Love life, live life

Rajkumari Sharma Tankha

I couldn’t have got Life’s Amazing Secrets: How To Find Balance and Purpose In Your Life at a better time. Confused and at crossroads on various life issues, I had recently joined a spiritual group (Beings Of Light) and started attending its monthly meetings. The group founder Major Dalbir Singh often called me for these meetings but I always thought that spirituality was for the retired. Why should I join the group?… I don’t even have time to attend these meetings? I used to think.

Then one fine day, after persistent calling of Major Singh (and I thank him for that till date), I did attend a meeting. It opened a whole new world of knowledge before me, knowledge I was so ignorant about! Significantly, most group members are working professionals, seeing whose ever-smiling, happy faces I often felt inadequate. These guys are so happy, they must not be having any issue in life and here I am having so much on my plate, I always thought. I had many questions to ask but I could never ask anyone anything. How can you ask a person why he/ she is always happy? I mean, that’s kind of weird. And not having answers bothered me no end.

So when Penguin sent across Gaur Gopal Das’ book, the title, Life’s Amazing Secrets: How To Find Balance and Purpose In Your Life , itself made me open it. I had heard about the author, even seen some of his short videos though I never thought too highly of him; I took him to be just another baba. But I am glad that in my confused state of mind, I decided to read this book. For the book answers many of the questions that erupted in my mind. The good thing is I got all my answers without asking a single question; the best thing is I now know that we are all sailing in the same boat, that each one of us has one or the other issue to tackle and that it is always better to confront a problem with a smiling face than a tensed one! This book taught me all this!

Life’s Amazing Secrets: How To Find Balance and Purpose In Your Life (Penguin Ananda, Rs 250, 208 pages) is a refreshing light-hearted conversational guide (with a bit of humour thrown in at places) to help you find your true purpose in life.

Written by well-known life-coach Gaur Gopal Das, it tells you how to strike the right balance between work, relationships and society while carrying on living a spiritual life.

Telling the story of a rich and well-settled couple Harikrishna and Lalitha Iyer, the author takes the reader on a journey of life which is truly unforgettable. Interestingly, Harry’s (Harikrishna’s) luxury sedan is compared to the Arjuna’s chariot, the author becomes the voice of Lord  Krishna while Harry expresses the confusion that Arjuna had just when the battle of Mahabharata was about to take place. Today, it’s not the actual war that we fight but we do fight our daily battles in life which are no less than a war. The modern city life is indeed a battlefield that throws up new challenges every day, challenges that leave one stressed and often feeling defeated — corporate jobs that take a toll on relationships, the stiff competition in the office, financial pressures, strained relationships, rising crime, inflation…  How to come out of these situations a winner? The books tells you all this and much more.

What makes this book more remarkable is that the story is interspersed with precious insights that Gaur Gopal Das gives on the everyday issues of life.

Sample this:
Feeling peaceful, happy and content is not about avoiding challenges in life but how we navigate through these challenges to reach the type of life we want to live.
The secret of life is finding balance, not too much, not too little. Just bas a car balances on four wheels, we must balance our four crucial wheels of life: our personal life, our relationships, our work life and our social contribution.
…the external tenets of balance are adjustment and alignment, the internal ones are attitude and values…

But he tells the readers that just as one cannot drive a car without the steering wheel similarly one cannot live life to the fullest without spirituality. We must NOT let go of the steering wheel (ie spirituality) of our life.

The book is divided into 20 chapters, each beginning with a thought-provoking quote, and most ending with a short summary of what is written inside it. This can come handy for people who don’t have much time to read but still want to read the book.

Life’s Amazing Secrets: How To Find Balance and Purpose In Your Life ends with two appendices. Appendix 1 talks about forgiveness worksheet while the second one is about Ikigai worksheet.  The forgiveness worksheet one not only teaches about forgiveness but also tells the step-by-step method in which one can forgive a person who has hurt. The Ikigai worksheet pushes one to delve deeper into the psyche and find out one’s true passion and ways to integrate it into daily life so as to make it more meaningful.

Truly a thought-provoking book, this one is sure to help the readers align themselves with the life that they want to live – the life they would love living!