20 Oct

How about adding some brightness to your life this Diwali?

There’s something about Diwali!! So vibrant and colourful. The brightness it brings along illuminates everyone and everything. The time of the year to clean up and declutter.  While we go out of our way to clean up our homes and offices weeks before Diwali, do we ever do anything to clean up our minds or rather declutter our minds? Diwali teaches us to let go –  to let go of all the negativity, only to engulf ourselves in all the positivity, improving our relationships and life in general.

If we consciously focus on a few things which we should never hold on to, our mind will become much less complex and easier to deal with. First and foremost, we should all give up the need to control others. It never helps beyond self-gratification. Grudges should be completely abandoned. It only creates negativity in us. Feelings of jealousy manifests in all kinds of negative behaviour affecting us and our closed ones. There should be no room for jealously. Someone will always be better than us. Feeding jealousy is like adding fuel to the fire. Feeling sorry for ourselves is a futile exercise. No self-sympathy can change any challenging situation. Instead facing it boldly can be a game changer. Again, blaming others for our mistakes is a sign of weakness. People who have no self-confidence and low self-esteem will play the blame game. Over analysing situations can wreak havoc in an otherwise sound mind. Certain things should only be taken at face value. Delving deep into something unnecessarily can spoil the situation further.  We should always let go of friends who aren’t there for us. Period. No justification required. We should never be afraid to be our self. Diluting the inherent us and our basic traits can be mentally exhausting. Never compromise on being who you really are unless you are changing yourself for the better. Worrying about what others think can be depleting in terms of time and energy. It can breed constant negativity and unpleasantness in and around us. Fear of failure should never rule us. It’s always prudent to do our task without thinking about the fruits it yields. Last but not the least – never hesitate to indulge. We all have a right to guilt free indulges occasionally.

Letting go will lead to a lighter and brighter you. Happy Diwali!!

13 Oct

Are you protecting yourself or your relationship?

Common problems plaguing relationships of today are affairs, power struggles, lack of communication and loss of love. As much as it is very difficult to understand how these problems get generated, one thing is very clear that couples create their own path to crisis.

And when that happens, couples stop being themselves when with their partner. Ironically, they feel good outside their relationship – when at work or with their friends or children, but not so around their partner. This leads to a lot of unpleasant and uncomfortable interacting patterns. A major reason why this happens is because they create a wall of protection – mainly to save themselves from the stress and tension the relationship generates. Communication is the first thing which is hampered by the shield created. While some do this consciously, others do it unconsciously. It’s impossible to love someone and at the same time try to protect oneself from that someone. It’s like wanting to have the cake and eat it too. Eventually love takes a back seat. Soon the protecting practice is mirrored by the partner one is protecting oneself from. This results in total disconnect. If not addressed, the wedge between the couple increases and only becomes difficult to bridge with time.

So effectively` what happens is that when partners are together they disconnect themselves from each other and when not, they reconnect with themselves. Affairs, many times are a result of this practice. People tend to reconnect with many parts of themselves which they lost or never knew existed, thanks to an affair. The real problem here is nether the relationship one is in or one’s partner. The problem lies in not being oneself.  Individuals struggling to be themselves when with one’s partner is the biggest sign of a relationship malfunction. People seldom realize this and go through a lot of pain and suffering which come from not being able to be free to be themselves in a relationship.

Instead of being someone you inherently are not, you need to focus on what has disabled you from being yourself with your partner. The reasons can be galore. But once understood, they can help safe guard a relationship from any distress rather than safe guarding yourself. Otherwise, how can you solve a problem when you don’t really know what the problem is?

05 Oct

Quick fix your relationship

All relationships go through a cycle of peak, plateau and downhill. Specifically, marriages. After the initial euphoria, excitement and enamour start evaporating, people get disillusioned by either the marriage or the relationship they are in. Creating successful marriages is a skill based activity. Once the initial chemistry and the resultant powerful attraction wears off, couples need to create that chemistry again – through their behaviours. Since most people are clueless about how to go about it, their relationships suffer. All marriages need a huge amount of investment and hard work to make it work. If that sounds too tedious, here are a few tried and tested ‘quick fix’ solutions to revamp your relationship overnight. These are not ‘one size fits all’ methods but depending on the nature of your relationship, you can pick the ones applicable to you. And the best part about these remedies is you don’t need any co-operation from your partner.
Touch is very important. Simply holding hands can help your relationship become warm, comfortable and positive.
Never jump to conclusions. Some people have this tendency of presuming things which are not logical. They cannot differentiate between ‘one off’ and something recurrent. For example, if their phone call is not returned, they start presuming that their partner is losing interest in him/her. He/she is having an affair. Such people immediately start attributing such standalone events to permanent generalised thoughts. Before drawing conclusions, always try to place the blame elsewhere and not on your partner.
Always view a fight as a third person. Instead of taking a stand for yourself or your partner, if you view your fight neutrally, you are bound to be more objective about the entire issue. This will give you the right perspective on how to go about resolving it.
Gratefulness always pays. Listing down the things you are grateful for either about your relationship or your partner, generates a lot of positive feelings. Gratitude is the word to keep the love intact.
Celebrate some achievements. When your partner shares some small achievement about something at work or elsewhere, show all your interest and excitement to find out more. Being enthusiastic about your partner’s smallest of victories helps in the partner getting a lot more pleasure in sharing again in the future. This will help you come closer to each other.
These are time tested techniques which can help you develop the required skill set to quick fix your relationship. And we need these since feviquick or fevibond can’t serve the purpose.