Healing from an emotionally draining experience is quite unlike healing from a physical illness.

Perhaps it was a potential life partner who was after your heart or a business deal or job offer that you thought could have made your career, or a medical treatment that you had pinned your hopes on to give a dear one a new lease of life. Only things didn’t go according to the plan.

We very often tend to equate being busy with being successful and doing things of consequence.

One thing that majority of us look forward to at the end of the day is to retire to a sanctuary called home. This is simply because home is a shelter insulated from the cut-throat world outside, the toxicity and negative energies, the competition and the petty rivalries. Retreating to home literally acts like a soothing balm for our soul. It helps us detach, reflect, introspect and brace ourselves for another day.

Most of us feel secure with the tried and tested. The unknown is always scary because we don’t know what to expect and whether we can handle it. Whether it is career choices for our children, business choices for us, matters of the heart or charting a new course in an organisation or attempting something new, or taking risks or doing things differently or getting used to radical change, we chicken out.

It is a selfish world that we inhabit. It is nothing unusual because the whole world is pretty much that way. Service of any kind, often in return for no gratitude or appreciation, to anyone other than those who matter to us seems superfluous.

The barbaric December 16 gang rape of a student in a moving bus in Delhi by a pack of six perverted and inhuman men was not only heart rending and shocking, it was also a conundrum to me in the spiritual sense.

The barbaric December 16 gang rape of a student in a moving bus in Delhi by a pack of six perverted and inhuman men was not only heart rending and shocking, it was also a conundrum to me in the spiritual sense.

Once in a while we all find ourselves saying, “I will never be able to forgive X, for what he or she did.” One is probably justified in thinking so. Perhaps one was wronged in a way that one shouldn’t have been. Perhaps one was backstabbed and betrayed or was a victim of petty politicking or a nasty conspiracy.

The letter “J” in the English alp-habet leads to words such as joy and judgment, but it also stands for other words such as jaundiced and jealousy. Jealousy or envy, the green-eyed monster, can breed a host of other negative emotions such as hatred, resentment and greed and if unchecked can send a person on the path to self-destruction.