Quick Reads From Awakening Wholeness: a book that helps young leaders develop compassion for Myself, Others and The Earth.
Our Mission is supporting Youth Globally in learning Compassion for Oneself, Others & our Environment.
The master key to health is keenly observing how life works, being in touch with the signals of life in the form of feelings, and being conscious of your needs. It means coming back home to the purity, fluency, open-heartedness, and open-mindedness that life is already programmed for.
It is to consciously and effortlessly remain focused on the flow of life in the now and not stray away from that.
Here is an example. Imagine it is “lunchtime,” and your body is clearly telling you that you are not hungry. Then honour that feeling and do not eat. Do not let your mind hijack what your body is telling you.
A classic study was conducted by the American paediatrician Clara Marie Davis in 1928 on the free choice of food for small children before weaning. During this time, she evaluated 15 children in a study that lasted for six years (1939). Her findings are shown below:
1. None of the children spontaneously chose a diet with large amounts of grain or dairy products, contrary to the (still in vogue) doctrine of nutritional science (the basis of the food pyramid);
2. None of the children became overweight or underweight during the study period, and
3. All of the children developed a skeleton and musculature that were radiologically proven to be excellently calcified. When I think of nutritional choices, intuition, and trusting the
guidance of the body, my mind is automatically reminded of horses. They trust their instincts and end up eating fresh grass, hay, oats, chickpeas, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, and fruits. This helps them develop beautifully formed bones and muscles. They do not consult “Food Pyramids” or treatises on nutrition. They trust life.
What keeps us away from health are things that come out of the ego, bringing the cleverness of the mind to the innocence of life. This manifests as a certain sense of “I know better than nature” or “I’m going to do this because a film on YouTube or WhatsApp says so.”
A question worth reflecting on is how I can gently understand the mechanisms and beautiful dynamics of nature and trust my intuition and body wisdom to guide me.
Healthy living for most people means both physical and mental health are in balance or functioning well together in a person. In the end, all that matters is that you are happy. Thoughts
can trigger emotions and also serve as an appraisal of those emotions. In addition, how we attend to and appraise our lives has an effect on how we feel.
~ Arusha, 16, India
To see the link between balancing and connection, let’s imagine two tanks of water connected with a pipe that can be kept ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’ using a valve.
Now with the valve in the ‘Closed’ position, thereby closing the connection, one tank is filled to the brim, while the other tank is half empty. Since the valve is closed, the level of water remains high in one tank and low in the other.
Now imagine that we open the valve in the connecting pipe. Water from the higher tank starts flowing to the lower tank. Within a short while, the levels are the same in both tanks, resting at a balanced midpoint.
There are many times when we think and act like isolated islands. Our food habits, patterns of thought, our experiences, and our feelings remain locked into a single pattern.
If I have grown up in a certain environment with a certain group of people, my responses are coloured by my mental conditioning. This is like the unconnected tank in the metaphor above.
If I hold a single story in my mind and have a limited perception of events, my mind is not connected. When, on the other hand, I listen to the stories of other people and look at other perspectives on the same events, things begin to change in my mind.
Balance is restored when we are connected to and consciously in touch with our feelings, our bodies, and our environment. When we travel, we are in touch with other perspectives — different food choices, different cultures, and different ways of looking at the world.
Travel is a beautiful way to enhance connections and bring about more wholesome experiences in one’s life.
Consider a simple thing like salads. Going to Uzbekistan, you find the Achichuk salad made from tomatoes and onions, the Shopska salad in Bulgaria, the yummy Tabouleh from Lebanon, the Conch salad in the Bahamas, the Azifa in Ethiopia, and the Salată de Roșii in Romania. My mouth is watering as I write this!
And I am getting ready to prepare for my next journey. Consider this statement by the writer Mark Twain on how travelling can help expand consciousness:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
~ Mark Twain
Even if we cannot travel, we can connect with people from other cultures. Each culture brings some gifts to the common good of humanity.
This is like different pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle coming together to form a complete picture. When we all share our gifts freely, in a spirit of open giving and receiving, we are all enriched.
In The Epilogue, we will share with you a process called “Youth Collaborating for Compassion”. Through this simple process of connecting, conversing, and co-creating, young people like you can start making friends with people from all over the world to learn, grow, and contribute together.
I was thrilled to be a part of a conversation between school children from Hosur, Tamil Nadu, India, and East Java, Indonesia. The children from Indonesia spoke proudly of the Prambanan Shiva temple in Yogyakarta.
This temple, built in the 10th century, is the largest temple devoted to Lord Shiva in Indonesia. The temple houses numerous portrayals of the Ramayana with references to Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma — the three great Hindu deities — along with three temples devoted to the animals that were believed to serve them. The conversation was an eye-opener for all of us.
I had never heard of the Prambanan Shiva Temple. Nor had the children in Hosur, India. Further, we were pleasantly surprised when our young friends from Indonesia spoke of how dancers from Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand enacted scenes from the Ramayana with music and dance at the International Ramayana Festival — all celebrating the universal values of heroism, truth, and loyalty.
Healthy living is a way of leading our lifestyle so that we remain mentally and physically healthy. Having a good diet and exercising regularly keep the human body intact. In my opinion, if we have positive thoughts and feelings, we remain happy. We should always keep ourselves busy with some form of work to maintain this positivity.
~ Adithya, 16, India
Being connected to our deepest core of compassion — being compassionate to ourselves, to other people, and to the environment — is the foundation for wholehearted living.
When we lead a connected and therefore balanced life, there is a sense of peace, joy, and freedom that we experience in the body and mind. In what follows, I will share with you a few tools and tips that have come from Dr. Pravin Chordia (MBBS, MS). He leads an organisation called Medicine-Free Life.
