Birth of ProJoy: Prosperity with Joy

Today my journey to further explore JoyMantras of "Prosperity with Joy" brought me to an exciting realization and I want to share it with everyone. I wanted to call this concept "Spiritual Materialism" but like any other term on the Internet, this term was also already utilized for a concept totally in contrast with my thoughts. So I though why not coin a new term "ProJoy" i.e. "Prosperity with Joy". Now let us dive into the details:

When I was getting my first introduction to Spirituality, either because of my biased listening or because of speaker's intentional communication, spirituality and materialism were polar concepts for me. I thought I had to choose one or the other. Mostly, spirituality was tied to talks about God and how desires are mother of all bad things that happen to us. So materialism was understood as quagmire that pulls you deep under - away from Joy.

Now coming to my recent realization - If you think about it, India was most prosperous when it had strong spiritual and cultural values. Even today, when discussion comes to what we have contributed to the world and what are we today known for - it comes to spirituality and culture. In all honesty we have to confess that most of the credit for India being spiritual and cultural goes to our golden past. That means, spiritualism and materialism did exist in harmony and no reason whey they can not coexist today.

In Dalai Lama's words in 'Art of Happiness', "The natural flow of life is towards Happiness". So we all are seeking Joy. We all want peace and also want materialistic wealth to fulfill our desires. None of that is bad. But do we want want a lot of money but no peace? In all honesty how many of us will be able to live in peace even if we have no materialistic wealth in the modern times? Therefore, for a Joyful Life we need to create a balance between our desires to obtain prosperity and our efforts to live a peaceful life. Our ancient wisdom (developed over hundreds of year) has some golden nuggets for us in the form of Dharam Shastra or Science of Desire Management. Its essence is to guide us to fulfill legitimate desires by legitimate means without getting enslaved by them and ultimately learning to outgrow them to attain total fulfillment. Most of us in the process of fulfilling desires either develop stronger of the same or new desires. So we never feel fulfilled. Having no desires will result in the whole world turning ascetic, which is also not practical. The middle path solution is "Desire Management".

All desires originate from desire to get happiness. So how to live in ProJoy state? Which desires should be fulfilled and when? I will sum up this blog with 7 Sutras of Desire Management to achieve ProJoy. Based on the readers' response, I will then further expand on them.

Sutra 1: Let go of illegitimate desires: Desires that result in adharma and sorrow

Sutra 2: Do not fulfill legitimate desires with illegitimate means

Sutra 3: Fulfill legitimate desires with legitimate means

Sutra 4: Cultivate desires for selfless action

Sutra 5: Let go attachment to the result

Sutra 6: Achieve ProJoy while being righteous

Sutra 7: Meditate on your desires & see if they shrink below your means - result ProJoy.

I wish you all a ProJoy Living !!!

Sept 11, 2011: WisdomXchange - A Spark with the power to illuminate humanity...

On Sept 11, 2011 when people were remembering how world changed for worse ten years ago in New York; a group of friends met in a warehouse in Bangalore to ignite a spark of a positive social change. The idea was simple yet profound - "WisdomXchange to Transform Our Lives".  It was not preaching, it was sharing. Everyone picked up something from others. And that is how the first session of "WisdomXchange" left us all enriched. For me personally, meeting new friends was exhilarating, and being able to touch their lives - pure joy. Our primary focus was not letting acquired knowledge ferment and evaporate but internalize it and use it for our own and societal good. 


It all beings with thought. An evil thought can cause destruction, where as a noble thought can create joyful wonders. We hope that "WisdomXchange" will help people connect with each other at human level by wisdom sharing, and compassion & caring. 


Looking forward to more such fantastic "WisdomXchange" sessions and to meet more such wonderful people. 

Emotional Intelligence 101

I was curious to know more about Emotional Intelligence and found it very interesting. So thought of sharing some key ideas with all...
Emotional Intelligence is being aware of your emotions as well as emotions of others you are interacting with; and using emotional awareness for making informed decisions or initiating actions. The emotional state you are in & what you are thinking at any time can affect your response to an unrelated event. Your response depends on your state of mind. So it does for others too. It is important to understand your own emotional state as well as emotional state of others to have a productive interaction with others. Non verbal cues may duplicate, underscore, match, oppose or replace verbal communication. It is not easy to read non-verbal cues, and therefore it is hard to gain absolute understanding of what a person is actually communicating. In my future posts, I will post some techniques to handle effective communications in the context of emotional intelligence.
Let me share a practical scenario that we all might have encountered in our professional life. Usually during any brainstorming session people get argumentative and emotions run high. It becomes difficult for the facilitator to keep discussions on track. What you can try is to pause discussions and ask people to share what kind of emotion they are feeling and why. Once people recognize their emotional state and get some time to reflect on it, they tend to think more rationally and emotionally charged arguments settle down. Give a small break and then continue with the discussion. Chances are that you will have much more fruitful brainstorming.
Let me know your experiences...