International Meditation Society Sivananda Ashram, Victoria, BC
A recent correspondant asked: "Can your organisation bring back self-confidence and memory etc?"
Here is our reply:
Oh Glorious Atman! Hari Om to you! No organisation does anything TO anyone! We permit and usually re-inforce regularly, the way we think and therefore act: All of us, no exceptions! So therefore, self confidence is boosted by successes or battered by failures to achieve some goal, which we have set ourselves. We can make it very difficult for our self confidence to rise much by setting ourselves very hard or impossible targets or we can increase our self confidence by setting ourselves relatively easy, short term goals and achieving them. You have to admit that a series of small successes behind you is more likely to lead to further success than, say, one bigger success, which was extremely risky and doubtful. In the first case, a habit of succeeding has been created, both in your conscious and subconscious mind and therefore the expectation of succeeding again, which leads to just that as a rule. However the second case is extremely doubtful and much more likely to fail next time and so on. So, to build self confidence, set yourself a series of easily attained goals, achieve them and go on from there. As regards a failing memory; there is no snap answer to this. It may be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, perhaps too many years of cooking in aluminium cooking pots, brain trauma caused by auto accidents etc., or just plain inactivity over a long time! In the latter case ( and perhaps all of them), intense use of your brain and mind should improve things. For instance, do lots of mental puzzles such as crosswords, solve mysterys, play chess and other games that challenge you and force you to think things through. Unfortunately, our society with its new habit of letting TV do all its thinking for it, may well end up severely crippled mentally becuase of lack of independent thinking. So, good luck with your projects. If you don't have any, make some! And do a lot of planning, but then make the plans work through your own intensive INTEREST (the key ingredient). From your question to us, I presume you feel that an organisation or person can change your self confidence or improve your memory. I hope you can see from my comments, that it is through personal effort and interest that one solves those challenges. God bless you. NadaBramananda......at Gurudev's feet.
Copyright - (C)1998 International Meditation Society - IMS
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