Swami Sukhabodhananda Teachings

This is a collection of teachings of Swami Sukhabodhananda

When we say that life is empty and meaningless, what it means is that life is like an empty canvas. Whatever you write on the canvas is the meaning. Not that life is meaningless, but whatever meaning you give to life is the meaning life has for you. One should be wise as to what meaning one gives to life. It should be an empowering meaning. The greatest meaning one can give is transforming oneself and transforming others.

Life can be a process of growing and aging. Growing is adding life to years and aging is adding years to life. Most of us are ageing rather than really growing.

What is the use of all the theories of life and their meaning if you have never tasted life. I would rather eat the pudding than create a theory of pudding.

Difficulties are like divine surgery. Do not resist difficulties. Nature expects us to use our heart and head to discover new and wiser skills to fly in life.

Commitment is the language of the wise; complaint is the language of the fools.

When one takes responsibility without accountability it weakens one’s being.

Few people traverse the road of success without a puncture or two, but it is commitment to excellence that takes them through.

Excellence happens when there is love to grow and contribute.

When body, emotion and intellect are aligned and purified, there will be charisma in one’s being. Such a being will be radiant for divine energy to flow in.

Apply the technique of seeing yourself as a transparent being. Let harsh words pass through you. Do not be like a wall… otherwise; harsh words will clash with you.

In the garbage of difficulties, let us look for good things in life and not get lost in worries. In life, we may be in the midst of garbage, but if we look carefully, there are seeds of wisdom!

Greed to become someone is deleting the richness of who you are and telling you that you are incomplete.

Action born out of greed in an unintelligent effort.

Greed enhances quantity and not quality. The beauty of life has never been in quantity but in quality.

Greed means a desire for more without seeing the richness of what you already have.

An action born out of greed deepens your ignorance.

No matter how enthusiastic we are and however well we motivate our colleagues, even a small failure could plunge us into the abyss of depression. At such times view failure as merely postponed success…that is all! There is nothing in it to make us depressed. Treat failure as fertilizer for success.

It is our attitude that causes depression.

Your energy field will also touch people. So create good vibrations around you.

Treat each experience as unique; then your being starts relaxing. Then you will no longer think of life as an emotional dungeon.

Exploring oneself is an ongoing process. It is great fun and an adventure.

A lot of us have conceptional knowledge. The word is not the thing. The word ‘love’ is not love. Verbal knowledge is superficial, but to get at the meaning of the word is existential. The word ‘joy’ is different from the experience of joy.

Let me give an example: a student asks the master, you denounce knowledge and at the same time you utter pearls of wisdom. Why is it so?

Master answers – I prefer seeds of wisdom for when the seed is planted it grows, whereas when a pearl is planted it does not grow.

The mind is a bundle of thoughts. More than heart attacks, we suffer from thought attacks.

Thought can make you; thought can break you.

Take lessons from nature. It never allows anything to cling to it. What comes has to go. Learn this lesson.

Let thoughts come and go. Remain detached.

A noisy and pushy mind leads one to a state of unhappiness.

Uncertainty is not the problem – how you deal with it is.

Mind creates misery by its desires, expectations, anger and jealousy stimulated by unnecessary comparisons.

The quality of our lives depends more on what we are inside than outside.

Hell and heaven are just two states of being.

Grace, the diving blessing, never makes anyone egoistic. One feels very humble and blessed through grace.

Windows of our mind have to be kept clean to see God’s blessings wonder.

Life is more of a journey than a destination. It is not static but dynamic. It is dancing towards the unknown.

Surrender is accepting something nobler to fill your being.

By surrendering you will leap from ordinary consciousness to spiritual consciousness.

In relationships, the greatest conflict is expression of ego. Ego wants to prove a point. More than happiness, people want their point of view to survive. When that does not happen, they are unhappy; they nurture this unhappiness from their ego.

When you are egoistic, you will be caught in a rat race. In this rat race, even if you win, you will continue to be a rat.

There is a very beautiful Sanskrit saying, spoken by a Rishi, which goes that if water falls on a hot pan, instantly, it gets burnt away. When water falls on a lotus leaf, the lotus becomes more beautiful with the dancing of a dewdrop of water, but with a little breeze the water will disappear. But if the same water falls on an oyster, it takes that one dewdrop of water and converts it into a pearl.

For some people, listening to the teachings is like water falling on a dosa pan, as you listen it disappears. If you are filled with anger, jealousy, hatred, upsetness, your mind is like the dosa pan, and the teaching of the Gita can be like beautiful water, but as it falls it disappears.

