening in our lives outside home.
For some a love failure or a crush could make matters even worse.
But it is friends again who support us and we somehow sail through these years without health issues.

Then its college time. This is the most difficult of all in many people's lives. There's lot more exposure to others from many places than the same friends we have been seeing at school for a long time since childhood - of course, it depends on whether we have studied at the same school for 14 long years!

At office we face another set of people and we are lucky if we have good humans as our superiors rather than those who feel threatened at every shake of their chair to mean that we are up to grab it!
In the efforts to prove ourselves worthy of our jobs we learn, re-learn, unlearn many things at work. We make mistakes, get pulled up, never make mistakes, get pulled up, work hard, but never get praised, never work hard but feel we ought to be praised for attempting to attend office :D
Some bosses put up and some don't suffer upstarts or juniors kindly.
Through all this we learn big and small things which mold and shape our lives.
We are not what we were 10 years back, well even 10 hours back if a massive event had occurred to change our lives forever!

So what does all these things tell us? Life has its ups and downs. How can we wish only the happy events to take place all the time in our lives. How can we also be depressed and bogged down only with bad events all our lives. Is it not then in our own hands to try to make our lives better by taking whatever positive steps we can to damage-control our mistakes, be ready to learn from our mistakes and try to lead a calm and peaceful life.
Stress can be dealt at every turning point in our lives by keeping our balance in happy as well as not-so-happy times. This does not mean we should savor in the happiness an event brings. Not just cling to it all the time is the secret of letting it go. This letting go after a while is to be applied to both happy and sad events. Let go means not simply trying to forget but to learn to move on with more maturity and strength. To get up and move on with the set of goals we have before us. If goals are too long to reach, it makes sense in breaking them into smaller segments so that the length of time does not bog us down which could result in our losing what little interest we started the work with.

Finally, the best way to de-stress is to talk to someone close who is not judgmental about us, or chant some routine mantras repeatedly until we can divert our minds in a more positive way and meditation is another excellent form to overcome our disturbed minds.
In these modern times it may be hard to find friends who have time to lend an ear to our problems but chanting and meditation can be practiced to good effect to put our lives back in order!

Cheers!
Happy chanting.
Mahalakshmi