Pratima Shah

  Life gives us innumerable memories through the moments that we have lived. These moments are visible to us when we close our eyes. We are able to live each and every moment as if it is real and happening again. Even though there are umpteen emotions attached to those moments; I would classify them into two categories: Happy and Sad. The happy moments rejuvenate us whereas the sad moments kill us slowly. Believe it or not the sad moments are a reservoir of strength from where we gain courage, patience and tolerance in our present and future endeavors.   We always remember the impact of happy moments in our life and we keep basking in the joy of those moments. But I firmly believe that a person evolves more as a human being due to those sad and painful events that take place in her / his life. They add value to this rigmarole of life. I have a painful habit of recording everything mentally and rewinding those moments by connecting them to events that occur in my life. There are barely

All of us have this problem in varying intensities: Either you are a person who can let go easily and refuse to stay in there, or you are a person who holds on and feels incapable of letting go. We are accustomed to holding on to situations, relationships, resentment and dreams. Many of us face situations wherein we require to make a decision - of staying where you are or letting go. Should I stay in this relation or get out of it? Should I look for a new job or remain stuck in the current job? Should I move on from someone / something or should I give it another chance? These are the questions that pop in our minds and trouble us until we make a decision. Life gives you signals to take charge of the situation. Say for example - it is expected of you to sacrifice your personal beliefs or become someone you are really not. You are unable to recall the time this made you smile. The situation / person made you feel depressed, broken and frustrated. When your trust is continuously broken;

 Forgiving a person who has hurt you is a very challenging task. One needs to forgive others for personal freedom, for releasing oneself from the burden of the emotions and live a happy life. But these statements are sugar coated. Forgiving someone is a mammoth task like every other challenging task that a person undertakes. There must be one reason why you want to seek freedom from these toxic emotions. One must comprehend what is at stake and why forgiveness is important for you, your peace of mind and for a happy life. Have we ever paid heed to the consequences of not forgiving? Most of the time people feel a resistance that keeps them from being willing to forgive. They have a misperception about the idea of forgiving and because of this they hold themselves back.  What Forgiveness is not - Forgiveness is not reconciliation with the one who hurt you. It is not living in denial of the actions of the person. It is not allowing the person to repeat the same behaviour over and over aga

 There is a huge population which is under the impression that surrendering at the feet of a guruji / a baba / a mataji or attending self - coaching classes would turn them into self - realized humans. An important aspect is to be awake internally and become conscious of every thought and action of yours. The key word is 'internal' because without 'internal will' nothing can make you realize the power within you.  Any success that you achieved in life always began by fighting the internal demons. After conquering these you took up the humongous task of conquering the external demons to achieve success. The internal demons include - fears, lack of confidence / self esteem/ worries / temptations / failures and your past experiences. The list could go on depending on what internal demons one possesses.  Have you ever taken into account the preponderance of '-ins' on the path of self - realization?  Why do we say in - trospect and not outer -rospect, in - tuition

   A person who looks perfectly fine but is always going through some pain or the other in the body / may be dealing with health issues could be the one who has many unresolved issues / inner conflict. When we have an argument with someone; we argue, give reasons for our justification and resolve the matter. This happens with issues at the workplace or among friends. A human is capable enough to resolve the issues others than with the family. The reason for this is that every human is so much burdened with the pressures and expectations of the family. A woman once narrated a childhood incident of how her puppy died because of her. Her parents made her apologize to everyone in the family by writing an apology. She was just a child and barely 10 years. Her parents had asked her to take care of their pet as they were away. The girl herself had never got used to being with the puppy as it was barely fifteen days of buying the puppy as a pet. The girl was in her room doing her homework

We have the potential to create and recreate our  life but still we are bound and governed by our thoughts. The thoughts we think determine our life. Thoughts that arise in the mind have the power  to destroy our peace as well as give us peace. Too many thoughts may sometimes create a void in the mind. They may make one lose track of the path of life or may put someone back on track.    It doesn't take long for a person to accept defeat due to the thoughts and the pressures that they create. Your thoughts can make you lose your self esteem / become depressed / feel hopeless / become suicidal and lose interest in life. When these things happen due to thoughts there is a sense of utter despair and hopelessness that prevails upon the person. There is no direction nor any interest in living life. Nothing pacifies the thoughts nor does the person feel peaceful.    Nip these thoughts / this state of your mind in the initial process. Do not wait for time to decrease this thought

   Have you ever felt that there is a kind of tension in your body due to which you have a tight neck / tight shoulders / upset stomach / headaches / or anything like a heavy weight on your body? Due to these symptoms one feels as if there is a huge burden on the body; like a heavy backpack on you. This backpack is filled with nothing but the emotional baggage that one carries throughout the life. This baggage may have come into your life due to childhood problems / familial issues / workplace issues / issues of the society. Sometimes one is so stuck in the old habits that these old habits are responsible for adding a load to the existing emotional baggage that you have stuffed your backpack with.    The emotional baggage one carries interferes with many of the phases of one's life - personal / professional / societal / ambitions / relations / satisfaction in life and many others. This happens because we are very much influenced by our past experiences - solved / unsolved. If