A little more evolved person is a lotus and the teaching is like water falling on a lotus flower. With this dewdrop the lotus is more beautiful. But the moment you go home, your wife says, “Why have you come late,” and all the teaching goes away like the dewdrop disappearing with the breeze.

But if you are like an oyster, and keep the water, then the same water will turn into a pearl. So too the teachings of Gita…like the water described above, and you can choose to be a dosa pan, or a lotus flower, or an oyster.

And what is required is your life has to get transformed into one of personal excellence, is that you should be like an oyster. When you listen to the Gita from a deep commitment, you will keep the teaching and it will turn into a pearl.

Identification is the root of all suffering. Cut the root and one is truly free.

Every point of suffering is an opportunity for enlightenment.

Our ignorance has no limits. Beware of this.

Behind the layer of ignorance there is big surprise.

Flexibility is the mother of creativity.

You and your body are not two but a manifestation of one. Like the leaf is the manifestation of the root. The soul is the invisible body and the body is the visible soul. Seeing this truth is great discovery.

Worry is absence of silence. Worry is like a rocking chair that keeps you busy and leads you nowhere.

If one learns the art of being in peace with ‘what is,’ then one experiences silence.

One of the greatest paradoxes of life is happiness is within but we never delve ‘within’ and continue to be beggars of happiness.

Existence unfolds the truth that joy is within and without effort, it exists.

When one learns non-identification, then life becomes a teacher. In both pleasant and unpleasant situations of life, can one remain without attachment? It is not just life that is a teacher, but life without attachment that is a real teacher.

Non-identification leads to detachment, which transforms our unexciting life into an exciting learning experience.

Identification leads to loss of objectivity. In such a state we cannot see what is as it really is. Through identification, we superimpose our subjective perceptions on the object. We get identified with the percept and lose objective perception.

An ignorant mind is addicted to facile choices between binary opposites such as yes and no, more and less, success and failure. With this conflict one attempt to be happy and thus, happiness has become elusive for many. Happiness is certain to elude those who are trapped in this dichotomy. Unless one learns the art of going beyond the mind, one will be chasing the mirage of happiness forever.

There is an illusion that, if we get an answer to a question, a solution to a problem, we will be happy. Answers only decorate the question, not dissolve it. That does not mean one should not seek answers to one’s question. The truth is that if one goes beyond the mind, beyond thoughts, then one will be happy without questions and answers.

Mind is a bundle of thoughts. If thoughts are used wisely, they will be valuable tools both in your studies and business.

Whenever you are not pressed for time or work, turn your attention to your respiratory process. Feel your exhalation and inhalation, your breath going out and coming in. Slowly train your mind to be in the present. Life is lived in the present, and mind is lost if it dwells either in the past or in the future. It takes training to keep the mind in the present state.

Swami Sukhabodhananda Teachings On Patience

Patience is often bitter but its fruits are sweet. Impatience is waiting with worry.

Unhappy homes are built of blocks of impatience. Impatience essentially is an inability to accept things as they are. Impatience affects all – male and female, young and old.

Impatience works like a poison that gets into a living system. It kills the system slowly and secretly from within. The victim realizes its true nature only after it is too late to do anything about it.

Impatience is so dangerous in its effects that it twists the perspectives of its victims long before it leads them to total destruction. Negative attitudes result directly from impatience. Pessimism and Skepticism are immediate descendants of impatience.

Life abounds in sorrows, mistakes and missed chances. However, with a slight shift in perspective from that of impatience to patience, we will get a totally different picture.

Swami Sukhabodhananda Teachings On Stress

There are two sources of stress, internal and external. Internal stress involves thoughts, values, beliefs and opinions. External stress involves wrong exercises, faulty breathing habits, unhealthy eating habits, pollution and sleep problems.

Nobody can avoid stress in life. One has to minimize stress. That is possible if one can work on both internal and external stress. The most important factor is our mind and how it looks at life.

Transforming the mind involves the understanding that there is no complete satisfaction in life; there is only a possibility to improve upon the existing state of affairs. We don’t have to win every time in order to be happy; happiness does not depend only on success. Learn to respond and not to react to events and incidents in life. If one continues reacting, reaction becomes a habit. Then an egoistic and reactive "I" emerges. It will have its own foolish logic.

In esoteric teaching there is an important law called the law of three. The positive effort you put in is called the first force. As you put in positive force there is a negative force that would affect the positive force.

This negative force is called the second force. If one continuously puts in positive effort, there would be a third force that would descend and transform the negative force into a positive force. This is called the law of three.

If you do not continue exerting a positive force, the negative force will take over. So the law of three urges us to be open to the negative force, but to continue applying the positive.