My PPT

 

What is the trickiest thing to manage and is very difficult to control in life? It is a master manipulator and has us dancing to its whims most of the time. Getting a leash on it is something most of us struggle with all the time. Any guess? Many of you think it is news or social media related. Interestingly the thing I am talking about is in our head. It makes us set a wake-up call the previous day and not wake up to it the next day. It is what makes us cheat meals on a diet we voluntarily chose. It makes us go back on our word and not meet our commitments. Yes, our mind is the part that both desires and dislikes.

The human mind, they say, is an excellent servant but a terrible master. Taming it is both a materialistic and spiritual pursuit. Many take different routes to reach this destination, like discipline or deprivation. I kept searching for mine, hoping to find the magic spell that could do the trick. It took an email from my mentor to help me see the obvious. One line in the email read, “Devotion = single-minded focus; try this in everything you do”. Something in those words clicked, and I felt triumphant like the child who got the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle. 

It is mind-blowing how a cracking radio plays a beautiful melody with just a little tuning. I realized life is all about such fine tuning and tweaks. I am very familiar with devotion. I have felt, experienced and lived it in my spiritual practices. But that line from my mentor was the fine-tuning needed for me to see it in a different light. Devotion is a way to tame my mind by aligning my actions and intentions, my mind, and feeling with my desires 

Putting devotion into my everyday things wasn’t easy at first. But with practice in a few weeks, I noticed a difference in the quality of my experiences. Living did not feel like a great effort, as the conflict within reduced. I no longer felt so anxious as the war in my head was getting better. The mind was slowly leaning from reluctance and laziness to joy and enthusiasm. 

How do we bring devotion into our daily activities? I use my PPT approach (not to be read as a PowerPoint) Pause, Pray and Thank.

Pause: Before getting into any activity, pause for a moment. Relax the body and focus on the breath. The easiest way to live in the present moment is to focus on the breath. Before I start my yoga practice, log into my laptop for work or start my cooking for the day, I pause, take a few deep breaths, become fully aware, and live in the present moment. It helps develop better focus.

Pray: This can be a prayer or an affirmation to get the feeling towards the work right. I usually say affirmations to feel the joy and excitement of what is to unfold. A fist up, a slight jog, and a few words of self-encouragement make me feel good about the work I am to commence. 

Thanks: Without a full stop, the sentence is incomplete. Always conclude the activity by expressing gratitude for it. Every experience is a learning experience that either adds to our confidence or makes us wiser. I always wake up and whisper a thank you for another day of life. I conclude most of my work with the phrase ‘thank you for the learning. It helps to get the feeling towards the activity right. Slowly we start loving what we do. We start feeling a reverence towards it.

In this world of information overload, multitasking has become a critical skill. We live almost every minute doing several things at a time. Devotion is performing the task at hand with undivided attention, with a single-minded focus. By bringing devotion into more and more activities, we align our intentions and actions, taming and redirecting our minds to higher pursuits.