     The geography of your face and the body which one sees has a dramatic impact in a face to face encounter. Due to this importance, the gaze can be classified into 3 types: Social Gazing, Intimate Gazing and Power Gazing. 1. Social Gaze : In a social encounter, the gazer's eyes look in a triangular area on the face of the other person, i.e between the eyes and the mouth almost for 90% during the encounter. The environment is non - threatening and you will be perceived as non - aggressive by the other person. The gaze is more focused in the area under the eyes. This is often used by people when they are with family and friends while in conversations with them. It is also known as the best responding gaze when your gaze meets the gaze of the other and is also perceived as being open and approachable. 2. Intimate Gaze : This is the gaze which one gives in the triangular area between the eyes and the chest when one is close to the person and when a person is at a distance t

    The year 2016 which made my professional life zero was something out of the blue for me and my family.  I resigned from the institute where I had been working since 2005. It was a like a catastrophe which struck my world and everything seemed so blur. The reason for resigning were the rumors which had been hurled into the air of the place by a handful of persons who knew it in their hearts that everything was baseless. It was the time where I came to know who are my real friends and who are the fake ones.    We always live in an illusion when it comes to knowing the people around us. There are so many around us who show us that they are our friends but actually they are not. They are just taking advantage of your position and trying to please you through their words. They genuinely never ever feel anything for you nor get attached to you as a friend. I never realized this before I resigned in January 2016. The ones whose support I expected were there with me in my good ti

   The world would be like a mechanical contraption if there is no love around. Love keeps the world going and alive. But what if if most of the love we get is just attachment and not love? What are the ways through which we express love? We do it by taking due care of the ones we love, by making them feel unique and special in every way and always wishing the best for them. Words too are a means to express love and it is very necessary that we all express our love towards our near and dear ones through words. There are many of us who get relief just by words of our loved ones. There is only one lubricant for all our relationships - and that is love.    Love can get converted into an intense attachment towards a relation and attachment is negative. If my child is sick I tend to him till he becomes alright. This is love for my child. But even after he is alright I keep on worrying about him and fall sick that is my attachment towards the child. This is negative and cause problems b

     Believe it or not, every addiction has its root in unhappiness. Being addicted to drugs, alcohol, smoking or any other substance works as an emotional anesthetic for a person who is unhappy and in pain. The question that arises is that why does addiction have its root in pain? Our brain grows after our birth. The kind of emotional and physical interactions we encounter determine the development of our brain. The brain's circuitry and chemistry throws light on our individual experiences of life as much as inherited tendencies. For a drug to work in the brain, the nerve cells must have receptors - the center where the drug can bind. Our brain is made of opiate receptors and we all have natural opiate like substances known as endorphins, chemicals that participate in many functions and which regulate pain and mood within us.    As per a survey, infant rates who were less taken care of by their mothers recorded less natural benzo receptors in that part of the brain that contr

   Our life is full of sweet - bitter memories; and we humans focus more on the bitter / negative aspects / memories. We remember the positive events for a very short time and the negative events imprison our minds for a long time. Confucius once said, 'To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.' But human as we are, we focus more on negative events / inevitable experiences. Life is a mixture of positive and negative but still we dread the negative events and relish the positive events with immense joy.     We are able to accept the day to day minor wrongs but the grave ones leave an indelible impact over our lives. They are nurtured as wounds by us and keep on reminding us about the trauma that we faced in that particular negative / bitter incident of our life. The behavior that is prompted by any person during the trauma is that some may take pleasure in self pity by nursing the wound for a life time or some may become bitter, vindictive and cynical. T

Time and again God, the Almighty takes away from us what we have had. It could be a relationship, a job, an ability or anything that we hold on. We feel everything that we possess is eternal and ours. But God takes it away; his taking it away is a way to make us realize that 'it was God's grace and it was never yours'. This holds true for each and everything we possess. It is true with our relations too. Eventually whether we like / dislike we keep losing our relations too - either through death or any other reason. When we begin to lose our relations we try making the grasp firm; because we feel sad and deprived of the person without whom we cannot live. When faced with such situations, one needs to ask a question to the self - What is it that I will take with me? The answer would be NOTHING. We have no control over death which very cold bloodedly separates us from every ability / wish / person / cherished possession. Grasping tightly to things makes us realize that t

