Self awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it. The more you peel back, the more you’ll gain new insights on yourself. By exploring the different facets of your personality, you’ll begin to realize your one true face from the various masks you put on to function in society.

This self-knowledge is what compounds to wisdom. You’ll begin to receive direct guidance from the divine intelligence that organizes all of life itself.

The deeper you go, the more likely you are going to start crying randomly.
Become your own sage 🥋

Happiness is sustained by needing less and less things to be happy.

In solitude you’ll find peace. And peace is just happiness on slow mo - perfect contentment without the excitement.

You can’t always be happy, but you can always be at peace.
Inner peace is much easier to achieve and maintain (cos it needs nothing). Happiness / sadness are highs and lows of the same ladder - peace is when you’re unmoved by either.
Train tranquility, stay Inspired🥋

Happy Diwali to those celebrating 🤎

Times when life doesn’t feel real to me

- Watching lightning & dark clouds gather for rain
- Watching fancy colored lights blink or fluctuate in the dark night
- Listening to a dog bark over the silence of the night
- Kissing a crush
- Driving to an airport in the midnight
- Walking & laughing with friends on an empty street in the midnight
- Taking a nap in the afternoon and waking up in the evening
- Getting really high
- Burying a loved one
- Watching a firewood burn (staring at fire)
- First night in a new town or apartment
- Returning to earth after a long meditation session
- Stargazing while lying on my back
- Listening to the croak of toads at night
- Watching droplets of water fall from a tap to a bowl
- Staring into the eyes of a baby
- Being at a concert of my favorite artist

I feel we’ve all had one or two of these moments in life - when your mind is absent but you are fully present. When genuine gratitude and spontaneous joy sprout from your being. When the veil between real / unreal thins out. And real life starts to feel like a dream. Unfortunately we aren’t educated to watch out for moments like these, talk less of recognizing or appreciating them. It takes a level of awareness to catch them.

So which one have you experienced (doesn’t have to be on my list)?

Haha. Few would get this

When you are your own sage,this is how it feels 🥋

Happiness is the optimistic interpretation of everything that happens to you.

If you truly want to be happy, you wouldn’t put a condition on your happiness or tie it to any specific experience. You are only about as happy as you make your mind to be.

You don’t need to raise your vibration. You are already what you are seeking. Let go of the idea that you are anything less. Let go of the idea that you need to find love in any one person. And you’ll come to see that the happiness and love you’ve been searching for without, relies within in abundance.

Don’t want until your life is perfect before you are happy 🥋

2a.m Musings On Stillness

I went out to stare at the stars awhile before heading to bed. There was a plethora of them. The crescent moon shone beautifully and the night sky was a pleasure to behold. However my attention was quickly drawn to the silhouette of a strange figure. I couldn’t tell what type of bird it was, but considering its shape and the time it was, I’m guessing it was an owl. It sat majestically on a rope . I could feel it staring back at me, as if trying to analyze if I was an incoming threat or not. I sat on the balcony and began to watch it. A light fog pervaded the atmosphere, everything looked dreamy. Then I noticed that the bird was sitting perfectly still. As a fellow meditator, I was intrigued. And I thought to myself; if a bird can be so still, how much more the spirit of a man.

Stillness is the only cure to restlessness. There are 3 levels - body, mind, being. A completely still mind is undoubtedly the hardest thing to come by. In fact, the very nature of the mind is movement - of thought and of time.

Your being is ever still, effortlessly. Investigate this yourself by closing your eyes in a space where you can safely walk or run. Keep your attention inwards and take a few steps. You’ll start to feel like a part of you isn’t moving. A field of being that’s just simply there. This is a mere glimpse. The depth of this innate stillness can be further exposed by stilling the body

1 - Still the senses: Light a candle, or choose any random spot in your line of vision. Then try to imagine your eye balls and pupils settling on that spot. Don’t think of it “focus”, as that would strain your sight. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. But you can also peek through them from within - until there’s no distinction between the seer and the seen. Another way to train this awareness is to catch every blink of the eyes (much more harder, but even for a minute is appreciable).

2 - Still the tongue: Thinking is subvocal communication. Thinking produces the same effect as speech articulation does - tongue movement. When you sit to meditate, open your jaws as wide as you can. Stick your tongue out and keep them open for as long as you are comfortable with. Then gently close your mouth and let your tongue fall in nicely. Let the roof of your mouth and the top of your tongue touch lightly. Observe how your tongue vibrates as it subtly articulates the thoughts in your head. Don’t try to stop this (you can’t ). Just observe, the rest of the work would be done for you.

3 - Still the breath: Exhale out powerfully & rapidly, keeping the same tempo. Imagine your tummy is trying to empty any residue CO2 inside. After 10-15 out-breaths, slow it down and return to normal. Then try to keep a nice rhythm of breathing. Let your in-breath reach your navel. When you breathe in, imagine the universe breathing out. And when you breathe out, imagine the universe breathing in. A time comes when the boundary between in and out thins out, and you become like a revolving door.

