How to have happy relations

I was musing about certain things the past few days.
Why do relations become a pain for people, etc...

What I realized are:
Our relatives are people who will be associated with us for a very long time unlike friends, who usually come and go.
Our relatives are not the people you choose - you can choose your friends but relatives are added.
Your closest cousin may marry a person, you can't gel with. What do you do?

We Indians are afraid of speaking our mind. We dislike somethings but we hold a grudge and backbite instead of openly telling people what we feel. If some relatives take advantage of us, instead of saying No, we will do the thing and complain behind their back.


We would go and gossip about A to B and how A did not treat us well, etc.

One of the most commonly complained things is - being taken advantage of or asked for too many favours or people not remembering what you did for them or inferiority complex.
As we grow, the more negative relations we have, the more it sucks our energy.

Life is a struggle to be better..that struggle should only create better things.

While thinking deep on this topic I realized a few things:

a) First and foremost is, know your relations. We cannot get very comfortable with everyone. Your mom's sister may be very close to you but you may not be able to get the same closeness with someone else. You may be able to do more for your close aunt than for your other relation. Avoid all negative relations.


b) We don't say "No" sometimes. A "No" is a better way to save resentment. If your "No" comes from a position of inability to help (rather than not wanting to help, where you can help) you will never feel guilty. Explain why you're not able to help and say sorry and let the other party understand.
I was reading http://greatist.com/happiness/how-to-set-boundaries-in-relationship and it's a must read for all. Many a times we end up in resentment because we had to go beyond our capacity to help others. It sours the relation. Instead, have healthy relations. Treat people well in general but if there are times when it's too hard, do say "No".

c)  Many a times we overestimate our help. A close family member will take everyone's problems on his head. The person himself may not think of it as a do or die situation but X will. He will put all his effort to help. Finally after a few years if he's not treated well or forgotten he feels bad.

The thing is, when you help someone in real need, they will never never forget it and you will also never need a "Thanks" from them. The happiness of helping such a needy person is itself sufficient.
One good example is, my dad helped a cousin get plastic surgery because of which she could get married. For her, it was a defining moment. Without that help, she would not have got married. There is no way she can forget my dad and my dad also doesn't need to hear a Thank you. The help itself was so magnificent.
Whereas, on the other hand, he helped one of his colleagues, get her job back in an unethical way.
That colleague, in all probability had no need for the job. The job was more of a luxury to her and it was got to her by unethical ways. So, a few years later, she will never remember my dad. I am sure he will feel let down with her.
So - you need to discriminate the real needs and comforts. When you give someone comforts it doesn't matter much to them. No one will remember that I change the bedsheets and pillow cases for every guest, so that it's clean and hygienic. It's a comfort that I offer. Whereas, if I give people a room to stay, when they do not have a place to stay in town, they will most probably acknowledge it. Also, no one will care that you spent 5 hours making a fancy mousse. You're doing it for your satisfaction and because you have a skill. Whereas, if you feed a real simple meal to a hungry person, it will help them more. So, know the NEEDs from the comforts.

Personally, I feel, one should go to great lengths to help the one in dire NEED. Whereas, if it's a matter of comfort, do it only if you have time and energy and inclination to help.

d) Never over ask for favours. Unfortunately, my dad, does this every single time.
I cringe everytime that he does this. He's helped people a lot. Sure. But that does not mean you ask a favour of someone which is actually a disturbance for them. Last week he asked my cousin to drop us from point A to our house. I did not know that my cousin stayed near point A. He drove all the way to drop us and drove the same distance back, that too at 10:30 at night. I felt horrible.

Don't just drop off at people's house unexpectedly. Don't drop in at people's place during regular lunch or interval times. Your host is then compelled to serve you food and they may not have the time, energy, ingredients or inclination to do so. It's not like people are always ready with extra food or all ingredients to throw a meal at short notice. As a thumbrule, don't do these things.

