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The Danger in Compromise

The Danger in Compromise

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When we think of relationships, compromise almost seems a synonym. Of course, right? How could a happy relationship exist without compromise? Any relationship – whether romantic, family, in-laws or friends involves different, sometimes diametrically opposite people.

While one likes football, the other may like the Opera. One might seek thrill outdoors while the other might want to curl up under blankets to relax. One might like to get things off the chest by confronting, while the other might be willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation. Sooner or later, these two people will have to meet midway. Compromise?

I may be wrong in saying that compromise poisons a relationship. So let me begin with what compromise means to me – to compromise is to ‘settle’ for something less than desirable, often as a result of perceiving no other choice.

But here’s the thing. When you really love someone, it doesn’t feel like one is ‘settling’. These things are voluntary. A friend once mentioned how he watched painfully cheesy romantic films along with his girlfriend. When I asked him why, he said that he enjoyed these times nevertheless because it brought him joy to see her happy. It wasn’t compromise, it was choice. And that makes all the difference.

Choice is voluntary. Compromise is forced, or perceived as such, due to lack of other options. Compromise seeks a payoff, and on not finding enough, it can create considerable resentment. Over time, resentment from compromise builds up, leading to cracks in the relationship.

Choices are most found in parent-child relationships. Parents willingly give up many things to bring comfort, security or happiness to the child. This happens because parents are almost always aware of their love for the child. This is something that somehow disappears in most other relationships.

Look for a win-win

Most times when we seek compromise, the underlying attitude is really about how both can lose equally, ‘adjust’ equally. If we can take a step back here, and go back to love, take the attention to how both people can get the best of the situation, then things change, even if it is the same solution.

Go back to love

The older a relationship gets, the more tedious and tiring it tends to become. Patterns repeat, and we seek easy ways out. If we let this fatigue motivate us to find a solution, we will end up with another tiring mess. Instead, the moment we become aware of a desire to brush things under the carpet, we can bring our complete awareness to the situation. We can remind ourselves of the love we have for this other person, whether parent, spouse, sibling or child, and ask ourselves how we can really resolve this problem, instead of just temporarily ‘fixing’ it.

Raising Children

Raising Children

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Although I’ve had many students ask me to write an article on parenting, I’ve always hesitated for one simple reason – I am not a parent. And I find it strange to have to preach what I haven’t practiced, apart from the thought that what I suggest might not be practical. However, there are simple behaviour and mind related things that I might be able to suggest, which I hope you find useful.

So here it comes, tips for parents from someone who’s not a parent. Suggestions welcome!

I would begin by reminding all parents that no matter what you do, you’re going to ‘falter’ somewhere. We tend to forget that all children come with their own destinies, and no matter how hard you try, some things are going to go wrong, and your child is definitely going to get hurt through you – because the child needs those wounds to help it grow, much like a plant needs clipping from time to time for it to develop new shoots. So just do the best you can, and leave the rest to God.

One common thing I hear most parents say is that they don’t want their child to suffer like they did. In another instance these people will also tell you that their problems shaped their lives and they are what they are today because of the problems they had. Put those two together and see what you get.

Problems are the stepping stones to success. Problems also force a child to think on its feet and develop problem-solving abilities early in life – otherwise that part of the brain simply remains unused and undeveloped. So let your child face problems, and learn to deal with them on it’s own. Of course you would step in if things seem to be getting out of hand. But let the child make mistakes, and learn to fix them – on its own. Empathise – not sympathise, with your child. Believe in your child’s ability to deal with problems, and see how much of a difference that makes.

Which brings me to my next point. All around me in India when I meet parents of young children, I’m flooded with stories of how brilliant their child is. Parents always seem to be in a state of shock or surprise at how intelligent their child really is. Do we realise what happens when we react in awe when a child behaves intelligently? We’re subconsciously telling the child that we expected it to be stupid. Why else would you be surprised? Would you be surprised if an adult knew the capital of say, Germany? No, because that is expected of an adult. If an illiterate person knew this though, you may be surprised. Because you would expect that illiterate person to be ‘dumb’.

Ditto for the child; this kind of programming tells the child that it is actually stupid, and that intelligent behaviour is a cause to celebrate. It also gets the child addicted to approval. Eventually the child will want approval for every intelligent thing it says or does. And as an adult, that’s going to lead to problems in motivation – something many of us are already facing.

