It's Only Mind

By A.T. Rajkumar

This book contains simple and practical truths and guidelines as to how we can achieve our desires and goals without getting stressed, keeping our emotions calm, and living life in an effective manner. It shares how we can create a right mindset, what understandings and realizations we need to reach, what changes we need to make in our mind, thoughts, beliefs and emotions, how we can nurture and heal relationships and achieve our goals through an experience of deeper stillness and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pustaka Digital Media
• Release date: Oct 5, 2023
• ISBN: 6580546410215

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It's Only Mind

(Mind It Books Series)

Author:

A.T. Rajkumar

For more books

https://www.pustaka.co.in/home/author/at-rajkumar

Digital/Electronic Copyright © by Pustaka Digital Media Pvt. Ltd.

All other copyright © by Author.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STAYING HAPPY AND EMBRACING CHANGE

GETTING OUT OF ADDICTIVE HABITS AND SELF SABOTAGING BEHAVIOURS

HEALING RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE

DEALING WITH OVERTHINKING, ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION

FACING ANGER, FEAR, GUILT, JEALOUSY, LONELINESS AND GRIEF

BECOMING AWARE OF THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS

EXPERIENCING STILLNESS AND PEACE

PREFACE

Every person wants to fulfill certain ambitions, goals, and desires to make himself or herself happy in life. Humans have defined success in life in terms of money, popularity and power. However, in the process of making ourselves happy by achieving these ambitions, goals, and desires, we have laid extra focus on success and seem to lose our innate sense of joy, peace and calm.

We create certain expectations and want outcomes, as per our expectations. When we don’t see the desired outcomes, or when we face challenges and failures, we get stressed. We fail to see the truth of life and often feel lost and disillusioned. One of the truths, is that life is not about winning always. It is also not about earning a lot of money, power and popularity. The journey of life includes challenges, defeat, failures, and feeling the discomfort of it all.

This certainly means that if our ambitions, goals, and desires are to be met, we have to come out of our comfort zones. We have to be willing to take risks, handle responsibilities, and not be lazy about them. We have to create the right mindset to understand that we can neither lose nor win, irrespective of anything that happens in the world.

Another important aspect is to understand that comparison is one of the worst things that human minds can do. People tend to compare themselves with others and are also scared of comparison. This results in a negative mindset including: jealousy, insecurity, fear, ego, and to certain extent - negativity and greed.

In my own life experience, my father was famous for comparing between his children. When we were young, he used to compare amongst my brothers. He always found me ineffective in comparison with my other brothers. This led to a feeling of depression in me. It created pressure, fear, anxiety, jealousy, and ego in me, as a child and well into my teenage years. When I had a love marriage, he said, You are the only odd fellow in this family. During that time, I was also the only sibling who didn’t have a proper job while all my brothers were well settled.

I was extremely depressed with all his statements and life didn’t seem to be going well for me. Until, I got married and went out of the house. Then, opportunities came to me through a business, and I started earning well. I got everything in life in terms of material happiness, and more importantly, an undisturbed mind irrespective of anything happening outside of me. My father now started saying that I was the richest, most blessed and satisfied among all his children. By this time, I was not excited about his statements, thanks to the complete realization of a beautiful mind.

I knew the pain that will be caused to others when they were compared with me. So, I didn’t accept the new statement by my father and I chose not to believe in that. One becomes big in worldly terms only when opportunities, situations and circumstances come to them. If the so called ‘worst people’, or any other gets the same opportunities and circumstances, even they can become big. So, what is the point in saying that someone is the best or someone is the worst It’s like a 100-meter running race with someone starting at 50mts and another at 0mts! I have learned this as a realization from my own life experience!

The right mindset also means that at times, we don’t have to bother about our mind at all. It finds its own solutions without the need to trouble it. Keeping our mind in stillness can help us overcome a lot of problems. To keep the mind still, we have to practice certain mind exercises such as meditation. These practices help cultivate a calm, mute, and neutral state, that leads to a lot of realizations and solutions while overcoming anger, overthinking, negativity, bad habits, emotional disturbances, fear, anxiety and all mind related issues. It is good to learn these practices and realize the truths early in life to enjoy life to the fullest and achieve our greatest potential.

