Why we put Tilak on the forehead?

                                      Why we put Tilak on the forehead?

             Without the worship of Sri Ganesh no work in Sanatan Dharma should begin. Likewise, no religious work should begin without a Tilak on the forehead.

Tilak is a mark of auspiciousness. It is put on the forehead with sandal paste, sacred ashes or kumkum (red tumeric). The devotees of Siva apply sacred ashes (Bhasma) on the forehead, the devotees of Vishnu apply sandal paste (Chandan), and the worshippers of Devi or Shakti apply Kumkum, a red tumeric powder.

The scriptures say: "A forehead without a Tilak, a woman without a husband, a Mantra the meaning of which is not known while doing Japa (recitation), the head that does not bend before holy personages, a heart without mercy, a house without a well, a village without a temple, a country without a river, a society without a leader, wealth that is not given away in charity, a preceptor without a disciple, a country without justice, a king without an able minister, a woman not obedient to her husband, a well without water, a flower without smell, a soul devoid of holiness, a field without rains, an intellect without clearness, a disciple who does not consider his preceptor as a form of God, a body devoid of health, a custom (Achar) without purity, austerity devoid of fellow-feeling, speech in which truth is not the basis, a country without good people, work without wages, Sannyasa without renunciation, legs that have not performed pilgrimages, determination unaided by Viveka or discrimination, a knife which is blunt, a cow that does not give milk, a spear without a point- all these are worthy of condemnation. They exist for name’s sake only."

From this you can imagine the importance of Tilak or the sacred mark. Tilak is applied at the Ajna Chakra, the space between the two eyebrows. It has a very cooling effect. Application of sandal paste has great medicinal value, apart from the spiritual influence. Application of sandal paste will nullify the heating effect when you concentrate and meditate at the Bhrumadhya.

Tilak indicates the point at which the spiritual eye opens. Lord Siva has a third eye at the Brumadhya. When he opens the third eye, the three worlds are destroyed.

So also, when the third eye of the Jiva is opened, the three kinds of afflictions - Adhyatmika, Adhidaivika and Adhibhautika- are burnt to ashes. The three Karmas- Sanchita, Prarabdha and Agami,- and also all the sins committed in the countless previous births, are burnt. When you apply the Tilak, you mentally imagine: "I am the one non-dual Brahman free from all duality. May my eye of intuition open soon." You should remember this every time you apply a Tilak.

There are various methods of applying Tilak. Saivas apply three horizontal lines with the sacred ashes. The vaishnavas apply three vertical lines (Tripundra) on the forehead. When they apply Tilak, they say: "O Lord, protect me from the evil effects of the Trigunatmika Maya which has Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas as its binding cords."

Some Vaishnavas apply only one vertical line. Only the method of application differs, but the significance is the same in both the Vaishnavas and the Saivas. The Tilak is used in various ways for different reasons. Without the Tilak, Sandhya, Pooja, Deva Darshan,Tarpan and other religious activities should not be performed.

There are thirteen places on the human body where Tilak can be placed. However, it is only on the forehead that it is noble. The head is the summit of the body with the brain being the axis of the entire body.

According to Hindu Astrology, Mesh Rasi or the House of Aries is on the forehead. The Lord of Mesh is Mars and His colour is Red.This is why Red Chandan and Sindoor is placed as Tilak on the forehead.

The fingers used for applying Tilak are as follows: At the base of the little finger is Mecury,at the base of the ring-finger is Sun,at the base of the middle finger is Saturn,at the base of the index finger is Jupiter and at the base of the thumb is Venus.

Perfect peace is experienced at Sunrise, Saturn is the protector of lifespan, Jupiter represents immortality and Venus represents health. Tilak applied with the ring-finger and the thumb is very beneficial.

In addition to this, the Sun represents firmness, brilliance, honour, respect and faith. These are the blessings achieved by applying Tilak with the ring-finger. Venus gives lifeforce, health,is the creator of new life, the bestower of gentility and politeness. This is achieved by applying Tilak with the thumb.

Women should use the ring-finger for applying Bindie with unbroken rice grains. Men should also use unbroken rice grains(Akshat)mixed in red chandan and apply the Tilak with the thumb.