Trust the Child
Children are very intelligent. Even babies. They are not dumb, and even when they cannot speak, they understand what’s going on. So it would be a very wise thing to treat that baby as an intelligent adult present in the room, and not lie to it – because it is learning from your behaviour every moment.

I read recently that a man spoke to his baby as an adult and played classical music to it as an experiment, and found that his child developed high IQ levels. The stimulation a child receives as an infant is quite critical to brain development. A coddled and overprotected child does not receive enough stimulation.

Also, children are very sensitive and aware of what they need. When you allow a child to eat what it wants and how much it wants, you allow the child to stay in touch with its body. By forcing a child to eat things against its wish, you are very likely cutting off that connection. Of course, all this holds true until the child is introduced to junk foods and refined sugar.

However, a child that is allowed to stay in touch with its body will eventually not find these foods very appealing.The child’s body is also fully equipped to tackle most diseases, so it would be wise to not bomb its system with frequent antibiotics. An adult’s body takes more than a year to recover from a course of antibiotics. Stick to holistic systems as much as possible.

Another thing to watch out for is labels. Avoid labels like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘intelligent’, ‘talented’, ‘dull’, etc. Labels, even good ones, limit the scope of a person’s growth. Remind yourself that no matter what the child is or does you will love the child anyway, and act accordingly.

I read a beautiful novel once, which traced the lives of a batch of students from Harvard. When these people met several years later, they agreed upon one thing. ‘Harvard taught us to succeed, but they didn’t teach us how to live’. It was a very powerful and moving end. Is your child going to feel the same way tomorrow?

We are very score-oriented in India and act as if poor scores will result in an unhappy future for the child. But happiness is in the moment! Happiness is a choice and if your child knows this, it will be happy even if it’s earning half of what its peers do. Be clear in your mind and heart – do you want a happy child or a successful one? A child trained to be happy will most probably be successful too. But will a child trained to be successful be happy? Doubtful.

I’ll end with Mahatma Gandhi’s principle – ‘Be the change’. Parents are Gods to children and they learn from everything you do, every act and every word you say. They’re watching you and cloning you. Be someone that’s worth cloning, and that begins, I believe, by loving yourself whole heartedly.

Finding the Right Partner

Finding the Right Partner

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We live in a society where it is taboo to be alone. As they age, many singles feel like they’re nearing their expiry date, causing them additional stress over and above their work tensions, and making them feel older as well.

‘I desperately feel the need to have someone to care for me – someone who’ll be bothered whether I’m hungry or healthy’, one friend told me, adding that he wasn’t able to find the girl of his dreams – either he liked them, or they liked him, but it just didn’t seem to happen together. Those who are undergoing the process of ‘looking’ or ‘hunting’ for boys or girls for arranged marriages, are even more agonized. While a girl whined that she’s just not able to find a man who is willing to take a working and independent woman, and one who wouldn’t ask about the dowry before he enquired about her name, another guy friend complained that girls only seemed concerned about his salary, family property and whether he had scope of working abroad.

What we all need to do here is stop and ask ourselves – Does this really have to be this difficult? And to anyone acquainted with the universal laws of attraction (not talking about male-female attraction here), the answer is clear – NO.

No, it doesn’t have to be this difficult. No, they don’t have to suffer this much. No, not everyone in the world is concerned only about money, and no, you don’t have to settle for that last person just because you’re fed up and have lost hope. No.

It can be easy, yes, you can find that one person you’ve been waiting for all your life. Yes, you can have a happy married life, and yes, you can find joy, freedom and growth in a bright and happy relationship after marriage. But is that what you’re really asking for? Let us begin at the beginning.

We’re going to start with looking inside ourselves. There is just one real requirement to finding a partner – a desire to find one. And before you jump in your seats screaming ‘ofcourse I want a partner!!’, wait. Do you really want one? I mean really, really want one? Are you really, truly willing to let your defences down and allow a person to see the deepest, darkest sides of you? Are you really willing to place all your trust and faith in another person? Are you really willing to share every aspect of your life with another person? Yes? Probably not. There is a fear – and that is the fear that prevents that special someone from stepping into your life and sweeping you off your feet. You can’t be swept off your feet if you’re afraid of letting go of the ground. Let go.