I remember so many times when we were at a relatives place and the lady of the house was so irritated due to our presence. It meant extra work for her. She probably did not want us there. At that time I never understood. But today I can. Never be an unwanted guest anywhere. It's a matter of dignity too.  If you repeatedly keep asking for favours, people will get annoyed. They may bite their teeth and do it, but don't let that happen. Ask only for genuine favours, that too when you know that the other person can help. Whenever you ask for any favour think a hundred times. Don't spoil your relations.

Whenever I set out to people's house I am very careful. I will never drop in during lunch or dinner time. At the most I can drop in for tea. Also, if I need help I will think a thousand times. Is it going to be a stretch for A to help me? How much of their time will it take? Is there any money involved? Will they say No? - Somehow because we do this, we seem to have good relations. We help people and we ask for limited help.

e) Be honest. Speak your mind. Don't hide resentment. Don't fake closeness. Be truthful and open.
Try to patch up. Else if the hurt is very strong, I recommend cutting off the relation.
Over years people gather a lot of hurt. Don't empower the hurt. Don't swell on them and let them feed you. It will make you negative. Instead sever ties and become positive.

I like my mom's attitude in this regard. If she does not like a relation, she cuts it off completely. She doesn't try to fake closeness. You will know that you're not in her good books :-) So many times, I end up falling in her bad books because I refuse to follow what she says :-)

She will not invite someone to her function for namesake. She will live with the ostracism than do that. She will not go to anyone's house or eat at their place if she does not feel comfortable.

f) Another thing is, we all consider that we're running a race. We need to be better than our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends and our relatives. Our children should have more degrees, better jobs, better houses and better cars. So, our relatives end up being people whom we compare ourself and our children against. This is never bound to create happy relations and it's bound to fail. Our only wish should be that we do our best, our children do their best and end up in jobs that they like and bring up their children with values. Beyond that, if my child earns less than my cousin's child - should not bother me. Earnings and social status is never a true measure of things. Long back PhDs earned so much less than most working people. For all their intellectualism and hard work they earned less. Today, my company pays so much to freshers than I make untill I was 29 years old. i.e Only after 8 years of working did I get that kind of pay. The world and economic structures change rapidly. Our skills and demand for our skills change. What was hot 10 years back is not hot today. New fields are emerging. Paychecks are fattening. Lifestyles are getting affluent. There is no way to compare two people - their education and earnings. My cousin, who is extremely hard working and is trying for MD will never see money till she becomes 27 or 28 probably. By that time, any software engineer will have a huge corpus and will own a house and a car. But a doctor is a doctor and we will all respect her much more than we respect a software engineer. So - we need to be realistic somewhere. An artists with amazing capabilities may die of penury.


So, as sadhguru says, these are just social or financial situations. Don't take it seriously and never compare 2 humans. It's gross injustice to both. Someone maybe rich but another "actually richer".
Everyone's aspirations and goals are different.

"Labels are distancing phenomena — stop using them! And when people use them around you, have the gumption and the guts to say, “What and who are you talking about because I don’t know any such thing.” … There is no word vast enough to begin to describe even the simplest of man. But only you can stop it. A loving person won’t stand for it. There are too many beautiful things about each human being to call him a name and put him aside."

g) Never take one aspect of a person and judge them harshly. Someone maybe selfish. So what? As long as that does not affect you - don't bother. Someone may be a miser. Someone may be proud or egoistic. Someone may be a bad cook. Someone may not know how to talk. These are small aspects of people. A person, as quoted above, has too many things. If we discard the bad and see the positives, we'll have positive relations. We all have so many negatives. We have slip of tongues. We blurt out. We sometimes behave proudly, not knowing that we're hurting others. When we have so many negatives, others will also have right? Who's perfect and why be perfect I say?