The unbroken rice grains symbolises steadfastness and firmness of the brain and is also a symbol of peace. It is reffered to as Deva Dhanya- grains of the Gods.

Yoga for a Broken Heart

                                                     Yoga for a Broken Heart

          I have spent the past two years using yoga alongside therapy to heal my emotional wounds. Suffering from pelvic pain, my asana practice revealed to me that my physical pain was a manifestation of my emotional pain. Once I released that, my pain subsided and I was able to cancel an impending surgery. I have seen numerous times in my practice and in my teaching that pain in the heart and the body can be helped or healed through yoga. Through my healing journey, my teaching has evolved to a more heart-centered approach; one that focuses on the connection between the mind, body, and heart and the belief that they are constantly striving toward wholeness. Here are a few of the techniques that I've used in my own life and teaching. 

                                          1. Use affirmations with Sun Salutations.

                  Bathe your body in the truth of who you are.  Each inhale say “I am”, each exhale say the affirmation (silently or aloud). Do one Sun Salutation per affirmation below. 

 Imagine!!

Red light at the base of the pelvis and say the words I AM SAFE 

Orange at low abdomen, I AM CONFIDENT 

Yellow at upper abdomen, I AM POWERFUL 

Bright green at heart center, I AM LOVING 

Pale blue at base of throat, I AM TRUTHFUL 

Deep blue between eyebrows, I AM WISE 

Violet above the head, I AM WHOLE

 White in the space slightly higher above the head, I AM FREE 

Soak in the effects of washing your body and mind in truth 

                                                          2. Talk to Your Pain 

                   When you feel physical pain, silently ask the pain what it is trying to tell you. Give it a chance to speak – tell it you're listening. Sometimes it helps to practice asana, journal, draw, or go for a walk during this process. 

                                     3. Ground the feet down and open the heart up 

                 Use standing and balance poses to help you feel grounded and present. Practice chest openers to help you keep your heart open. Interlace your fingers at your back, hug your shoulder blades and elbows together, reach the knuckles toward the floor, and lift the sternum and side ribs up. Do this as often as possible to help you keep your heart open to life and joy. 

                                                         4. Keep your heart soft 

                     Pain can cause you to close up. To help you stay open, place your right middle finger on your heart center and gently and slowly massage. In that spot, imagine a beautiful ray of light breaking through the clouds. Choose a quality of love that resonates for you, and imagine that quality shining brightly. Any time you need to remember this place of love and peace deep within you, put the right middle finger there gently.

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Reasons Your Company Should Start a Meditation Program

                             Reasons Your Company Should Start a Meditation Program

      "Please begin meditation" are the sounds that people are hearing at meditation centers in Boston, Chennai, Paris, and even Chile! These aren't just the sounds of people just meditating, but meditating on the heart.

        Meditation is an practice that focuses on the heart through the help of yogic transmission. The meditation system was formulated around universal love for others, and the essence that we are spiritual beings, and getting to the enlightened level is what we are looking for.

     Practitioners of Meditation have put through a simple process of learning to relax, and then meditate on divine light in the heart. Entrepreneurs such as Chirag Kulkarni, co-founder of Insightfully have spoken highly of the practice, calling it the "number one reason for success in business, health, and relationships".

     An popular meditation practice called Mindfulness, which is a Buddhist practice that espouses inner strength, balance, and compassion to create a harmonious and effective state of existence has taken effect in major companies such as Google and Apple, where thousands of individuals are trying to use it to improve their focus, efficiency, and productivity.
 
   Meditation practices are extremely successful, but why should you care if you are the CEO?
 here is why your company should start a meditation program at work.

1. Build company culture

         What is the number one reason why employees are retained at companies? Is it because of pay?
No, in fact, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the value of corporate culture is being one of the important aspects of why retention rates at some of the larger firms is going down. The single easiest way to build company culture is by creating initiatives that will inspire your employees to come to work, and learn.


