Thread Ceremony 2.0

 

The Legend of Merlion (Kavish's first story)

Around 1842, in a forest near the island of Singapura, there lived a ferocious lion who was nice and kind. Once he was giving a candle to an old lioness to help her light up her cave. Her hand was trembling and she accidently dropped the candle. The candle’s flame turned into a big fire soon. The fire spread to the trees and soon it started spreading into a forest fire.

The lion started thinking of ideas to save his beautiful home. He came up with an idea to go to the ocean and get as much water as he could to put out the fire. But, how would he transfer the water from the ocean to the jungle to stop this blazing fire!

He thought of a plan:

1. Find a helpful ocean friend

2. Get a hollow log and put it inside the water

3. The lion would roar into one end of the log to make the water shoot out, like an elephant’s trunk

4. The ocean friend would rotate the other end of log in all directions to extinguish the fire

The young lion started searching and found a friend he knew would be ready to help him - the pretty mermaid swimming around a coral by the coast.

The lion asked the mermaid for help and she agreed immediately. The lion threw the hollow log in the ocean and started roaring. The mermaid started rotating the log so that it would shoot out water in all directions.

The fire still continued to spread though!

They realised there was acid in the water, all because of the pollutants that humans threw. The acid water was igniting the fire even further. The lion then jumped into the ocean bed to fetch some sand. The mermaid helped him swim and together they collected sand. The mermaid started filling the log and the lion roared into it. The sand that shot out made the fire settle.

All animals cheered and thanked the brave lion and helpful mermaid – that’s how the legend of ‘Mer-lion’ was formed.

~Kavish Narang, 7 years, 3B - DCIS

Gardening & Parenting (& Meditation): An analogy

Sowing a seed in the soil, giving the sapling requisite shelter & sunlight and feeding it adequate water daily to see it grow healthily into a plant in its own wake, has so many parallels to bringing up a baby with the right Parenting approach, eventually enabling it's maturity into an individual of its own thinking in the future!

Whats the most synonymous though at a certain time & stage is to prune away the weeds that come along in the garden - those that share the same shelter, benefit as well from the sunlight and partake of the common water for the plant you intend to grow. Left to grow, the weeds too mature into bigger, more stronger beings by taking away what's originally intended for the plant. Left to itself, may be the plant would have grown bigger & stronger without the weeds, but alas!

Thankfully, a master gardener knows the right time to prune away the weeds, keeping them around only so long that he knows he's not mistakenly plucking away at new saplings of the original plant.

In the case of Parenting too, at times, incorrect thought patterns & resultant negative actions do get picked up by kids on the journey to becoming individuals. Left to grow, these could become stronger habits that take away from their growth into inspired & positively influenced individuals - destiny may have a role to play eventually, but the self-effort of each parent on the field of their child's life garden, would have an impact to show & a mark to leave behind.

Just like the master gardener, a conscious parent prunes away the negatives, analyzing and deciphering them clearly from the key virtues & values that impact positively, enabling the transition as the bedrock of individual growth for the child!

Conscious Parents are the Master Gardeners of Nature's most precious creation!

 

Pic: Our home basil/ tulsi plant grown from seeds sown 

Another 'gardening' analogy sourced from the book 'Karma' by Sadhguru

Those who are meditative will experience deep levels of joy. But this also opens them up to deep levels of pain. This pain is only for a short duration, however, because their higher level of awareness allows them to work it out more quickly. When you go into deeper levels of meditation, if you take a single wrong step, the effect manifests itself immediately and you will have to correct it. But for a person who lives in relative unawareness, the process may be slow but much deeper. What takes a lifetime could be over on this very day for the spiritually aware person because they immediately take corrective measures.

If you become meditative and still carry negativity, your negative karmas become a thousand times more powerful because you have become that much more sensitive & receptive. Suppose you cultivate the soil and enrich it with manure. The crops will grow well, but the same manure will also enable weeds to grow. Similarly, when you cultivate a meditative state and allow negative emotions to flourish, inner suffering increases dramatically. It is important to be extra cautious about weeding when you are in such a state. Otherwise you will be left with a forest of weeds and no crop!

The reason those on the spiritual path have a daily practice is just this: to ensure that karmic stagnation does not happen. You may already have noticed that if you have a daily practice and you stop it for 6 months, many recurrent issues - physical, psychological & social - that have not bothered you for a while start returning. This is how the karmic cycle works. You may have believed you were transformed, but you will suddenly find all kinds of compulsive behaviors returning with a vengeance. Only practice, or sadhana, helps break the cyclical movement of life.