Day 54 - WEC- The inner turmoil

There are so many things that I want to write about, that I want to express.
About people I met recently and how sick they were and how beautiful some other souls were.
About misunderstandings that arise between two perfectly well intentioned souls.
About my insecurities, about my love for the world.
But then some small voice inside me stops me. It says,"Why are you opening up your heart to people? You don't know what kind of person is on the other side and reading your innermost thoughts. They may misuse this."
And this has happened.
My frank and upfront nature has been the cause of many sleepless nights.
Most people are just not worth the truth!

But some are.
Very few are.
And this goes out to them.
This risk must be taken.
Because the true souls are worth every bit of pain suffered to connect to them.

There was a time I wanted to be a writer.
That urge and desire isn't there anymore.
You want to be something when somewhere inside you believe that you aren't that.
But when you are 'it', you don't want 'to do' those things.
I can not be a writer or a story teller or a lover !
I am all that and so much more.
I recently got connected to Instagram and I always get stuck at that "Bio" part where we are supposed to introduce ourselves.
How silly is that?
You just write what you know about yourself.
No..you write what you 'like' about yourself.
You write what you are proud of showing to the world.
But that's not the real you.
You are just putting up a nice face!
That's because you are afraid of saying the truth!
You are afraid people won't like you if they know that about you.
But you do know that about yourself, and you hide it. You hide it to your grave.
So nobody knows the whole story.
How sad!

I don't want that to happen to me.
I want people to know my whole truth.
The good, the bad, and the unknown.
You know there is always that area....you don't know what it is...is it good? is it bad?

I want to tell the world about the experiences I explored.
I have explored love in so many forms. The love affair I have With my pets, my family, my dreams, my plants,my innumerable lovers and with my country.
You can't be someone who loves that deeply and doesn't hate as much deeply.
They both go hand in hand,
and so I have also hated.
I have explored hate in so many forms. The hate I feel towards animal abusers, the hate I feel for the people who hurt my family members, the rage I feel when someone disrespects my dreams, my heart is torn when my plants die for reasons I don't know yet, I so wished I could talk to them and understand what they need and give it when they were still alive....The hate I feel towards my ex lovers for the way they treated me, and towards people who harm my country.

As I swing between love and hate, between compassion and pain
and between reaching out and holding in, I live!
With this inner turmoil , I breathe.

Day 53- WEC- Three Stories of three women!

Story 1:

There is a very smart woman and she wants to do a lot in her life and she is capable. But she doesn't find good support system in her family. She tries to take them together and walk forward on the road to progress.....but somehow the burden of their rejection and negative approach towards her is too much. So she decides to walk alone, without any support from anybody. Step by step, she makes herself stronger, with every passing day she learns new lessons. She doesn't stop, she pushes on, she achieves her goals and her dreams. In the process she leaves her loved one's far behind. The loneliness is her comfort zone now. There are vultures attacking her everywhere , she fights them bravely, scarred and bleeding, but she won't ask for help, she can't trust anybody . There is no turning back, there is nobody to look up to. Every step must be forward. Her defense system is high, nobody can breach the high walls. The thorns on these walls bleed the hands of even her well wishers and her friends. The walls keep her lonelier than she should be. There are good people around....but she can't see any. She fires at all targets blindly!

Story 2:

This is also a story of a woman.
This one is highly intelligent and calm. Powerful combination. Very early in her life, she and her family had to go through a very difficult situation. It was tough to survive it, but somehow they make it through, all of them. They are now a happy, close knit ,supportive family. But the memories of those years don't fade out from her mind. The fear and insecurity of that situation keeps surrounding her even today. She is still reacting to a situation that happened 15 years back. "What if it happens again? i must be prepared" She keeps telling herself. "I will make no mistake." She is filling up every gap, she is trouble shooting to that old problem even today. She is so busy looking out for the shore that almost sunk her ship that she misses noticing the shores that could take her to places.