2. Invest in your employees' growth

        How many businesses keep track of metrics such as week over week growth, or revenue growth? Most of the companies I speak with on a daily basis do.
But what fuels company growth? As Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square puts it, "a company is simply a company, the people are what execute the vision and drive it forward." This becomes blatantly obvious while looking at business metrics; human fuel growth!

3. Cut back on expenses

            Can meditation cut back on your company's expenses? It sure can, and here is how.
One of the main expenses that affect your businesses bottom line is human capital, which can include everything from the cost of maintaining employee healthcare costs, to employee productivity.
For example at Alumnify, we understand that even 2 hours of unproductive time spent by employee's means less work being done, which means lost opportunities and even revenue. That is a major expense for us, and anything we can do to avoid it is crucial.
Similarly, the more engaged and focused you can keep your employees, the more success you will have.
Meditation has helped millions in practical aspects of improving their lives, and building organizations that result in massive successes both personally and financially.

Guide to connecting you with your highest self

               Guide to connecting you with your highest self

    

     I personally believe that connecting to your higher self is actually more about allowing you to live in a state of peace and harmony within yourself – which will then naturally allow you to offer more to the world.

    

       I believe that connecting with the most wise, liberated, loving portion tha t already exists within you is not about becoming better – because there is really no thing that must be ‘improved’ within you. It is simply a matter of returning to who you have always been, and releasing all those things that never had anything to do with you in the first place.

                                         

       Essentially, connecting with your ‘higher self’ is simply you remembering who you are. It is you returning to a state of flow, and exiting a state of resistance. You do not have to try to be a good, caring, genuine person. You are those things already. You just have to release the blocks that have been built up in your emotional/mental/energetic bodies that prevent you from being who you are.

           

      These following steps are the easiest, quickest ways I’ve found to return you back to your center, back to your knowing, back to who you truly are and always have been –your highest self. These steps may seem overly simplistic, but give them a try and see how magical they really are! 

   1. Acknowledge Where You Are In This Moment

     The first thing I invite you to do when you want to move closer to being your highest self, is to simply make peace with where you currently are. Sit for a moment in silence and just allow yourself to arrive in this moment. Remove any expectation, even if it is just for a moment, and be. Feel the peace that comes with this allowing. Even if you only do this, and forget the rest of the steps, you have already shifted your state and raised your vibration. You have already made a step towards your highest self just by stopping the resistance to where you are. Pretty cool hey?

  

   2. Send Yourself Love & Compassion

        The second step is to love yourself in this moment. This is most likely what I like to call a “pattern interrupt” for you. For most, when we feel ourselves not living up to our potential, not acting or thinking or speaking in alignment with our highest good, our knee jerk reaction is to beat ourselves up. You are most likely used to berating and abusing yourself. This self-punishment will never get you to a place where you are aligned with your highest good. The reason? It lowers your vibration too much! When you are shaming, blaming and guilting yourself you are re-creating the exact environment that took you out of alignment with your highest self in the first place. By consciously choosing to love yourself where you are at in this moment you take another step up the vibrational scale, bringing yourself one step closer to your highest self.

   3. Send Your Behaviour/Thought Pattern Love & Compassion

        The third step is to send love and compassion to your ‘negative’ behaviour/thought/belief. Like with step two, you are most likely in a habit of hating your negative behaviours – getting upset with yourself that you constantly run to food to numb your emotions, hating that you speak badly about people, judging your actions. If you can instead send love and compassion to your negative behaviour, you may notice that it is actually there with a positive intention. You may discover that your over eating is simply there to help you deal with your negative emotions in a way that makes you feel like you have some power and control. Perhaps this over eating is a protection mechanism that is helping you so that you don’t just drown in an emotion you don’t know how to deal with in this moment. By bringing your negative patterns into the light of love, you will see them for what they really are – and in that you will have the power to start transforming them into self-loving patterns.

  

   4. Tell Yourself What You Would Tell Your Best Friend Right Now

       Next, speak to yourself the way you would speak to your most beloved friend if they came to you feeling or acting the way you are currently acting. There is a good chance you are not going to tell them that they are dumb, stupid, selfish and awful or any of the other harsh things you most likely tell yourself.  Meet yourself with understanding and compassion. Meet yourself with the words you wish someone would say to you as you are feeling the way you are feeling. Meet yourself with this love and see how it automatically lifts you.

