Spirituality & Stress-Management for Teachers

Spirituality & Stree-Management for teachers [Lecture to the teachers of MCKV Vidyapeeth, Liluah, Howrah] Om sthapakaya cha dharmasya sarva dharma svarupine Avatara varishtaya ramakrishaya te namaha. I am very happy to be here today to address you all. First of all, let me tell you that I am very choosy about the invitations that I accept. I agree to speak only to audiences of students and teachers. Of course, technical seminars are also there, but in those cases, I do not speak about spirituality and such topics. My second self-imposed limitation is that I prefer to know my audience before I speak to them. The reason is if I dont know them, then I will have to speak on very general terms and such speeches are boring. If I have some knowledge of the workings of the minds of my audience, I can then speak on those exact issues that need to be addressed, you see. Mr Arijit Sarkar, the Professor of your MCKV Engg College approached me and told me that I would have to speak to you all, the teaching staff of MCKV School. I agreed. The date was fixed. He even told me the topic on which I would have to speak Spirituality & Stress Management. Then I asked him to tell me what exact problems these teachers face. I needed to know this because these problems would have to be the cause of stress in you all. The moment I raised that question, Mr Sarkar became very defensive and said, Oh no, Swamiji. Our teachers have no problems at all! They are all very happy. Now, I ask you, if you are all very happy, if you all have no problems at all in your school, why then should I come here and what indeed shall I speak to you about?! I asked him the same thing. He is a very brilliant person, you know. He said, Swamiji, please look here. This lecture is an annual affair in our School. Every year, we invite a Swamiji of Belur Math to address our teachers after the academic session ends. In that lecture, the Swamiji speaks on spiritual life and how to work and conducts a guided meditation session. We request you to do the same. I understood the situation. You see, today morning, I started thinking how shall I speak to a set of teachers on spirituality and stress management? I then came up with some ideas. I developed those ideas. Then, I did something which I generally do I put those ideas into a small line-diagram. I use this technique when I teach my students too. Whatever ideas I have to convey, I speak to them; and then I summarize them into a small line-diagram so that, after the lecture is over, they will easily recall that line diagram and then recall most of the ideas associated with that diagram. So, I will draw a small diagram, based on which I will speak to you all today.

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Spiritual life

Yoga
Daily work Mind

Here I have drawn three circles, each containing a huge field of human endeavor spiritual life, our daily work and our own mind. Each of these circles is connected to a central circle which contains the word Yoga. Let us understand this diagram. Let us take spiritual life first. You see, we all feel we are connected to many people in our life. We feel a connection with our father & mother, with our brothers & sisters, with our friends & relatives, with our colleagues & bosses, and with many such relations in our life. We feel we are closely connected to them all. But, when the final day of reckoning arrives, we find that all such feelings were merely an illusion. None of those relations can do anything for us. When the moment for dying comes, we die. No one can help us at that moment, no matter how close they may have been to us here. Death is a fact of our lives. Everything else about our lives may be incidental, but death is a certainty. Each and every one of us here will have to die. That is for sure. We plan for all sorts of eventualities in our life. But, do we plan for our death? How many of you here have even a conception of how you will face your death? Have you ever thought about that? If I ask you how you would wish to die, some of you may answer me, I wish for a peaceful death. That is vague for me. I need to know what you wish to be doing when the moment of death arrives. Some of you may say that you wish to die in your sleep. Well, that is not an answer that I appreciate much, for that answer just reveals that you are afraid of facing death and hence would like to done with it when you are not conscious about it. That wont do for me. We are afraid of death because we know nothing about it and we havent planned adequately for it. Now, some may object that no one can indeed plan for his or her own death. I agree. But then, we can indeed plan about how we will be, or more precisely, how our mind will be, when we face the moment of dying. Now, in India, we thought about this subject and it developed into great depth. In fact, this special