h) Another most important thing - do not poison your children. Let them evaluate people and choose their close relatives. Your equation with your mother in law maybe screwed but your children can have healthy relations with the grand parent. Never interfere with that. I can see so many children, who are exposed to so many negativism within the family. These children end up being suspicious people - doing bad things like tapping phone calls, opening gift made to someone, eavesdropping on private conversations, or not treating a relation with respect, etc. I find it abominable when children do it. It's ok for a conditioned adult to behave this way, but when children do it, I find it intolerable. In the name of teaching, you're spoiling your child's inner beauty. You're making them mature and negative to others. They will always be suspicious and never have open relations. Their first thought of a relation will always be doubt and suspicion. I am glad that my mom never taught be who is what.
I always gew up believing that people were all good. Yes, over the years I have come to realise that neither am I a buddha nor is everyone good. There are people who cannot be close. There are people who are opportunists. There are people who will not treat you well if you're not well off. But those people do not matter. But, overall whatever I know of relations, is not through my mom's teachings. That is why I am able to have close relations with the same people whom she hates. If she had taught me early on, I would have also hated some people. But I was free to form my own relations using my own judgements, which I feel is a good thing. A person will have different relation with X and X's children. X is an adult whereas, X's child is innocent, pure and open to relations. That's how it should be.

i) Accomodate changes. A person matures with age. They usually become better. Whatever grudges you have, drop them and accept the new person. Then only life is meaningful. We all change over time. Some relations fade and new ones form. Always evaluate a person for what they are now - not what they were 20 years ago. 10 years back, in my immaturity I had a lot of hatred against few relations. Today, I have matured and they have also opened up themselves to me and we have a really good relation. If I still hold the grudge that they ill treated me long back, this cannot happen. Our efforts to become better people encompasses moving on and accepting changes - both in us, others and in the relation between us.
Read this interesting article:
http://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/article328930.ece

j) Last but not the least, always treat people well. Whoever it be. If you meet someone, greet them and treat them well. Never ever make faces or behave in a cheap manner. Always think that you are god and everyone is god. Behave like a god.

So - these are the things that come to my mind. I want to have very positive healthy relations. I value every person. I want to nourish relations and grow into a better person and help others also grow into positive people and healthy, successful people. This, is an attempt towards that.

The beauty of surrender

http://www.jenniferkassllc.com/uncategorized/are-you-judging-everything/

The ability to move forward with creative projects, relationships, and all the rest without trying to make them perfect is hard to do when we’re used to judging and controlling things. The problem with creating something and not letting it be what it’s meant to be in that moment and putting it out into the world, is that it will never actually go out into the world or develop or get to the next level!
We do this in our work, our relationships, even with our bodies. This belief that we’re not where we’re meant to be, whether it’s with the weight, or the project, or in the relationship, does not allow it to be whatever it perfectly is in that moment. Until we accept exactly where we are right now and LOVE it and trust it, things will remain stuck and unable to unfold in the beautiful way they’re meant to.
When we apply non-judgment to any person, situation or creative project, we release our tight hold on it and let it be whatever it’s meant to be. But the big surprise that none of us realize is that when we do this, it’s ALWAYS bigger and better than we could imagine. Because there is our plan–and there is the higher plan that is not in our control–and it’s better that way. When we relax and allow things to be what and where they need to be, we are practicing the highest level of surrender.
Surrender is releasing the need to control outcomes and situations, allowing them to be of the highest good and of the highest service to all involved. Surrender is when we get out of the driver’s seat and let a force much bigger than ourselves take over, a force that is unconditional love, a divine all-knowing, cosmic flow that brings in miracles and a level of creativity and ease that we would otherwise never experience in this lifetime. Surrender is the fast-track to happiness. And when we’re happy, we’re unstoppable.

The freedom within each man

Man’s Search for Meaning author, Victor E. Frankl said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

The song of the soul

There is a tribe in Africa called the Himba tribe, where the birth date of a child is counted not from when they were born, nor from when they are conceived but from the day that the child was a thought in its mother’s mind. And when a woman decides that she will have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child that wants to come. And after she’s heard the song of this child, she comes back to the man who will be the child’s father, and teaches it to him. And then, when they make love to physically conceive the child, some of that time they sing the song of the child, as a way to invite it.

