You are a Masterpiece
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
"A plum once said, 'just because a banana lover came by, I converted myself into a banana. Unfortunately, his taste changed after a few months and so I became an orange. When he said I was bitter I became an apple, but he went
in search of grapes. Yielding to the opinions of so many people, I have changed so many times that I no more know who I am.  How I wish I had remained a plum and waited for a plum lover.'

Just because a group of people or someone do not accept you as you are, there is no necessity for you to strip yourself of your originality. You need to think Good of yourself, for the world takes you at your own estimate.  Never stoop down in order to gain recognition. Never let go of your true self to win a relationship. In the long run, you will regret that you traded your greatest Glory - your uniqueness, for momentary validation. Even Gandhi was not accepted by many people. The group that does not accept you as YOU is not Your world.

There is a world for each one of you, where you shall reign as king /queen by just being yourself. Find that world... In fact, that world will find You.

What water can do, gasoline cannot and what copper can, gold cannot.  The fragility of the ant enables it to move and the rigidity of the tree enables it to stay rooted. Everything and everybody has been designed with a Proportion of uniqueness to serve a purpose that we can fulfill only by being our unique self. You as you alone can serve your purpose and I as I Alone can serve my purpose.  You are here to be you... Just YOU.

There was a time in this world when a Krishna was required and he was sent; A time when a Christ was required and he was sent; a time when a Mahatma was Required and he was sent; a time when a J.R.D.Tata was required and he was Sent. There came a time when you were required on this planet and hence you were sent. Let us be the best we can be.  
 
In the history of the universe, there has been nobody like you and to the infinity of time to come, there will be no one like you.  Existence should have loved you so much that it broke the mould after making you, so that another of your kind will never get repeated. "You are original. You are rare. You are unique. You are a wonder. You are a masterpiece. .. Your Master's piece. Celebrate your Uniqueness."

~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

The wise man wants you only to have insight into things so that you have your own light. But you don't want insight, you want clear-cut instructions. You don't want to see yourself, you want to be guided. You don't want to accept your responsibility towards yourself; you want to throw the whole responsibility on the shoulders of the master, on the shoulders of the wise man. Then you feel at ease. Now he is responsible; if something goes wrong, he is responsible. And everything is going to be wrong, because unless you take your responsibility nothing is ever going to be right.



Nobody can put you right except you yourself.



A real religious person is born the moment you accept your responsibility for yourself, the moment you say, “Whatsoever I am is my choice—not of the past but of the present. It is my choice of this moment, and if I want to change it I am absolutely free to change it. Nobody can hinder me—no social force, no state, no history, no economics, no unconscious, can hinder me. If I am determined to change it, I can change it.



The master simply teaches you to be a master of yourself - that is the true function of a master. He does not want you to depend on him. But the mind goes on playing these mischief. The mind wants you to depend. The mind is always in search of a father figure or a mother figure; you want somebody to hold your hand. You want somebody to guide, to lead.

The master can only indicate. He is a finger pointing to the moon. But the mind plays a mischief: it clings to the finger - you may even start sucking the finger.

A Zen master, Nan Yin, used to say to his disciples, "Please don't bite my finger - look at the moon!"



FROM YOUR VERY CHILDHOOD YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT NOT TO BE responsible. You have been taught to depend. You have been taught to be responsible to your father, to your mother, to your family, to your motherland, to all kinds of nonsense. But you have not been told that you have to be responsible for yourself, that there is nobody who is going to take your responsibility. . . .



I teach you not to be responsible to anybody —the father, the mother, the country, the religion, the party line, don’t be responsible to anybody. You are not!



Just be responsible to yourself. Do whatsoever you feel like doing. If it is wrong, the punishment will immediately follow. If it is right, the reward will follow immediately, instantly; there is no other way. In this way you will start finding what is wrong, what is right, on your own. You will grow a new sensitivity— Indians call it the third eye. You will start seeing with a new vision, a new eye. Instantly you will know what is wrong, because in the past so many times you have done it and always suffered in consequence. You will know what is right, because whenever you did existence showered great blessings on you. Cause and effect are together, they are not separated by years and lives. . . .



This is what I mean by being responsible to yourself. There is no God on whom you can dump your responsibility, but you are always searching to dump on somebody, even on a poor man like me, who is continuously telling you that I am not responsible for anything, for anybody. Still, somehow, deep down you go on carrying the illusion that I must be joking. I am not joking. “He is our master," you must be thinking. “How can he say that he is not responsible?" But you don’t understand. Dumping your responsibility on me, you will remain retarded, childish. You will never grow.



The only way to grow is to accept all the good, the bad, the joyful, the sorrowful. Everything that happens to you, you are responsible for. That gives you great freedom.