color cloth that I wear, the gerua cloth, is a symbol of that study. It signifies that I have dedicated myself to an in-depth study of death and that I have decided to minutely plan about meeting my death. A whole field of human knowledge and human endeavor developed along these lines. That is what is called today as Spiritual life. Each one of us has to do this plan for our death. For, that is by far the only certainty we have about our lives. When you start working along those lines, you will be astonished with the details that you are presented with. You will be overwhelmed with the details of procedures that you will be expected to follow. In fact, for all practical purposes, you will have to leave everything else and dedicate yourself whole-time to spiritual life, if you wish to achieve anything of value in this field. In fact, how many of us
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can afford to do that? Suppose you all go home today and start telling everyone at home that a Belur Math Swamiji had come who instructed that you have to leave everything and lock yourself up in a room and start following some practices which will help you approach death joyfully! Imagine the situation that will result. Anyway, this much we shall understand for now. Here in our country, our ancestors have discovered certain procedures, by following which, we can discover something within ourselves which is eternal, and having discovered that eternal being in our inner-most core, we shall be able to deal with our impending death with a smile on our face. But the catch is that those procedures require that you leave everything else and dedicate yourself full-time for it. Therefore, those procedures may not be, after all, very helpful to us. Now, we shall deal with the other circle Mind. Whose mind? Our own mind. Generally, what happens is, we focus on the minds of others around us. We neglect our own mind. For all practical purposes, we are our mind. Everything else just supplements what we carry in our own minds. Just think about it a little and you will understand that this is true. The difference between us is the difference in the quality of our minds. This quality of the mind is not a given constant. It can be refined or made gross. Certain habits of thought and action alter the grossness and refinement of our minds. These are recorded and documented. When we improve the quality of our mind, the quality of our life improves. This is a field in which the Western people have invested sufficient time and energy and have reaped great benefits. Let me give you an example. How many of you teachers here in this hall have a nagging fear in the back of your mind I hope I wont lose my job in this School. You see, it is mainly here in India that I find this peculiar mental condition. Here, people who work in a private enterprise are constantly filled with the fear of losing their jobs. In fact, this fear goes so far that some dont even consider a job in a private enterprise as a proper job! A job in the Govt alone is secure! If you travel in Europe, you wont find this mentality. In fact, there, it is the other way around. Here, we are crippled with the fear of losing our jobs. Now, this is just a thought in our mind. But the effect that simple thought has on us is debilitating. We cannot perform our best when we have such fear. A little bit of rational thinking will remove this fear. Can this school run without good teachers? No. This school always needs good teachers. If you remain a good teacher, you will always be there in this school. Analyze for yourself what a good teacher means, and be that. Then there is nothing to fear. We dont need high philosophy and spirituality in order to do that! Mere ordinary horse-sense will do. That is the benefit of knowing about our own mind! What actually exists is one thing. What our mind sees it as is quite another thing. So, the quality of our life depends on the control we have on our own mind, for then we can control how our mind interprets what it sees. Once a lady went to a psychiatrist and complained that she lived in a locality where everyone else was uncultured and noisy. The psychiatrist sympathized with her and gave her some advice. He told her to write to the newspaper about the behavior of her neighbors and also complain to the police about them. Then he wrote down a prescription for a pill she would have to take for one month, after which she was asked to meet him again. A month later she came. This time she said, Doctor, the newspaper did not carry my letter of complaint and the policemen did not respond either. But, somehow, the place has become more habitable and the people have calmed down a lot. You see what just happened here? The doctor had perhaps prescribed her some mild tranquilizer. As a result, her nerves had become calm. Consequently she saw that the whole world had become calm!