Secondly, all our focus is on what we want from that other person, and not on what we can offer to them. We all want someone to care for us, someone to bother about us, someone to worry about us, someone to wait for us until we get home. But are we ready to give yet? Have we ever focussed our attention on being able to give of ourselves? Are we waiting just as desperately to care about someone? To bother, worry, and wait for that special someone? Are we looking forward to loving someone else with all our hearts for all our lives?

Despite the desperate want for that special someone, we’re afraid at the same time that we will lose our freedom. Marriage is looked upon so frequently as a permanent bondage, that it is hard to think of it otherwise. The desire to find a partner, and the fear of being bound do not go together. Fear sabotages any bright plans for the future. That marriage is not bondage, is a topic that requires an entire essay to emphasize the point. Only if a person is not willing to work at marriage, does it change a person for the worse and binds him/ her. If you want to be a person who doesn’t want to give his/ her all to the marriage and doesn’t want to work at it, you’ll be stuck with an unhappy, miserable relationship for the rest of your life, the type your children will look at and say ‘I don’t want to marry because people get miserable after marriage’.

For those who look forward to marriage and are willing to give it their all, it is a completely different experience. If you’re a person who wants to find that life -partner to love, care for and grow with and are willing to change yourself for the better to help the relationship, you’ll find the perfect man/ woman and live the kind of relationship that people will look at and want to emulate. Don’t resist change, embrace it – because these changes make you a better, stronger and happier person – isn’t that the kind of person you want to be?

A happy married life actually adds much more fun to one’s life! One never has to depend on friends to go on a trip, one tends to be more careful about expenses and hence has more money at one’s disposal, salaries are often double to boot, and you have someone who’s always there to help you become a better person – all you need to do is ask! Marriage is the easiest way to bring out the best in you.You can choose whether you want to be stuck and bound after marriage, losing your freedom, or whether you want to enjoy more than you ever have, and celebrate twice the freedom and love you’ve ever experienced in your life. Its your choice, and you have to make it both consciously and subconsciously.

So all you really need to do is take a good look inside your mind, figure out what is bothering you, what you are afraid of, and eliminate it. Thats all – and your life partner will breeze into your life so fast that you won’t even know what hit you. Trust me, I’m not exaggerating. Follow it correctly and you’ll find someone within a couple of months. It really is that fast.

The steps are simple to list, a little difficult to apply, but certainly doable, and bring great results.

1) Identify the emotion / fear that is preventing you from allowing yourself to totally submit yourself to another person.

2) Eliminate the fear/ blockage, talk to someone wise at this point if you have to. Or just talk to a happily married couple and get their views on the topic.

3) Start dreaming about the life you’ll have together. No matter what you do, think about that person. Think about how you’ll cook for each other, how you’ll make your birthdays special, how you’ll go on long drives together, etc. Whatever you do, think, how would this moment be once I find my partner? Dream about him/ her as you fall asleep.

4) Prepare for that person to step into your life. Start saving up for the life you’re going to have together. Look at romantic greeting cards. Stop to look at that wedding dress hanging in the store window. Read articles on how to be a good husband/ wife. Learn cooking. Take the plunge. Believe.

And lastly, LET GO. Several studies have shown that those who are incapable of being happy before finding a partner, are incapable of being happy after finding one. Provided you find the perfect one, it will bring you at most 2 years of a ‘high’. Identify the desire to chase this belief that you have everything except ‘this one last thing’, and drop it. Be happy now. Romance life, dance with every moment and if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone else doing the same dance too.

Love and Emotions

Love and Emotions

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Is it love or is it just an emotional addiction?

True love is something  we all covet, but when we stop to think about it, what is true love after all, and how do we recognise it? Does such a thing even exist? Then are all other ‘loves’ false? Yes and no. I believe that there is no difference, but I use the ‘true love’ term anyway, because people seem to call everything else love too.

People seem to mistake what I call ’emotional addictions’ to be love most of the time. An emotional addiction is something that is a very convenient arrangement atleast initially. Something like smoking. All of us have gaps and holes in our emotional personalities, and anyone who fills them is a favourite of ours, because they make us feel nice. But just like any addiction, these relationships slowly start strangulating the person, preventing his growth and making him miserable. It comes to a “can’t live with, can’t live without” situation, because staying with the person is misery, but without that person, one feels completely lost and starved. Just like withdrawal symptoms, actually.