4 - Still the body - When you sit to meditate, imagine your body petrifying to stone. Meditation is hard because the mind becomes agitated. If you aren’t comfortable in silent sitting, you’ll feel the urge to move or get out of the pose. This is totally natural, but as with everything, you’ll only get better with practice. You must resolve not to move till your session is over (even 5 minutes of stillness is a huge W). You can also practice the stone technique while lying on your back on your bed. Every thought alters your brain chemistry & body cells. You’ll notice that certain thoughts trigger certain movement. If you imagine something annoying, you'll feel your entire body stiffen as if ready to fight.
Whatever comes, relax through it.

As you develop body stillness, your inner stillness will deepen and your presence will expand. The after effect is that you'll start to gain more control over your mind as your thoughts become more organized & diffused.

Stay Inspired 🥋 (1:50am - 3:05am)

Namaste 🤎

The fear of consequences is how they keep you compliant. That’s how they keep controlling you - the government, the pharmaceuticals, food industries, religious leaders, family members and the likes. Everyone is trying to manipulate you by exploiting a certain innate fear that you have. It could be the fear of being lonely, the fear of being punished, or the fear of dying.

He who cannot lead himself, will inevitably be enslaved. A highly evolved human lives completely on his own terms. He acts courageously & without hesitation, accepting whatever consequences his actions incur. That, to me, is the hallmark of responsibility and maturity. Unless you attain peak levels of sovereignty- people will go on dictating what you should and shouldn’t say, wear or eat. They will enforce a career path on you, and even choose a life partner for you if you are really docile.

You’ve been blessed by nature with all you need to guide you through life - instinct, intuition, intellect & intelligence. Do you have such little faith in yourself. Granted you’ll make a lot of mistakes, but you won’t gain true wisdom otherwise.
And what is the fear? We live on a floating rock, drifting through an ever expanding nothingness. There are no rules!

Everything in life is already a gamble. Fall in love, and you could get hurt. Start a business, and you could go bankrupt. Eat, and you could choke or be poisoned. The most beautiful thing about life is that nobody gets out alive.

If you love to smoke - do you & cherish every high.
If you are very sexual - don’t be ashamed of it, there’s nothing more natural.
When you refuse all external interferences aimed at improving you, that’s when you blossom into progressive perfection.

Living dangerously & consciously with increase the quality of your life & character way more than living cautiously 🥋

A distillation of Navals thread on how to meditate

https://twitter.com/wisart_in/status/1453069224864145413

https://twitter.com/skantlee/status/1460308296833900549

I’m back ninjas 🖤

The easiest way to manifest your dream lifestyle - is to reprogram your mind by acting like you are already that which you seek. Stop waiting to be the best version of yourself. Instead carry yourself like your best self would. Live in alignment everyday. This mental hack will help restructure your habits & choices in order to make it a reality.

Never lose sight of the person you are trying to become. Keep the vision in sight, and the mission at heart.

God is in your mind 🥋

“The general theme of my work is the limitations of human knowledge, and the charming and less charming errors and biases when working with matters that lie outside our field of observation, the unobserved and the unobservables—the unknown; what lies on the other side of the veil of opacity. Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.! The mind can be a wonderful tool for selfdelusion!”

— Nassim Taleb

https://twitter.com/skantlee/status/1461442585038360577

A short thread 🥋

Quick Q & A

Guided meditation 🙏🏾

There is no reality that exists, but the one that IS.

Read that slowly, and consider it.

all mental stress comes from an inability to realise this fact - that whatever the circumstances that are occurring in this moment, are the only ones that could ever be.

When we complain about our situation in life, or even something as simple as the weather, we are comparing a fake reality that we have concocted in our heads to what is playing out in actuality.

‘I WISH IT WAS SUNNY :((((‘

Whilst I agree, the sun being out would be better - but it is not out, so there is zero point in entertaining an idea that it ‘should’ be out and thus feeling dissonance because of that fact. ENJOY THE RAIN.

there is a benefit to being aware of a situation that might impact you, to this end I don’t condone a strategy of sticking your head in the sand, but there is always zero benefit to having your mental state affected by that fact. what is the benefit of stressing about the world?

When you can dance among the madness and have a resilient and optimistic mind frame despite the rollercoaster of existence, that is when you win.

Once you realise this and internalise it, you develop a sense of observation about the way of the world, instead of an emotional, reactive and stressful need to control everything. You begin to notice the silliness of others (which used to be me) when they complain about things

However, The key is not to allow this distinction to make you lazy, or demotivated

Don’t throw your hands up and think OH WELL IT IS WHAT IT IS.

YEs, it IS what it IS, but Don’t leave with the idea that just because reality IS, that the future is unchangeable.

For as the reality that happens IS as it is, the future is still under deliberation depending on the choices and the thoughts you make/have today.

Practice mind-pattern interruption (gratitude) if you find yourself ruminating on things that you wouldn’t like to happen. To continue the example of the weather, you can find appreciation for the rain that waters the plants that grow to make your food, or fill the catchments that provide your drinking water.

Form your future by curating your thoughts and actions today.