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Take the case of criticism, for instance. We all hate facing criticism. If someone says something negative about us, we become mad. But, strictly speaking, words are, by themselves, neither good nor bad. The reaction to those words that arises in our mind is what is categorized as good or bad. Once, a man went to the Court and filed a suit against his friend claiming that the friend had called him a hippopotamus. The Judge was appalled and said, Well, that is indeed very bad. Please give me details of how, when and where this happened. The man said, He said this to me five years ago in my house, while we were playing bridge. The judge was taken aback. He said, Did you say five years ago? Then why are you coming to this Court now? The man replied, Your honor, yesterday I saw an animal on the TV and my son told me that it was called hippopotamus. Such indeed is our case too. If we do not know the meaning of words, nothing affects us. But when the meaning becomes clear, tremendous reaction sets in! And we seem to have no control over this process. Let me tell you another personal experience. I was a probationer in the Ramakrishna Mission and I accompanied a revered old Swamiji to a programme in a College in Bangalore. You know how most colleges are. The outstanding boys are generally loitering in front of the college main gate. Well, in this college too, there were some such boys. As we got down from our car and were walking towards the gate, I distinctly heard one of the boys say, Hey, look! A fake swami is coming to our college today! You see, I was a Brahmachari, in white clothes. So, I knew that those words werent meant for me. So I was calm. But I was interested in finding out the reaction of the Swamiji to these words. I ran up to him and asked him if he had heard the comment that the boys had made. Do you know what the Swamiji said? He said, Do you see how eager he is to see a true Swamiji? imagine! Most people in his place would have reacted differently. Who knows, if some such comment were to be passed towards me, I might slap the boy and bring him to his senses! But this Swamiji, very naturally, said to me, Do you see how eager that boy is to see a true Swamiji? That is the result of knowing ones own mind. If you know your mind well, you will have control over it, for knowledge is power. So, we will need to spend sufficient time with ourselves, in order to study ourselves, so that we will know our own mind. The present situation is that our mind is filled with the thoughts that come from others minds. Stay in isolation for at least a month. Have no TV, radio, mobile phone or newspaper. Then, slowly you will start recognizing what exactly your mind has to say. How many of us are capable of doing this? Given our family and kids and responsibilities in our work place, can we ever go into isolation like that? Again, if we dont, how else will we come to know our own mind? Be that as it may, let us now come to the third circle that I have drawn daily work. Well, the less said the better. I know how stressful it is to be a teacher. Every class will have a couple of students whose lifes goal, it seems to be, to shoot up our blood pressure! Then there is the Dept Head and VicePrincipal and the Principal. I heard somewhere that one of the qualifications to be a Principal is that he should have high BP! Look at it this way. We plan our day. All good teachers plan their day in advance; detailed planning, involving what they will teach in which period and stuff like that. We start from our home with a resolution that we will have a joyful mood during that day. Then what happens? Right in the morning, perhaps the Principal calls you and takes you to task for something that you did a week ago and your mood crashes! Or, you are doing well, and have already taken a couple of classes exactly as per your plan, safeguarding your joyful mood, and then, some colleague passes an uncharitable comment in the staff
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room and gone! Or, some student does something stupid [children are really masters at doing stupid things!] and your mood goes down the tubes. How are we to deal with our daily work? Sometimes, it becomes so depressing that we may decide to resign and stay away from all that, but then, we have commitments. We cannot afford not to work. At least for the money, we have to work. Then there is the common occurrence where all the good work we do and all the enormous effort we have put in doesnt bring in even a customary good job from the HOD or Principal. Our efforts are often not recognized. That is disheartening, isnt it? Isnt it really interesting that we all have entered this work field without the least bit of training of how to work correctly? You see, what I mean to say is this: There are many forces acting on us when we work in our daily life. Supposing we were given some training regarding recognizing those forces; we would then have been in a position to manipulate those forces; once we know how to manipulate those forces, we would be in a position to predict the outcome of those forces. How surprising that we have absolutely no clue to any of these, and all of us spend a good amount of our lives working! In fact, most of us learn by making mistakes ourselves in our life and by the time we gain real maturity, we are about to retire! Such is the condition with us. So, we all have three areas along which we need to work. Each of those areas is deep, and vast. In order to make decent progress along any one of them, we will need to spend a major portion of our life in that line. In the meantime, our life is going waste. What is the way out of this? The answer lies in the fourth circle that I have drawn in the line-diagram. Yoga is the answer. Of course, now-a-days, this word has become synonymous with Baba Ramdev! Having an elastic body is yoga in popular perception, isnt it? Well, for your information, this word was actually introduced to the present age by Swami Vivekananda. When he was alive, he had brought out four books on this topic. One such book is called Karma Yoga. I personally consider this book to be my Bible. This small book solves the problems we face in balancing these three drives in our life. I will read out for you a portion of a chapter from this book. Here, Swamiji is telling a story to carry across an important point, the point that we also raised in this lecture how to integrate our lives in such a way that we will make spiritual progress and prepare for our death, while at the same time have complete control of our mind and derive joy in the daily work that we all are involved in.