  5. Choose An Activity That Makes You Feel Good

         Finally, choose an activity that you know lifts your energy – lifts your vibration. Ask yourself “what would someone who loved themselves do right now?” and then do that! Understand that your highest self is the self that fully, totally and completely loves and accepts you and everyone else. So by engaging in something that aligns with what you would do if you loved yourself, you are aligning yourself with the behaviour that reflects your highest good. Your highest self. Choosing to act from a place of love, rather than a place of fear in this moment IS you living as your highest self.

Remember, your highest self is already fully formed and fully active within you. You may just need to remember how to connect with this portion of yourself. Take some time to consider how little beating yourself up does for you, and to consider that acting in a loving and compassionate way towards yourself –especially when you are at your worst –may be the exact thing you need to do to connect you with your highest good.

    Pleasure and pain, happiness and grief, friendliness and enmity are temporary experiences!!

      Bhagvad Gita Chapter 2.14 God Krishna says, "O Kontey, the interaction of sense and sense objects give the heat, cold, pleasure and pain. These sensual feelings are temporary, appearing and disappearing; therefore you tolerate them."

      Pleasure and pain, happiness and grief, friendliness and enmity, desire and fatuation, these are experiences of our sensory organs. Because our sensory organs eyes, ear, nose, skin, tongue, and mind are constantly in the receptive mode, it keeps getting these feelings. When you hear good words it pleases your sense but when you hear abusive words then it creates agony. Similarly when you eat a tasty food it pleases our tastebuds but, when we eat bitter food then it creates unpleasant feeling. But, these feelings are not permanent, it keeps changing.

     God Krishna says that one should never consider any of the sensory agonies as permanent and act based on these temporary feelings. Wise people learn to master the skills for ignoring these mental disturbances. Favorable and unfavorable circumstances are just a cyclic wheeling of nature like too much heat or too much cold; both can make a tree lifeless.

          What Is Qi? What Are The Benefits Of Controlling Qi? 

                      We've all heard it before: “energy”, “spirit”, “essence”, “soul.” But all of these things refer to one thing, which traces its roots back to traditional Chinese culture: Chi. Also known as Qi, or Ki in some cultures, Chi, translated literally, means “breath” or “air”, the life force or energy flow that fills every living thing. But while this concept sounds like some mumbo-jumbo to many skeptics, in recent years science has shown some evidence that reveals the very concepts of Chi itself. But what exactly is Chi? And why is it important for us?

                                                                      What Is Qi?

The concept of Qi is simply the life process or the “flow of energy” that is found within all living things. While the concept itself is of Asian origin, it is also found in other cultures, like in ancient Greece and India, and found in Jewish and to an extent Christian traditions. The “life force” is not just within each living thing, but also serves as a connection to other living things and their surroundings. This means that everyone and everything is part of the cosmic network, where the one affects the many, and ripples in the events of the world eventually reach everyone else.

Qi is also said to have different categories, can be turned into many different forms of matter or energy, can be used to heal or destroy, and can be used to extend life and, in some cases, even slow the effects of aging.


                                                             Harnessing And Using Qi

Being able to harness the power of Qi gives the person the ability to enjoy its benefits in many different ways. And there are many avenues that people can employ to be able to harness Qi.

1.)    Feng Shui – one of the most common ways to harness Qi is through Feng Shui, which is the art of properly arranging a space and choosing proper placement of objects and any other elements. It can be employed from a small room to whole complexes like commercial centers and condominiums. The concept behind Feng Shui is balancing the flow of Qi, to be able to have it interact properly with the 5 elements of Chinese tradition, have it flow in the right directions, and so on. Properly retaining or dissipating Qi in key points is believed to affect everything from the health of the occupants to the wealth that comes in the area, to the overall luck of the vicinity.