If I am responsible for something, then the key to your actions is in my hands. Then you are a slave to me. Then you are a puppet and the strings are in my hand. I say dance, you dance; I say stop, you stop. Of course, the puppet cannot be responsible for anything. The puppeteer, who is behind the screen, is always responsible. God is the great puppeteer.


The moment I say there is no puppeteer, no God, no saint, it is all rubbish, I am trying to give you total freedom. I am making you absolutely responsible for everything that happens to you or does not happen. Rejoice in this freedom. Rejoice in this great understanding that you are responsible for everything in your life. This will make you what I call an individual. And to become an individual is to know all that is worth knowing, is to experience all that is worth experiencing. To be an individual is to be liberated, is to be enlightened.

By OSHO - Rajneesh (from his book - Autobiography of a spiritually incorrect mystic)

(Prepared by clicking the  photo of the pages from the book and getting google doc to convert image into text - works like a charm!

Sharing from a mail
what children are excited by is not necessarily congruent with adult
perceptions about what is good for them; what they must read, watch or be
exposed to. This is not to say that we must give up the idea of sharing
stories that we feel our children could learn from; rather we should perhaps
begin to wear our anxieties a bit lightly. If something is imposed, there’s
bound to be resistance.

“Sometimes when I visit schools, I ask children how many of them don’t like
to read. Many of them say that it’s because the books at home are all picked
up by their parents, and they find those books boring. They don’t have a
choice in what they read. Also, I think some children will never love books,
and that’s okay. They can go play in the park, or do something else that
they enjoy,” she says.

There’s too much pressure on children. Even in the case of parents who
encourage their children to read, there is often an impulse to push them
into reading seemingly more complex books; for instance, to move beyond
picture books, and to read ‘real’ books packed with text. Says Anushka
“Children relate to pictures in a very different way than adults. For many
adults, the concern is how to keep them occupied instead of thinking about
what the children will engage with and enjoy.” So how does she manage to
figure out what a child will enjoy? “I don’t think of a reader out there.
You have to tap into the child in yourself and write for that.”

*References*

Modi, C. (2008). Official School Poetry in Indian Textbooks: A Critical
View. *Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language* 12/3, 1-8.
http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume12/ej47/ej47r1/<http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume12/ej47/%20ej47r1/>

Munro, H. H. (1949). The storyteller. In L. B. Cook, W. Loban, O.J.
Campbell, & R.M. Stauffer (Eds.), *The world through literature*.
California: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 406-411.

 

A wise man once sat in the audience & cracked a joke. All laughed like crazy. After a moment he cracked the same joke again and a little less people laughed this time. He cracked the same joke again & again, When there was no laughter in the crowd, he smiled and said "When u can't laugh on the same joke again & again, then why do u keep crying over the same thing over and over again.
'Forget the past & move on' ...
 

One day, the sage gave the disciple an empty sack and a basket of potatoes. "Think of all the people who have done or said something against you in the recent past, especially those you cannot forgive. For each of them, inscribe the name on a potato and put it in the sack."

The disciple came up quite a few names, and soon his sack was heavy with potatoes.

"Carry the sack with you wherever you go for a week," said the sage. "We'll talk after that."

At first, the disciple thought nothing of it. Carrying the sack was not particularly difficult. But after a while, it became more of a burden. It sometimes got in the way, and it seemed to require more effort to carry as time went on, even though its weight remained the same.

After a few days, the sack began to smell. The carved potatoes gave off a ripe odor. Not only were they increasingly inconvenient to carry around, they were also becoming rather unpleasant.

Finally, the week was over. The sage summoned the disciple. "Any thoughts about all this?"

"Yes, Master," the disciple replied. "When we are unable to forgive others, we carry negative feelings with us everywhere, much like these potatoes. That negativity becomes a burden to us and, after a while, it festers."

"Yes, that is exactly what happens when one holds a grudge. So, how can we lighten the load?"

"We must strive to forgive."

"Forgiving someone is the equivalent of removing the corresponding potato from the sack. How many of your transgressors are you able to forgive?"

"I've thought about it quite a bit, Master," the disciple said. "It required much effort, but I have decided to forgive all of them."

"Very well, we can remove all the potatoes. Were there any more people who transgressed against you this last week?"

The disciple thought for a while and admitted there were. Then he felt panic when he realized his empty sack was about to get filled up again.

"Master," he asked, "if we continue like this, wouldn't there always be potatoes in the sack week after week?"

"Yes, as long as people speak or act against you in some way, you will always have potatoes."

"But Master, we can never control what others do. So what good is the Tao in this case?"

"We're not at the realm of the Tao yet. Everything we have talked about so far is the conventional approach to forgiveness. It is the same thing that many philosophies and most religions preach – we must constantly strive to forgive, for it is an important virtue. This is not the Tao because there is no striving in the Tao."

"Then what is the Tao, Master?"