This book answers questions posed by several people while facing their life challenges and stresses. This book contains simple and practical truths and guidelines as to how we can achieve our desires and goals without getting stressed, keeping our emotions calm, and living life in an effective manner. It shares how we can create a right mindset, what understandings and realizations we need to reach, what changes we need to make in our mind, thoughts, beliefs and emotions, how we can nurture and heal relationships and achieve our goals through an experience of deeper stillness and peace.

This is the third book being published in the Mind It series by A.T. Rajkumar. The previous two books Mind It... You don’t have to be a Swamiji and Mind It... Realizations and Solutions - Blanking the (Thinking) Worries have met with tremendous success. On popular demand and for wider outreach, these books were also translated into Tamil and Hindi languages and were well received.

Enjoy the read!

Best Wishes

A.T. Rajkumar

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author, A.T. Rajkumar has already written 2 earlier books in the Mind It series that are available in the market, immensely popular, and well received by a wide audience. These books are a compilation of his answers to questions posed to him by several people to him about various issues and aspects of the mind, thoughts, emotions, life and relationships. Rajkumar has answered these questions through his knowledge and wisdom consolidated from personal experiences, learning and realization.

He was afflicted with depression for some time in his own life. This made him lose a few precious years of his life from his teenage years until the age of 40. However, this phase of life made him turn to spirituality for solutions. Spirituality helped him overcome his struggle with depression. It helped him lead a successful life with a positive attitude. He attended different teacher’s classes and practiced Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation techniques to help him find satisfaction and peace of mind.

Through these books, he has tried to share his understandings, realizations and techniques. The answers provided are based on questions received from others who face similar challenges and want to realize their thoughts, their mind, and start living life to their fullest potential.

Rajkumar is eternally grateful to be blessed with an excellent wife, beautiful children, amazing parents, loving brothers, sisters and fantastic friends. He loves listening to songs and has a flair for singing. He also enjoys sports like tennis and chess.

STAYING HAPPY AND EMBRACING CHANGE

How can we make our life happy?

Iwould like to share a personal experience here to explain this. One of the most beautiful experiences I have ever had in my life was during my eighth standard annual holidays. In the vacation, I would get up early, take a bath, eat breakfast and meet my friends living in my colony. We would play business, a board game involving trading all day long. We never felt like ending it and would even skip lunch at times. We would go to bed with that exciting feeling and in anticipation of the next day.

The same feeling happened during my 10th standard holidays with games of carrom, chess and cricket. We want life to be stay that way always a lot of fun without much responsibility. Enjoying was our only ambition in life. Right after college, without a job, friends would meet at 10 in the morning, go to the movies and have a beer in the evening. We long for this kind of a life throughout. During a love relationship with someone, we go out to an exotic place, take a long drive and watch a movie and it turns out to be an amazing day. We want all of life to be this way. We want outings with families and friends even after marriage. We want life to be exciting throughout.

But we fail to realize who makes it possible. During our childhood holiday our parents are cooking breakfast for us, washing our clothes, earning money for us to buy the business game. They are behind our happiness and enjoyment. We fail to realize sometimes that they are also human beings and they also have the same feelings. They will also want to enjoy life like this. It should be your turn or responsibility to make them enjoy too.

After the exciting weekend, going to schools, colleges, work places on a Monday morning is a horrible feeling. Realize that you are a part of an education system which gives salaries and livelihood to teachers and supporting staff. With that they have to bring joy to their children. We feel horrible to attend schools and offices without thinking about these responsibilities. Realize this and you will never start feeling terrible on Mondays.

Moreover, anything gets boring after sometime. Playing a game for hours together, chatting with friends for hours, going to the same tourist spot often, becomes boring after sometime. Meeting and spending time with your boy / girl friend is interesting because of the impediments in meeting. We calculate the happiness of meeting once a while and think that once we are married, we can have the same happiness and excitement 24x7 - 365 days. But once you both are easily available to each other, life starts getting boring. All these get boring because it becomes monotonous. Realize this and balance your life.

Be away from some important people for some time to create the excitement and balance your activities too. If you are interested in some specific activity, don’t be in that always. Balance your activities and spend time on other things. After sometime when you come back to your favorites, it will be interesting. Mix different activities like sports, family time, social service time, work time and life will be exciting. Lead your life this way and you will not have quarrels with anyone.

