Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Life is like a trek in the mountains. Every peak entices you. Standing on the zenith, you look at other peaks which beckon you. Conquests, that’s what trekking is about; that’s what life is about. The joy that a trekker experiences while standing on the zenith of a mountain is quite different from, say, what you experience when you receive a promotion at your office. Real conquests fill the spirit with a new vigour in spite of all the pain you endured on the way. The rugged paths through the mountain slopes, the exhaustion on the way and the rain and the sun that you braved, they don’t matter now. In fact, they metamorphose into a special kind of joy. As Richard Bach said, when you have conquered certain heights you don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly. That’s what zeniths do to you. You don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly. Zeniths that really enrich life are not about amassing more wealth or attaining higher positions

At Allahabad Triveni Sangam where I said Yes to one of the harshest realities of my life “I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the UNO wrote those words just four months before his death in 1961. Saying Yes to reality is a self-surrender. Unless you can surrender yourself to both the joys and sorrows of life, both hope and despair, light and darkness, you can’t say Yes to reality. Your triumph in life is a catastrophe and the catastrophes of life are triumphs when you say Yes to reality. Your Yes to reality carries you to the realisation that “the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation” (Hammarskjold’s words). There is no greatness in life that is

My Xanadu must have a lot of water and greenery Xanadu is a paradise. Originally it was the summer palace of Kublai Khan celebrated by poet Coleridge in his poem, ‘Kubla Khan’. The Tatars ruled by Khan were barbaric. Khan created his personal paradise, Xanadu, as a refuge from the savagery of both his people and the nature. We all need to create our own Xanadus in order to take shelter from the resounding savagery around us. Each one of us must find his/her own way of creating the personal paradise. I create my Xanadu through reading and writing. You can create yours following your own passions. Music, craft, gardening – there is an infinite variety of options open to you for the creation of your Xanadu. It is a place or ambience that gives you personal gratification. It helps you move closer towards self-realisation. In the biblical creation myth, Adam and Eve lived in the Paradise created by God until the couple was driven by the irresistible human urge to know good

“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet when Polonius asks him what he is reading. When asked further what the words are about Hamlet’s answer is, “Slanders, sir.” Rumours and slanders abound in people’s usual conversations. We love conversations. Have you ever noticed that most of our conversations are about other people and that most of the time we speak bad things about others? Words can kill. People love to kill the reputations of other people. But words can heal too. Words can be magical. Words create music. If we change the way we wield words, we can usher in magic to our life, to the world itself. A good word, a word of encouragement, a word of joy can transform the life of the person to whom it is uttered. One of the tragedies in our life is to begin the day with the morning newspaper which brings us negative words: reports about rising prices and taxes, rapes by spiritual leaders, corruption of political leaders, and so on. It is difficult to sustain our smiles in su

Image courtesy here “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” said Jiddu Krishnamurti. There are too many well-adjusted people today. They are rich, they are found frequently in shopping malls and entertaining places, and they are religious. They are well-adjusted at home too. The husband and the wife have their own entertainments and possibly partners outside home. The children find their own entertainments wherever they are. After all, they all live barricaded safely in their gated communities. They have insurance for everything from themselves to the last item in the kitchen. Everything is taken care of. Perfect. And yet sick. They are so sick that they have to visit gyms and/or detox clinics to extract the venom within. They need gurus most of whom are fake to give them spiritual solace. They have medical insurance to pay their unending hospital bills. Hospitals generate more diseases than they cure. Medicines become food instead of

In psychology, unfinished business refers to emotions and memories surrounding past experiences that one has avoided or repressed. Life is very generous with painful experiences like the loss of a beloved one or the break-up of a genuine relationship. Poet Khalil Gibran sang of pain as “the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” Understand your pain, accept it. That’s the secret of dealing successfully with pain. Pain is a season of the heart even like “the seasons that pass over your fields.” But we often choose to avoid or repress pain. When we do that, the pain goes into some dark chamber of our consciousness and remains there like a smouldering cinder beneath the mounting ashes. Some of us may seek to escape the pain by consuming intoxicants or engaging in binge eating or compulsive shopping. Unfinished business is dangerous. It burns within. It can burn us out by filling our souls with sadness, fear, anxiety, mistrust, hate and whole lot of negative e

The Thinker (Le Penseur) Our thinking plays a vital role in making our life magical or miserable. Thoughts have the power to perform miracles. Cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis presents an A-B-C framework to explain the importance of our thoughts. A stands for the activating event, B for beliefs, and C for consequence. Let us understand this through an example. Joe and Ann break up their relationship. Joe goes into depression. A is the divorce and C is the depression. But did A cause C? No, Ellis says. B causes C. Joe’s beliefs about the divorce are responsible for his depression. Joe believes that the divorce proves his inability to love or that he is a failure or that he is not even worthy of love. What we believe about things happening to us makes the world of a difference to the consequences. Some 2000 years ago, Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “People are disturbed not by events, but by the views which they take of them.” If we change our views, the event chan