"You can figure it out. If the potatoes are negative feelings, then what is the sack?"

"The sack is... that which allows me to hold on to the negativity. It is something within us that makes us dwell on feeling offended.... Ah, it is my inflated sense of self-importance."

"And what will happen if you let go of it?"

"Then... there is no sack to carry the potatoes / grudge. No me, no holding of the grudge, no need to forgive."

From http://www.deccanchronicle.com/business/bagful-wishes-422

By Ashish Rajpal

Do not limit your child to your own education, for he was born in another
time.

A Jewish proverb

I wish that hands-on exploration be part of our classroom curriculum. What
if children were treated as little scientists who conducted experiments with
their own hands, made observations, asked questions and came to their own
conclusions while guided by the teacher?

For me personally, a defining experience was a class I attended with Eleanor
Duckworth. She was our professor at Harvard University who would run classes
in a very hands-on and experiential way. She would make us do permutations
and combination exercises with clips, make us do area and volume exercises
with chocolate bars, keep us up late at night and make us watch the moon to
see what its shape was and the direction of the “rabbit”. It was an
astonishing experience in hands-on learning.

My second wish is to inculcate a reflective mindset and openness to feedback
as part of the programmes to educate our teachers. Theoretical knowledge of
psychology and subject matter understanding is certainly necessary but not
sufficient to create good teaching practice, which is often limited to
repeated transmission of textbook content. What if teachers observed each
other inside the classroom, reflected honestly on how they performed, gave
each other feedback and continuously improved on their practices?

After training over 10,000 teachers in this manner, I have seen the visible
difference a reflective teacher can make on her students. Instead of running
after marks and ranks, children in these classrooms think on their own,
thirst for objective feedback on their performance, are not afraid to fail
in new tasks and try repeatedly until they succeed.

My final wish is to get school leaders to be role-model teachers and
learners. When I visited Kiran Sethi’s acclaimed Riverside School in
Ahmedabad, Mary Roy’s painstakingly created Pallikodam in Kottayam, and the
vibrant Harishree Vidyalyam in Chennai, I found one thing in common. The
leaders of these schools spent their time and energy in the classroom;
immersed in learning, modelling good teaching and coaching their colleagues.

For my wishes to come true, the theoretical world of academics and policy
must meet the real world of teachers and students. Today they lie estranged
in different galaxies. Good education management means bringing them
together.

Once this happens, we can then look forward to a generation of curious,
creative and fearless learners who can solve the most pressing challenges of
our country. No problem will be too big for them. They will say: “Let’s
figure it out”, and not, “It’s out of syllabus”! That is when we will
deliver a truly liberal education.

Ashish Rajpal is the co-founder & managing director of iDiscoveri Education.

Bhuvana - i am going to very harsh on this email - just to make sure my point is heard above all the sugary sentimentality the story creates. I am also marking this to the emails from where you got it.

The original article

Pencil: I'm sorry....

Eraser: For what? You didn't do anything wrong.

Pencil: I'm sorry cos you get hurt bcos of me. Whenever I made a mistake, you're always there to erase it. But as you make my mistakes vanish, you lose a part of yourself. You get smaller and smaller each time.

Eraser: That's true. But I don't really mind. You see, I was made to do this. I was made to help you whenever you do something wrong. Even though one day, I know I'll be gone and you'll replace me with a new one, I'm actually happy with my job. So please, stop worrying. I hate seeing you sad. :)

I found this conversation between the pencil and the eraser very inspirational. Parents are like the eraser whereas their children are the pencil. They're always there for their children, cleaning up their mistakes. Sometimes along the way... they get hurt, and become smaller (older, and eventually pass on). Though their children will eventually find someone new (spouse), but parents are still happy with what they do for their children, and will always hate seeing their precious ones worrying, or sad.

This is for all parents out there.....

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we;" they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit...This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done."

"Lessons From the Geese" is a powerful illustration from nature of the rules of high performance teamwork. As you read about the natural unity that exists among this species remember - this same unity can exist in your organization!

As geese flap their wings, they create an uplift for the bird following. By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if any bird were to fly alone.
If we share a common direction and a sense of community, we can get where we are going more quickly and easily because we are traveling on the thrust of one another!

Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone, and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front.
If we have as much sense as geese, we will stay in formation with those who are headed where we want to go, and we will be willing to accept their help as well as give ours to others.

When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into formation and another goose flies at the point position.
If we take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership as with the geese, we become interdependent with one another.
The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed. If we "honk," we need to make sure it is positive and encouraging.

When a goose gets sick or wounded or is shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again or dies. They then launch out on their own, with another formation or catch up with the flock.
If we have as much sense as geese, we too will stand by each other in difficult times, as well as when we are strong. Let us all try to fly in formation and remember to drop back to help those who might need it!

BEHOLD THE POWER OF TEAMWORK