Most relationships are varying degrees of emotional addictions. Where the need is more, the addiction, the bond, is stronger. And in case of separation, the pain is that much unbearable. When you see people wanting to commit suicide after being dumped, you know its a serious case of addiction – the absence of the lover leaves an emotional gap the person cannot handle.

Someone recently told me, “whats wrong if someone fills your emotional needs; if we have needs, obviously it is good if someone fills them”. No. This is why I say life must be a journey of constant self-development, a journey where you are constantly persevering to eliminate your own emotional needs. As long as you have these gaps, you’re susceptible. To steer clear of emotional addictions, you HAVE to work at filling your own gaps.

So now you’re wondering, how do I identify addictions and what is true love anyway? Think of a person you love very much. Now imagine them dead. How will you feel, will you survive? What are your biggest fears – that of being left alone? Or how you will manage the bills or the kids, or who will take care of you?? Those are your gaps. Those fears will tell you where your gaps are being filled.

The mother-child relationship is often hailed as the ideal love relationship because it is not based on need. I’m talking generally, ofcourse, I’ve seen a lot of mothers fail at it. However, generally the mother loves the child no matter what it does. It is not a need-based relationship – you can live away from your mother and you still feel her presence in your heart.

Coming to love, it is non-binding. It is something that helps you grow. When you are in love, you find yourself becoming the best person you ever were. All the best parts of you start blooming and the negatives start getting erased. Two people in love help each other grow, and help each other eliminate their own emotional needs. They’d be making their partners more independent in the process. The most important part of love is loving oneself. Love makes you see the beauty in yourself and realise that you’re special. And this love spills over and benefits everyone around you.

If you find yourself telling your lover ‘I can’t live without you’, think again, you have addiction written all over the relationship. But if you say ‘I can live without you, but I want to spend the rest of my life with you’, you probably have something going.

Coping with Emotional Turbulence

Coping with Emotional Turbulence

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When it gets dark and cloudy
And nature whips up a storm
It leaves everything wrecked
Abused, destroyed and torn

It is the eye of the storm
That’s the safest place to be
But it moves, before we know
No one is spared its fury

There is no escape
From things we are destined to bear
They comes and wreck up our lives,
But success lies in our capaciy to repair
The root cause of all our problems – whether mental, emotional or physical, lies in only one place – our mind. When something goes wrong, we tend to toss it in our minds, looking at the problem from all sides, analysing how it will devastate our lives, how things could get even worse, and so on. If one could just decide to stop thinking of it all, there would probably be no problems at all, but no, things just never seem to work that way.

The statement ‘take life as it comes’ has a much deeper meaning and is much tougher to apply in real life. We have to learn to accept our problems. More often than not, it is not the problem we are afraid of, but that it might last that way forever, or might make things worse. Just like if you try to run away from a dog, it will run after you, the more you try to get rid of a problem, it will make life more miserable for you.

This does not mean that we should not work towards solving problems – it just means that when we are trying to solve problems, we must remove from our mind, the fear the the problem might not get solved. It will.

This too shall pass
Once we realise that problems are here only to go, it will change our attitude to problems. To understand this concept, think of the most trying time you went through, and see how things sorted out themselves. That phase went away, this will too. Think of the good times, they went away too. Change is the only constant in life!

Having to Decide
Depression and fear are at their peak, when time is running out and one has to make a crucial decision fast. In situations such as these, we tend to get worried that we might make the wrong choice and end up suffering for the rest of our lives. Wrong. There is no such thing as a wrong decision – both the paths will teach you important lessons, and help you grow, which is the ultimate purpose of your life on earth.

The most helpful in a case like this, is to find someone who you know will help you put things in perspective, weigh the pros and cons and decide. And once the decision is made, never look back. Regret is only an excuse for your current failure.

Accept it
When you are depressed or afraid, do not worry over it. It is normal, and happens to everyone at some point in time. Accept your state, accept your misery, and accept that you are not being your normal, happy self. Give yourself that allowance, after all, you’re only human! It is ok to be depressed, and that does not make you any less lovable. Tell yourself that this is only a passing phase, and soon you’ll be happy again, and this will be nothing but a forgotten chapter of life.