How can we achieve a happy and balanced life?

Life is totally about balancing. If you are able to have a technique of balancing most things, then life will be amazing. For example, you play tennis and are going to play a match with someone. Obviously, you go with the intention of winning the match. The match starts and the opponent is making a lot of unforced errors and faults and you win the match. You are not satisfied with the win, as the excitement of tennis is to hit the ball as many times and win rallies and then the match. The next day, a match is happening where you are able to hit the ball a lot and play rallies but the opponent is winning the points. You are losing. You want your opponent to make errors, as you are unable to win while rallying with him. At one point of time, you started thinking that you want him to make a lot of errors without hitting the ball because winning is eluding you.

Take these two cases. You want to hit the ball and you also want to win. You want everything to happen equally. When hitting the ball eluded you, you wanted that and when winning eluded you, you wanted it to happen without even hitting the ball. So, you want both to get the satisfaction you want. The same thing applies to most cases in our life. The mind wants what it is deprived of. You also have to experience everything in proportion to get satisfaction in life.

Another way of achieving calmness or happiness is to keep your mind mute. When a positive or winning situation is happening, don’t get excited. Observe calmness and become calm. Being calm is a kind of happiness. If you are able to be mute and calm during a positive happening, you will definitely be able to be calm during a negative situation. This is called balancing the happiness and suffering.

Why do I feel like I need permission to be happy?

Suppose you have 3 problems - x, y and z. Your mind will always think about that and the mind gets stressed. Meanwhile, there are some happy situations happening. Your mind will be happy for some time and then think, ‘I am happy now and looks as if I don’t have worries.’ It checks whether you have any worries and the mind starts remembering x, y, z issues. Suddenly, you are conscious of all the pre-existing problems and your mind says that you should not be happy now with all these problems. Your mind thinks that you can be happy only after all the existing problems are solved. It will start thinking about those issues and the happy situation is completely gone.

There is nothing like you can be happier only after the issues are over. Although you have hundreds of problems, you can be happy for any positive or happy situation happening right now. Force yourself to get focused in the present and blank the unnecessary negative thoughts. If you feel like developing or solving it, don’t do all that. Get focused in the present and blank the unnecessary thoughts whenever they come. After sometime, it will go away from your mind. Consciously enjoy the calmness. You should be in the particular moment to enjoy that calmness. If you develop this attitude, at any point of time, you will not have any problems.

For each and every issue, there is a solution. There is a way to handle it or accept it, if there is no solution. Acceptance itself is a great solution. If you develop this attitude, you will not need permission from anyone to be happy. You can be happy always.

What are some mindfulness hacks to make me feel happy instantly?

Here are some techniques you can practice. Let us say that there are 4 issues worrying you. Just after you get up from bed, close your eyes and visualize those issues getting solved. That’s it. It gives you immediate relief and you will be raring to go. You will feel positive. Visualizing creates resources and solutions too.

Usually, most of us have man-to-man egoistic issues. If someone has hurt you badly, instead of having revenge thoughts, start visualizing that the other is patching up with you or is becoming close to you. This brings peace of mind. Revenge thoughts make you stressed. Infact, the vibration reaches the other and makes him feel closer to you.

Force yourself to get focused in the present moment or activity. It can be your favourite passion, some useful activity, listening to some music etc.

Practice of Meditation is the best technique to help you focus on the present moment. It is a mind exercise rather than a spiritual one. It helps one calm the mind. There are two great advantages of doing it. In meditation, we focus on one image or a mantra. By doing this regularly, we start focusing on one thing and learn to live in the present moment.

Another advantage is, while we are focusing on an image or a mantra, our mind will definitely travel to unrelated thoughts. When you are consciously aware that you are distracted from the image or mantra, you will realize it and get back into focus. By doing this regularly, you can easily get away from other thoughts and come back to focus. In this case, unnecessary thoughts like worrying about the past or future can be overcome. By doing meditation regularly, you can solve both your issues.

Why is it important to accept something whole heartedly?

Recently in my house, we gave a plumbing labor contract to a person. After taking three quotations, we finalized the person to do the work at a fixed price of Rs. 35,000. It went on well and he did a good job. They were working fast and finished early. We gave the payment happily.

A similar type of contract came up again after 3 months. This time we thought we would hire people and pay them through daily wages. We hired