Nurturing the spirit in the New Year

“It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated…it is finished when it surrenders.”Ben Stein

For me personally, the above quote is the perfect one to begin the New Year’s first post. After setting a personal target to write every day in 2010 when I began this blog, I was delighted when by December 2010, I had managed around 345 posts. After a diligent start to 2011, both reader fatigue and personal fatigue induced me to scale down my target to just around one post a week. Even this I realized was tough going and by December end 2011 I was just happy that the year had ended albeit with very little output to showcase on this blog. Then I chanced upon this quote and that injected fresh life into my blogging endeavor and here I am back with the hope of doing  much more than in 2011.

There would many like me who have enjoyed the high points of success but have also experienced the low point of drudgery that sometimes overwhelms us. This is inevitable, but surrendering meekly to it is optional. For almost every individual, life by and large is fairly routine, occasionally stressful, sporadically successful but largely very boring. At various points in this cycle of life, the temptation to give in and surrender meekly is often overwhelming, but then the spirit of survival takes over and coerces us to take charge of our life. It is this spirit that we are all blessed with which needs to be nourished so that it powers us from within to tide over the bumps, the hurdles, the pitfalls and the chasms that we need to cross in our journey called life.

This is my 4 A’s formula to help nourish the spirit.

Accept with grace. Good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, bountiful or frugal these are extremes in a continuum and we need to accept that in the journey of life we would be getting our share of these. Rather than crave for more of good or whine about our troubles we should calmly and deliberately focus on acknowledging the fact that we receive these only because we are alive. Life by itself is a grace of the almighty and what comes with it needs to be accepted as it is. By accepting ourselves unconditionally we are ensuring that our spirit is fully charged up within us.

Avoid negativity. Finding fault, making comparisons, being dissatisfied are very human traits. Notice that these are never found in the animal kingdom and yet we proudly claim to be a more evolved species.  The irony is obvious and so we would be better off taking a leaf out of the book of the animal kingdom and wake up each morning with the hope of a better day.  By avoiding the negatives we would be letting our spirit shine brighter.

Appreciate gratefully. As an evolved species we have the power of communication, higher level of intelligence, the special gift of being creative and the individuality that is so unique to each one.  We need to realize that with these special gifts we are empowered to meet any challenge. Once we appreciate this power within us, we would be reinforcing our spirit.

Align harmoniously.  We need to align our life to our goals, our dreams, our expectations by soaking in the grace that we are blessed with, eliminating the negativity that we are tempted to embrace and by adding zest to our living by appreciating the blessings given in abundance to us. When we align our thoughts, hopes, aspirations, expectations to our material, spiritual, intellectual and social wealth we would realize that the spirit engulfs us from within and we radiate that spirit in our thoughts, words and deeds.

Remember: Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey. (Quote by – Alex Noble)

Try this:

1. Play a game of snakes and ladders with a group consisting of someone much older, another person of around your age but of the opposite sex and a child. Notice that the group is heterogeneous and there is an equal probability of each person winning.  Can you see life as this game being played by characters not too different from those playing with you. The only difference is that in the game of life, everyone is assured of a win.
2. List out all your negative thoughts, fears, worries etc. one below the other. When you run out of ideas to include in this list, realign this list in order of your most worry some thoughts. Adjacent to this list, against each point write down all the blessings, positive points, the skill sets that you posses. Once you have listed this in the next column write down all your hopes, your aspirations, your dreams. Now study the table and put a line under the last row where each of the columns is filled in. Cut of all the items in the other two columns against which there is no item in any of the adjacent column. Put a time frame column adjacent to the dreams column and enter a time frame to achieve each of your dreams, hopes and aspirations. Make this your practical horoscope and envisage the future for yourself.

This post is courtesy www.actspot.com

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