Story 3:

There is yet another woman.
This one is a warrior princess. She was trained for battle since childhood. And she thought she was ready to take on the world.But her very first battle gave her the deepest of all wounds, her training didn't help cope with the situation. She lost the battle , she lost every war subsequently and that continued for such a long time that she lost her identity in the chaos of defeat!
"Had there been some mistake?" She thought, "What kind of training did they give me, I was duped! i am no warrior!" So she stays low and makes sure to get as far away as possible at the very whiff of conflict....but A warrior princess she is meant to be...wherever she goes, conflict follows ! The chase continues...Will she stop running away and turn around and look Conflict in the eye? Will she mount the horse and fight?



The first story is of a woman who has built very high defense mechanism to protect herself. That mechanism while it works against some, starts hurting the maker in the long run. The right step is  to get strong internally by bringing down the defenses  and fill oneself with positive potion so you can deal with  attacks calmly, without locking oneself down in a defense tower.


In the second story, the woman needs to make peace with herself and accept that whatever happened was not her fault, it has taught her some good lessons, it was necessary for her growth, have gratitude and walk ahead. Breaking out of the circle of fear and insecurity which has been formed due to repeated thinking patterns on the problem takes time and often feels painful. But it is necessary for the spiritual growth and one must accept it.She must break those thinking patterns consciously , so she needs to learn the techniques of breaking them and apply them regularly.


As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagawad Gita, a warrior must fight the battle. There is no place for a coward on a battlefield. The third woman must pick her sword again and she must get back to war in order to win over her fear of failure.

All of us are stuck at different stages of our life. Some of us are stuck in our towers of fear, some of us are tired of running away from the problem, some others still are wondering what is happening  and are unaware of the patterns or the lessons to learn.

Eventually, we learn what we need to learn, it's a matter of time!

Day 52-WEC- Rolling the Ball!

I have been thinking and thinking and getting frustrated with the state of affairs for years.

Plastic everywhere!
Deterioration of the environment!
Pollution!
Negativity amongst people!

First, I decided to go off the grid, ran away to Ooty, tried to find a farm to rent out.

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him you have a plan!"

Apart from what was intended, everything else that was not intended happened.
I came home. Dejected, scared but not hopeless.
I took my time.
Stayed underground for a while.
Reworked myself.
And the opportunity walked in.

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."

Goa is becoming a garbage dump day by day. The Government isn't doing much, as always, they have better things to take care of, such as 'increasing their Party strength in the Legislative Assembly and kick off some past allies' or  fill their personal treasury in the name of running a Government! 

All of them are pathetically the same kind. 

Aso ( 'Anyway' in marathi),

So there was this 12 week Go wasteless Program started by this woman called Saritha. 

( The Waste Less Project collectively researches local solutions on waste reduction for the larger community.
Follow the project via: Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/wastelessgoa) OR Instagram (@wastelesspro).
WhatsApp Invite - https://chat.whatsapp.com/K1DRmATLF71HaVFK2N5URl)

We just had to sign up and she personally sent us information every week and helped me to reduce my waste drastically.

What more, I even started composting and planting more trees than ever before. 

I should say this program alone made almost 50% change in my behaviour as a consumer, as a citizen and a human being. 

One of the requirement of the 12 week program was to talk about this subject in our communities. 

That's what I did. 

I talked to Mahila Mandal with over a 100 members about the solutions to our Garbage problems and ended the talk with an Action plan for the Mandal.

Lucky me, the Mandal took it up!

We then held a meeting with the Municipal Counselor and the residents of 2 wards. 

A. We pledged to send 0 waste to the landfill.

B. We pledged to hand over our dry waste to a responsible recycler.

C. We pledged to learn composting at home and at community level.

Next, we invited the Garbage Warrior of Goa Mr. Carneiro to visit Comba, our ward to guide us about waste management. He checked some of the black spots and then took us to a community composting unit he had set up for 120 residents. 

<---- This is a Black Soldier Fly larvae composter with 1000 ltrs capacity.

Apart from educating ourselves and spreading awareness, we are taking steps to minimize garbage as much as possible. We are talking with several people about starting something similar to an Eco Posro in Comba. Check this out:
Goa's very First Eco Posro!