And then, when the mother is pregnant, the mother teaches that child’s song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that when the child is born, the old women and the people around her sing the child’s song to welcome it. And then, as the child grows up, the other villagers are taught the child’s song. If the child falls, or hurts its knee, someone picks it up and sings its song to it. Or perhaps the child does something wonderful, or goes through the rites of puberty, then as a way of honoring this person, the people of the village sing his or her song.

In the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.

The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.

And it goes this way through their life. In marriage, the songs are sung, together. And finally, when this child is lying in bed, ready to die, all the villagers know his or her song, and they sing—for the last time—the song to that person.

You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn’t. In the end, we shall all recognize our song and sing it well. You may feel a little warbly at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you’ll find your way home.


Source: The Mind Unleashed
www.themindunleashed.org

Luxuries

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
— Thoreau

Thoureau on simplicity and technology

http://simplicitycollective.com/thoreau/thoreau-on-technology

 Thoreau On Technology

What about technology? Must the simple liver indiscriminately renounce it? Thoreau thought that it is certainly better to accept than reject the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of humankind offer – provided, of course, that they are genuine advantages.[1] But he warned that often with these ‘modern improvements’ there is ‘an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance…. Our inventions are want to be pretty toys, which distract us from serious things. They are an improved means to an unimproved end.’[2] It is all very well to invent or be able to afford some new gadget, Thoreau was saying, but we should look upon new technologies with a measure of scepticism, for however ingenious and marvellous the invention may seem, it will likely have unintended side-effects and even shape who we are as persons, in ways that are not always obvious or positive. Looking to our own day, the television, for example, is a remarkable human achievement, and yet, aside from sleeping and working, the television now consumes more time of the typical North American or Briton than any other activity, and other ‘advanced societies’ watch almost as much.[3] One does not have to be an ‘elitist’ to have doubts about whether this is really the best way to spend our freedom. The point is that if we do not know what to do with technology, then it can be life-debilitating rather than life-enhancing.
Trying to get us to question the purpose of various technologies and whether they actually improve our lives, Thoreau wrote:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.[4]
The problem is that technology is often just there – fascinating, new, socially celebrated, affordable, and available – and it is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, since earlier generations did without it, we ‘moderns’/’postmoderns’ must therefore have progressed, that we are necessarily better off. Pernicious nonsense, Thoreau would say. We must show some discrimination in terms of what we choose to celebrate. If some new technology genuinely furthers our life goals and does not distract us from more important activities, then, by all means, we should take advantage of it. But Thoreau warned that all too often – in insidious ways – technology costs more than it comes to.
Two reasons that made Thoreau particularly suspicious of technology were (1) that we have to spend time working to earn money to afford technology, and he wonders whether we might oftener be better off without the technology and with more free time; and (2) that technology tends to distance us from the natural environment and can affect our life experiences for the worse. Both these points are masterfully illustrated in the following passage:
One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.[5]
Travelling by train might seem to be the most ‘efficient’ way to travel, but Thoreau challenges us to rethink how this new technology affects our experience and what are its full costs, comprehensively defined. And although Thoreau’s example here considers transportation only, the points he makes are generally applicable to all our decisions relating to technology.
To the objection that Thoreau is advocating an unsophisticated primitive existence, the appropriate response is twofold: first, that although he often damned technologies as debilitating luxuries he did not deny that they could also be enabling tools worthy of praise and exploitation; secondly, Thoreau suggested that just perhaps there is a sophistication and elegance to the clothesline, the bicycle, and the water tank, that the dryer, the automobile, and the desalination plant, decidedly lack. Conversely, perhaps there is a certain primitiveness to technological gimmicks. As Leonardo da Vinci once wrote: ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’

Thoureau's unsold works

Rain in the night and this morning, preparing for winter.
For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, — 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship; these are the work of my brain. There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The unbound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed, —
H.D. Thoreau’s
Concord River
50 cops.
So Munroe had only to cross out “River” and write “Mass.” and deliver them to the expressman at once. I can see now what I write for, the result of my labors.
Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe that this result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer.