When life throws lemons, you are tempted to start with “why me?”, aren’t you?

You look for answers. You don’t find any. You experience fear, failure, injustice and get more embroiled in the muddy puddle fighting against the whims of life. While you are using every bit of your brawn and brain, taking it upon your ego to solve the problem at hand, life seems to be feeling entertained at your cost. Or so you think.

After what seems like a long arduous battle, you remember what your Guru always repeats – Seva, Sadhna, Satsang. And something hits home. When you have gone past logic and your depleting intellectual reserves only to find yourself defeated, you realise there is another way. Surrendering to the divine. 

After all, were you born with your own effort? 

Were you raised by your own effort? 

Did you find a Guru with your own effort? 

If your answer like mine is a big NO to all the questions, an epiphany instantly takes center stage. Life throws lemons at you because it wants you to awaken or change course from ideas that have brought you thus far. That realisation is the power of Surrender.

But it takes the fall of the empire of ego in order to surrender. Surrender can happen only when nothing else makes sense. When all else ceases to work. When you feel you have done everything in your human capacity. And that is when you choose to adhere to words you have heard over and over, but never once resonated with – Seva, Sadhna, Satsang. 

You now choose to do what never befitted your logic. You choose to do seva regularly. You continue your sadhna daily. And you join satsang once in a while. After a few months of consistently following what you decided to do, you experience some change within. 

Seva – no matter what form it comes in, doing dishes, serving food, chopping vegetables, washing toilets or conducting mindfulness sessions, is always a humbling experience. Joy, fulfillment, blessings and a subtly vanishing ego show up each time you serve with selflessness. And somewhere, satsang begins to make sense too. I remember a week when I sang, “Your home is in my heart”, nonstop, driving my family up the wall. 

Over the past seven months or so, I have come to reckon, when you consistently go beyond your own material needs, take responsibility for things and people you do not technically call your own, you reach a melting point, where ego fades away and love blossoms. Not the romantic sort of love. But the love you can feel for every other life form; looks, race, religion or status, no bar. Love that turns seva into your second nature. And love that culminates into a habit. Seva humbles you and no job seems big or small anymore. That is the most liberating feeling ever. Because in turn, you stop judging people and drop all botherations of people’s opinion of you. It also drives home course points from HP and AMC because you are now automatically internalizing what was taught. 

Whether you take 21 days, 40 days or 10000 hours to change a habit, I don’t know. Personally, it was a troubled year that got me into the mindset altering habit of seva, sadhna, satsang. Have my troubles vanished? Absolutely not. But am I able to deal with them better? Certainly.

Practising Seva, Sadhna and Satsang consistently has been helping me internalize the quality used to describe Lord Ganesha – ‘Sthitapragya’ or the western concept of ‘Stoicism’. Both ideas confer to taking ups and downs of life without much allure. By staying grounded. By responding as opposed to reacting. With Seva, Sadhna and Satsang, awareness spikes. Bigtime. Your ability to respond with awareness takes birth. And finding neutral ground if not bliss certainly makes it appearance in your life.

When responding becomes your natural reaction, you have worked your mental muscle to take life as it unfolds. Feeling sad, albeit not balling over when misfortunes try and flip your balance over. And feeling joyous when a gentle wave floats the boat of your life, rather than going euphoric. And that becomes the key to a calmer, more balanced life.

So what’s the mantra to a more intentional life? 

No prizes for guessing – S,S,S!