2.)    Martial Arts – another common way to harness Qi is with martial arts. There are many martial arts, both Eastern and Western, that use Qi whether they know it or not. It is known as the explosive use of the internal energy, and can be commonly seen when one sees or hears a martial artists “yell” during a move. Qi can be used in martial arts many different ways, from turning flesh impervious to damage, to making heat radiate from the palms or other areas, to being able to achieve feats of strength that can commonly be associated with superheroes, like punching through walls of stone.

 

 

3.)    Qigong/Tai-chi/Active Meditation – all referring to virtually the same thing, qigong is the concept of uniting proper movement, breathing, meditation, and cosmic awareness, which is said to balance and even increase one's Qi. It can be described as a combination of martial arts, meditation, and personal feng shui, qigong is a method that anyone can do. It can also promote relaxation, heal the body of its ailments, and in advanced levels, actually slow down aging. This is why people see a lot of elderly qigong and tai-chi practitioners in parks all over Asia!

Cultivating and harnessing Qi is a valuable skill that people can learn and benefit from. Binaural beats can help in this regard.
 

 

Tips for Establishing a Daily Meditation Practice

                                         Tips for Establishing a Daily Meditation Practice

                                                               It sounds so obvious, I know. In fact, you'd think it would go without saying. But training the mind, meditating, being mindful, or whatever else we choose to call it only works if we actively engage with it. More than that, it only works if we practice it regularly, preferably on a daily basis with a considered, gentle discipline.
 
                                                               The obvious comparison is training the body, perhaps to get fit or to lose some weight. It's not enough to have the membership card of the gym in our bag or the shiny new trainers at home, hoping we might get fit by osmosis. We need to actually turn up for the event, to engage in physical exercise on a regular basis to experience the benefits. The same is true of the mind.

      Meditate first thing in the morning if you can. 

              It will ensure it gets done, gets rid of any grogginess from your sleep and is a great way to start the day. It will also mean you are more likely to be mindful throughout the day.

                           

         If you choose to do it at another time of day, prioritize it. 

             This means putting it in the diary and committing to it in the same way you would to any other kind of meeting. Whether it is 10 minutes or considerably longer, nothing is more important than the health of your mind.
                                            
                                                           Think "same time, same place."
              When you are looking to develop a new practice, activity or habit, this simple motto will dramatically increase the likelihood of you doing it. Try to create a conducive environment in which you can immediately relax into and make it part of your daily routine. 

                        
                                   Some people find it useful to "attach" their meditation to another daily activity to strengthen the habit.
                For example, think "tea and then meditation," or perhaps "shower and then meditation." By doing this, we  integrate the practice into a well-established routine that already exists. 

                                 
                                                                Be flexible, no matter what. 
                If you intend to train the mind for the rest of your life, you can be sure that there will be days when your routine is thrown out of shape. Don't let that be an excuse to skip a day, just do it later instead. It is always better to sit for a short while than not at all, even if it is only a minute.
    
                                             
                                                              Avoid judging your meditation.
                It is tempting to think you are "good" or "bad" at meditation. In truth, there is no such thing. There is only distraction or non-distraction. If you tell yourself you are bad at something you will lose all motivation and are unlikely to do it. If you understand the purpose, this will never be a problem.
                
                         
                             Always reflect on the benefits of meditation at the end of the session.
                Notice how you feel, physically, mentally and emotionally. The more you establish the connection between training the mind and feeling better, clearer, or calmer, the easier it becomes to sit down and practice each day.
                           
                                                         Keep an "excuse book" close to hand. 
                The idea of this is that when it's time to do your meditation, if you choose not to do it for any reason, you write down why you are choosing not to do it. It may sound strange, but often when we see the excuse on paper, we realize that we really do have the time and that it really does matter.
                                      
                                      
                                                                   Find a buddy to do it with.
                 It doesn't have to be physically together, or even at the same time, but find a friend who's also looking to establish a regular practice and commit to helping each other out. Knowing that someone else is making an effort and may ask us if we have done it or not, can help to strengthen our commitment.

                                                 
                                                            Be realistic in your expectations.
                 Training or taming the mind is a skill to develop over a lifetime.  Sure, there are some immediate benefits to be found, but some take longer than others. If expectations are too high then you may well feel disappointed and demotivated at some stage. So just take one day at a time.