A young Sannyasi went to a forest; there he meditated, worshipped, and practiced Yoga for a long time. After years of hard work and practice, he was one day sitting under a tree, when some dry leaves fell upon his head. He looked up and saw a crow and a crane fighting on the top of the tree, which made him very angry. He said, "What! Dare you throw these dry leaves upon my head?!" As with these words he angrily glanced at them, a flash of fire went out of his head such was the Yogi's power and burnt the birds to ashes. He was very glad, almost overjoyed at this development of power he could burn the crow and the crane by a look. After a time he had to go to the town to beg his bread. He went, stood at a door, and said, "Mother, give me food." A voice came from inside the house, "Wait a little, my son." The young man thought, "You wretched woman, how dare you make me wait! You do not know my power yet." While he was thinking thus the voice came again: "Boy, don't be thinking too much of yourself. Here is neither crow nor crane." He was astonished; still he had to wait. At last the woman came, and he fell at her feet and said, "Mother, how did you know that?" She said, "My boy, I do not know your Yoga or your practices. I am a common everyday woman. I made you wait because my husband is ill, and I was nursing him. All my life I have struggled to do my duty. When I was unmarried, I did my duty to my parents; now that I am married, I do my duty to my husband; that is all the Yoga I practice. But by doing
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my duty I have become illumined; thus I could read your thoughts and know what you had done in the forest. If you want to know something higher than this, go to the market of such and such a town where you will find a Vydha (The lowest class of people in India who used to live as hunters and butchers.) who will tell you something that you will be very glad to learn." The Sannyasi thought, "Why should I go to that town and to a Vyadha?" But after what he had seen, his mind opened a little, so he went. When he came near the town, he found the market and there saw, at a distance, a big fat Vyadha cutting meat with big knives, talking and bargaining with different people. The young man said, "Lord help me! Is this the man from whom I am going to learn? He is the incarnation of a demon, if he is anything." In the meantime this man looked up and said, "O Swami, did that lady send you here? Take a seat until I have done my business." The Sannyasi thought, "What comes to me here?" He took his seat; the man went on with his work, and after he had finished he took his money and said to the Sannyasi, "Come sir, come to my home." On reaching home the Vyadha gave him a seat, saying, "Wait here," and went into the house. He then washed his old father and mother, fed them, and did all he could to please them, after which he came to the Sannyasi and said, "Now, sir, you have come here to see me; what can I do for you?" The Sannyasi asked him a few questions about soul and about God, and the Vyadha gave him a lecture which forms a part of the Mahbhrata, called the Vydha-Git. It contains one of the highest flights of the Vedanta. When the Vyadha finished his teaching, the Sannyasi felt astonished. He said, "Why are you in that body? With such knowledge as yours why are you in a Vyadha's body, and doing such filthy, ugly work?" "My son," replied the Vyadha, "no duty is ugly, no duty is impure. My birth placed me in these circumstances and environments. In my boyhood I learnt the trade; I am unattached, and I try to do my duty well. I try to do my duty as a householder, and I try to do all I can to make my father and mother happy. I neither know your Yoga, nor have I become a Sannyasi, nor did I go out of the world into a forest; nevertheless, all that you have heard and seen has come to me through the unattached doing of the duty which belongs to my position."

This is indeed a most marvelous proclamation that Swamiji makes here! Just look at these words that Swamiji has quoted in the above story: My boy, I do not know your Yoga or your practices. I am a common everyday woman. I made you wait because my husband is ill, and I was nursing him. All my life I have struggled to do my duty. When I was unmarried, I did my duty to my parents; now that I am married, I do my duty to my husband; that is all the Yoga I practice. But by doing my duty I have become illumined. Again these words are there in that passage: I am unattached, and I try to do my
duty well. I try to do my duty as a householder, and I try to do all I can to make my father and mother happy. I neither know your Yoga, nor have I become a Sannyasi, nor did I go out of the world into a forest; nevertheless, all that you have heard and seen has come to me through the unattached doing of the duty which belongs to my position.

