Appreciation → Gratitude → Happiness

Someone told me recently that they’ve been struggling to find gratitude.

I suggested they try appreciation instead. They asked me to explain the difference. It stopped me for a second because they’re not the same thing, and the distinction actually matters.

Here’s how I see it:

Appreciation is noticing the gift. Gratitude is receiving it.

Appreciation lives in the mind. It’s the moment you recognize something is good — the sunset, the kind word, the unexpected win.

It’s cognitive. “This is good.”

Gratitude goes deeper. It’s when that recognition moves from your head into your body, into your being. It’s not just acknowledgment—it’s absorption. The sunset doesn’t just register. It moves you.

Most people try to jump straight to gratitude and wonder why it feels forced. Gratitude isn’t a starting point. It’s a destination.

Appreciation is the door.

So if gratitude feels hard, stop chasing it. Start smaller. Just notice. The coffee this morning. The fact that someone texted you. The breath you just took without thinking about it.

Don’t try to feel grateful. Just get good at noticing. It is softer, easier and more accessible.

Gratitude tends to follow when appreciation becomes a habit.

And happiness? That’s what accumulates when gratitude becomes your default way of moving through the world.

Appreciation → Gratitude → Happiness.

Not a hack. Not a morning journaling prompt. A sequence that actually works but only if you start at the beginning.

Most meditation practices make you work for them.

Hour-long commitments. Daily discipline. A payoff promised somewhere in the future—if you just stick with it long enough.

But here’s the reality: in an Instagram world with hyper-short attention spans, that doesn’t work for most people. Even people desperately seeking peace, joy, relief from stress.

What if the practices worked for you instead?

That’s what happened in February.

I ran a small cohort—and watched people discover things I didn’t expect.

Someone who’d never stuck with meditation found “sudden stillness, calm take over as if time stood still.”

Another blended techniques (which speaks to the beauty of this approach) and came to a place so deep in flow that they lost track of time and surroundings. Only presence and the now moment.

One person said the emotional release practice was “magical. Never experienced anything like this.”

Not because they forced themselves. Because something finally clicked.

What I’ve Learned

For the last 12 months, I’ve been living in “go with the flow” mode. No grand plans. Just experiments—following what feels right, seeing where it leads.

Over the years, I’ve run gratitude meditation courses, guided sessions for seniors, live cohorts. Each one taught me something about what people actually need versus what meditation traditionally demands.

This February’s journey—Being Joyful—moved through one practice per day, building from calm to presence to flow.

I loved watching different practices click for different people. Seeing what resonated.

But I also noticed something.

The Insight

Some people didn’t want to rush through a new practice every day. They wanted to linger. Immerse themselves for a few days, really feel it, integrate it before moving to the next one.

That’s when the flow nudged me toward something different.

Introducing The Joy Lab

A weekly practice community where you explore one practice at a time—at your own pace.

Here’s how it works:

• I pick one practice to explore for the week (Week 1 might be breath awareness. Week 2 could be gratitude. Week 3, sound meditation. You get time to actually feel each one.)

• We chat about it on WhatsApp—what’s working, what’s not, what you’re noticing

• Saturday mornings at 8:30am PT, we sync up over virtual coffee or tea to share experiences before exploring something new

Just like a lab, this is about experimentation. You try a practice and see what works for you. What brings you to a quality of being where life feels lighter—where you find joy, happiness, and most importantly, peace.

Real change happens by cultivating inner state—like peeling an onion or opening the petals of a lotus. One practice at a time. Not by forcing it.

No lifelong commitments. The practices work for you instead of making you work for them.

The Details

$11/month. Capped at 25 members—small enough to stay intimate, large enough for rich conversations.

I’m starting small. If it’s just you and me for a few weeks, that’s fine—we’ll figure it out together. You’re coming in on the ground floor of an experiment.

You’ll also get access to the full library of cohorts—today that includes Being Joyful. And you can join the next cohorts for free.

When we hit 25 members? We’ll see where that takes us.

This is my lab too. I’m not sure where it goes, but right now, this is the next immediate flow.

Join the Joy Lab

PS: Last week, the flow took me to this analysis of Guru Granth Sahib. I’m quite proud of it—it brought me a lot of joy. Not every answer to happiness has to be sit down and meditate for a few hours. :-)

— Harpreet

(This post is 9,100 words long. It is best read on substack. Your email will truncate it. Repository source code. see docs/ for the entire analysis, my data science post on how the project was delivered)

I am a voracious reader and practitioner of Indian philosophies. But I always felt that as a not-so-fluent reader of Punjabi, I couldn’t truly understand the Guru Granth Sahib – the seminal text, nay the Living Guru, of the Sikhs. My understanding and interpretation were outsourced to Granthis (clerics). That, as a modern human, felt like being illiterate.

I was always curious to answer some basic questions. What’s the core philosophy? Because different parts of the text felt different – Advaita (non-dual)? Bhakti (devotional)? Stoicism? Why music? What’s the influence of Sanatan (Hinduism) or Islam? As far as I know, the GGS is the only scripture where the Gurus have written every word themselves, and the only spiritual text where saints from different religions are quoted alongside the Gurus’ own compositions – deliberately placed there to bring in lessons from those traditions.

Then I discovered one reason it had been so inaccessible, even though my listening Punjabi is excellent: there are six languages woven into the text, all written in Gurmukhi (the Punjabi script). Par for the course when a text is composed over 200 years by ten Gurus and thirteen saints from across the subcontinent.

So here’s what I decided to do over a long weekend. Armed with ChatGPT (for the product requirements document) and Claude Code (for the pipeline), I went to analyze the raw Gurmukhi text directly – no English translation driving the analysis, no intermediary interpretation. Every line. Every word. Every divine name. Every metaphor. Every critique. 124 theological entities tracked across 346 spelling variants. Ten iterations of checking and rechecking to keep my biases out.