    When one does not love the self, one keeps on trying to prove something to someone - that you are a good person, a good partner, a good employee or a good parent. But the fact is unless and until one doesn't learn to love the self , you will forever run yourself ragged and never feel complete. One may play blame games by blaming the self, or by thinking that one lacks being organized enough, that you are not able to take correct decisions and many other escape mechanisms that will give a boost to your self destructive pattern of negative thinking. Why does one need to say 'yes' to someone for doing a task even though you don't have the time, energy or desire to help. It is because you don't want to disappoint the ones who count on you. But its OK to refuse help at times. Its OK to ask for help when you do not have time. Do not put yourself in such an unloved state that you keep on hating yourself more and more. Set priorities and make your SELF the top most p

   Listen to nature to learn and understand why day turns into night, the change in seasons, the sound of water / waterfall / waves and so many other natural things that happen around us. What is the teaching that Nature gives us through all these phenomena?    The teaching that is hidden in these is that nothing is permanent and everything that happens in our life is relative so we need to let go and free ourselves of those emotions and thoughts that make us feel stressed or nervous. Be a good listener to those who are always on the go to give us a variety of opinions / advice and what not. Learn to listen and respect all. One cannot be dogmatic if one wants to live with a happy mind without stress. Only a mind that is open and spacious can be a happy mind. It will be an accepting state of mind. A narrow mind will make you stressed and will never even allow you to accept the self. This leads to jealousy for others and the person struggles with all kinds of horrifying and pathetic

Many youngsters have anxiety issues and this is devastating to the person who is suffering from anxiety and also to those around that person. Anxiety never allows us to enjoy the joys of life - one cannot enjoy nature, cannot enjoy the embrace of a dear one nor can enjoy any moment which a normal happy person can. Anxiety is capable enough to take away your sleep. It can keep you glued to itself and you would lose your concentration in your day to day tasks. Once anxiety takes over you, you are not there in what is happening now in the present. Just because you are not present in that moment you can never relish the flavors of those moments. Anxiety is powerful or say you make it powerful because you never allow yourself to go near or experience the fear that is underlying. You run away from it by dumping yourself body and soul into something - say for example - in eating, in movies, in social media etc. There are many places where you can divert yourself and go. Thus the person t

   Every disease comes as a specific message/signal for us. Our body listens to what our mind says. The auto immune system gets the message from the hypothalamus whenever a danger is going to come. The hypothalamus conveys this to the adrenal gland, and this gland immediately releases Cortisol. Cortisol shrinks the blood vessels which lead to blood pressure. It increases the sugar level into the liver and puts the body into a fight/flight mode. In short, we humans are nothing but our hypothalamus. The body believes that you may need this sugar and thus it is stored in the form of visceral fat.    Auto immune diseases – thyroid, epilepsy, hair loss, and allergies are all in our mind not in our body. All pains in the body are emotional pains. Auto immune diseases are the result of subjective experiences, e.g. diseases like thyroid, arthritis, allergies, epilecia and psoriasis. Loneliness leads to excessive eating. People with SEE (Significant Emotional Experience) have cancer.

   We all have been listening to the miracles our wonderful and powerful mind can perform. But still how many of us have tapped into this enormous energy reservoir within us? Our mind is the one that directs our personality and helps us in taking day to day decisions - big or small.    Our mind is the force that enables us to do everything as it is the primary source of our energy in everything we do. We release less energy while doing easy tasks. But when we decide to take up something difficult the mind releases a greater amount of energy. Thus it can be said that it is only through our efforts that we can build our personality. A person who is easy going receives less energy from the mind and this results in the person being a weak person. In contrast if a person is ambitious and has big aspirations, the mind receives greater energy and makes the person a strong person. We all are born with the same potential but everyone of us in some or the other way either use or misuse this

      There are incidences that wound a person very deeply and can never be healed by traumatic incident handling alone. Such incidences come with great emotional pain and become scars on our souls. They may be personal or professional scars, for example personal and professional betrayals, unexpected attacks from someone you trusted, cruelty and violence which shake our confidence and make us incapable to carry on with our own life. These factors cause scars on our soul and damage us directly.        I have understood one thing from this journey of life that what you throw at the universe, returns back to you - a reality which all know and believe in. When you beam with positive thoughts, things turn out to be positive; when you are negative, things turns out to be negative. Whenever there is anything inconsistent that happens around us due to our creation of thoughts - we have a scar - a psychic wound - because it is something which has traumatized our being to its deepest core.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is the study for modelling excellence, where 'N' stands for Neuro : our first mental map of the world which is formed by our internal representations from our 5 senses namely visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory & gustatory. 'L' stands for Linguistic where we form our second map of the world around us through our assigned language, even known as our Linguistic map. 'P'  stands for Programming or our behavioural response towards the incidences that occur in our life due to the neurological filtering and our language map.  Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a tool for self-motivation and personal development. The teachers today have recognized that the principles of NLP are significantly parallel to Howard Gardner's 'Theory of Multiple Intelligences'. We all have our 'representational systems' where we process sensory information. Many of us display a preference for one system even though we all