So, what we need to do is just this much: We shall do the duty that lies at hand; and we shall be unattached while doing our daily work. Swamiji claims here that just by doing these two things, we will be able to achieve a balance between the three areas that we need for a fulfilled life. Just two conditions, take note of that! The catch is in that second condition non-attachment. How to explain this idea to you? Your Principal asked me a question regarding non-attachment. He asked me how to do this unattached doing of the duty which belongs to my position? Well, to answer it properly, I myself will have to be an unattached worker, which I am not. But this much I can say; I have tried most sincerely to work in an unattached way. I do so by following the direction shown by Swamiji in this very book. He delineates two separate paths for doing this unattached work; one for the believer in God and the other for a non-believer in God. I believe in God. You would have noticed that before I began this lecture, I
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chanted a mantra for Sri Ramakrishna. Again, when I end this lecture, I will chant another mantra and offer all that I said in this lecture to God. That way I remain unattached to the whole affair here. So, for the believer in God, offering every action to the Lord will make him/her unattached to the work that he/she is doing. Let me tell you a wonderful story to explain this point. You see, using stories to explain concepts is the best way of teaching. It is unfortunate that our teachers are yet to wake up to this wonderful idea. Someone once said, The shortest distance between a man and the truth is a story. There was once a king whose close friend was a monk. This king, as you all can understand, had a very stressful job. Indeed, what job can indeed be more stressful than that of an all-powerful, absolute monarch? So, one day he went to meet his friend the monk in the forest and told him, I am fed up with running this kingdom. I have decided to renounce it all and go somewhere and live a low-key, peaceful life. The monk commented, Is that so? Well, let me seeyou must certainly have made provisions for your successor? The king had made no such arrangement. His own son was but a small boy. But he was planning to choose someone from his large kingdom so that he could hand over its reins and be free. However, since he was a conscientious king, who took his kingship very seriously, there was a nagging fear that he might not get the right kind of successor who would care for his immense kingdom just the way he had done all these years. The monk understood all this. He volunteered, Say, why dont you gift your kingdom to me? The king was overjoyed. Where could he get a better successor than his closest f riend?! So, he gave away his kingdom to the monk. There was a visible relief on the kings face now. The monk asked him, Where will you go now? What is your next plan? The king said, Well, I will now go to my palace, take some money, go to a neighboring kingdom. I know many trades. I will earn my livelihood there. The monk stopped him, Hey, wait. Did you say my palace just now? Remember that the palace, along with everything in the kingdom is now mine! The king was indeed taken aback. Yes, what the monk said was indeed true. Without another word, he turned and was about to go away when the monk stopped him and said, Say, my friend, you said you are ready to go elsewhere and do some job and earn your living. What do you say if I offer you a job right here? This was indeed acceptable and he agreed. Then the monk said, Well, you see, I have just come upon this huge kingdom. I am a monk. I live according the voice in my soul. I need a trust-worthy man to look after this beautiful kingdom on my behalf. You have sufficient experience in running kingdoms. Say, I will fix a certain amount as salary for you. Why dont you run this kingdom on my behalf? The king readily agreed. Thus he went back to his palace and went about managing his kingdom exactly the same way as it was before. A month later, the monk came to meet the king in the palace. He asked the king, How are you? Are you facing any problems now? The king now replied, I am doing fine. Problems, yes, of course there are; but I and my team of ministers keep solving them on your behalf. This is exactly how it happens when we start involving God in our daily activities. The load of our responsibilities then rests on the Lord just as the load of running the kingdom now belonged to the monk. The kings mind was now free to face the problems and solve them as and when required. That is the way to work in an unattached way. I leave you all with these ideas. I shall meet you all again. Thank you for patiently hearing me. Om shantih, shantih, shantihi. Harihi Om, Sri Ramakrishnarpanam astu.
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