There are some nay Sayers of course. But there are so many enthusiasts who are ready and willing to participate in this revolution.

We just have to get the ball rolling!

"Dum Laga ke Haisha"! 

Day 51- WEC- Lose some , win some!

I am generally happy about my life at this point.
I am actually doing a lot of the things that were just dilly dallying on my "To Do List" since 2014.
For an example, two of the activities were:  "Meditate Regularly" and "Grow your own veggies". I am actually doing these two very important activities and they have increased my overall life satisfaction score.
I also almost have the kind of balance between legal work, my passion for writing and doing community related work about recycling dry waste and composting the wet waste.
I don't always get it right of course.
Some days I read, some days I don't.
Some days I write, some days I don't.
Some days I do legal work, other days I don't.

Do I make a lot of money ?
Nope.

Am I happy?
I am peaceful!  :-)

I have realised that the shift from "How is this going to benefit me?" To "How is this going to benefit people around me?" has made me more guilt free and happy than just thinking about my career goals, my money, my success etc.

It has taken me quite some time to  get here, it has been a wonderful journey.

You want to know the trick to be more peaceful?

A. Quit Competition of all kinds!
In your career, pay, looks, dressing, success . It's just such a dumb concept! When we compete , we believe that we are against someone else. And that's a self sabotaging strategy. Get this right- we are not 'against' others, we are in fact ' a part of the whole'! I don't compete with my mom or my mum in law, or my sister or my sister in law or my best friend....or my Husband..then why not spare the rest of the world? What is making me look/sound better than the other women or the other men going to give me? A superiority complex, arthaat 'Ego Boost'. That brings me to point no. 2

B. Wage a war against your Ego!
It's not the break up's or the fights we have with our colleagues or Managers that hurt us more than Our own Ego. This Ego is a devil sitting inside our heads and making us work against ourselves by giving us a notion that it's actually good for us.
It's hard to understand exactly at what point to take a stand against someone else because of their behaviour towards you or others, because of this Ego element in between the transaction. Do I want to take a stand because I am hurt, and am I hurt because of my Ego ? Or should this behaviour be curbed for the benefit of many? I run myself through these screens before red flagging my own behaviour or those of others- whether it's my family or at work place.
As a rule, no matter in what setting, abusive -aggressive behaviour is to be shot down at first sight.

C. Downsize, Stop running behind manufactured ideas of success, adventure and happiness!
This has been the biggest relief! No need to run behind jobs and fatter pay to spend money on clothes, drinks, parties, traveling etc.
I understand there are people who really love dressing up, their desire has gone beyond all good sense and the toll it takes on our environment and resources. And I also understand there are people ( I was one of them) for whom adventure means traveling, scouting, parties - Yo!
Well! A continuous traveling life does tend to put pressure on our minds. So does running behind adventure activities, jobs, higher qualifications....I have done it all and realised that everything I was ever searching for was right here, in Goa, where I am.
The entire running behind things business was expensive, exhausting and unfortunately ended with no great lessons learnt.

D. Identify the activities that bring you 'Nirmal Anand' / Peace:
What are the things you do when nobody pays you? Or nobody asks you to do, yet you do, because of something so strong within? It takes years to identify these activities. And most of the times they are the really small everyday things around us.
For an example, I love spending time with my pets and around the trees, it's such a satisfying and absolutely free of any cost activity.
I also love going to the library and spend time amongst books. I enjoy my time alone at home, I enjoy my time with kids, I also enjoy searching for old clothes in my mom's closet and try to convert those fabrics into something else.
All these are activities that require no money and yet give me so much joy.

E. Closer to nature, closer to spirituality :
If you have already done the above, then you would naturally bend closer to the nature and nature will direct you to spirituality. People who have no clue about the nature of their souls are truly lost. They are so engaged in everything outside of them that they have no clue what's happening inside. And what's happening inside is everything..it's the real world! But well....it's a long journey!


That's it!
Just 5 points and you are on your way to a Peaceful life.

I wish you all peace and harmony, love and abundance!

be happy!