Here’s what the data says.

The Mool Mantar (Core Mantra)

Every recitation of the Guru Granth Sahib begins with one line. Every Sikh knows it by heart. I didn’t realize until the data came back that the entire book is an elaboration of it.

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ

Ik Oankaar Sat Naam Karta Purakh Nirbhau Nirvair Akaal Moorat Ajooni Saibhang Gur Prasaad

Word by word:

• Ik Oankaar – One creator, one sound, one field, one spirit.

• Sat Naam – Truth is the Name.

• Karta Purakh – It does everything. The field and the creation are not separate.

• Nirbhau – Without fear.

• Nirvair – Without enmity.

• Akaal Moorat – Timeless. Eternal. Beyond time.

• Ajooni – Beyond species. In Sikh theology, “jooni” means species or life-form – the GGS references 8.4 million jooni that the soul cycles through. A-jooni means the divine is not any life-form, not any species. Beyond all 8.4 million categories of existence. Beyond the cycle of birth and death entirely.

• Saibhang – Self-existent, self-illuminated. Existing by its own nature, without an external creator.

• Gur Prasaad – Realized only through the grace of the Guru.

This is the pehli paudi – the first step. No idol, no incarnation, no mythology. Nine attributes of the formless, compressed into a single line. The remaining 1,430 pages are a commentary on it.

The DNA, Not Just the Preamble

The Mool Mantar isn’t just an opening prayer. It reappears 28 times across the text – from ang (page) 1 to ang 1,410 – punctuating the entire book like a heartbeat.

But here’s what the data revealed that I didn’t expect: even outside those 28 repetitions, the Mool Mantar’s attributes travel together through the compositions themselves. Co-occurrence analysis shows that AJOONI, AKAL, SATNAM, NIRVAIR, NIRBHAU, and MOORAT form the tightest theological cluster in the entire corpus. The statistical association between these terms ranges from PMI 2.7 to 5.0 (PMI, or Pointwise Mutual Information, measures how surprisingly often two words appear together – higher means a stronger-than-chance association). When a Guru invokes one of these attributes anywhere in the text, the others tend to appear alongside it. They move as a pack.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. At ang 916, deep in Raga Ramkali (a contemplative melodic mode), Guru Arjan writes:

ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੰਭਉ ਕਲਿ ਅੰਧਕਾਰ ਦੀਪਾਈ

Timeless Form, Beyond Birth, Self-Illuminated – a lamp in the darkness of this age.

Two lines later:

ਏਕੰਕਾਰੁ ਨਿਰੰਜਨੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਸਭ ਜਲਿ ਥਲਿ ਰਹਿਆ ਸਮਾਈ

The One Creator, Unblemished, Without Fear – pervading all waters and lands.

Four Mool Mantar attributes – AKAL, MOORAT, AJOONI, NIRBHAU – woven into the poetry of a composition 915 pages after the opening line. The Mool Mantar isn’t a preamble. It’s the theological DNA of the entire text, and you can find it echoing in compositions across centuries and authors.

Every word in that opening line describes the formless. This is Advaita in one breath.

What Makes the GGS Unique

Eighteen authors across two hundred years. The prophets wrote it themselves – no intermediary scribes interpreting decades later. That alone is a remarkable provenance claim. But the GGS goes further.

Structural Inclusion

The Gurus deliberately placed compositions by saints from outside the Sikh tradition alongside their own, in their holiest text, on equal footing:

• Kabir (4,187 lines, 6.9% of the text) – a Muslim weaver from Varanasi.

• Ravidas (475 lines) – a leather-worker, considered “untouchable” by caste Hindus.

• Farid (158 lines) – a Sufi mystic.

• Namdev (257 lines) – a Marathi tailor-saint.

• Plus nine more Bhagats (devotee-saints) from diverse backgrounds.

In the 15th-17th century, this wasn’t tolerance. It was structural inclusion – placing these voices in your most sacred text, alongside the Gurus’ own words. Kabir alone contributes more lines than two of the six Gurus (Guru Angad and Guru Tegh Bahadur) individually.

A Text Written Across Generations

Some compositions in the GGS were deliberately left incomplete by earlier Gurus, with the expectation that a Guru generations later would come and complete the poem. And they did. This is not collaborative editing in the modern sense – these are authors separated by decades, sometimes over a century, completing each other’s verses as though continuing a single conversation. The Gurus saw themselves as one light (jot) passing through different bodies. The text is built on that continuity – a prophetic confidence that the voice would not break.

Poetry Set to Music

Every composition in the GGS is assigned one of 31 ragas – melodic modes from Indian classical music. Each raga has emotional and seasonal character: Gauri for contemplation, Aasaa for hope, Maru for desert longing, Bilawal for joy. The text doesn’t just tell you what to think. It prescribes how to feel while you sing it. Built-in emotional instructions – not just words but the feelings the Gurus intended you to experience.

The Living Guru

In 1708, Guru Gobind Singh declared the GGS as the eternal, living Guru. This isn’t symbolic – the ethos is ingrained in daily practice. Sikhs sit before it, consult it, bow to it, put it to bed at night, and wake it in the morning. It is treated as a living human being, not a book.

Guru Gobind Singh’s Restraint

Guru Gobind Singh was himself a prolific poet in Punjabi and Persian – his compositions fill the entire Dasam Granth (a separate collection of his writings). He compiled the final edition of the GGS (the Damdami Bir, 1706), adding Guru Tegh Bahadur’s 605 lines. Yet he deliberately excluded every word of his own. For a saint-warrior-poet to edit his tradition’s holiest text and add nothing of himself – that is extraordinary humility.

Length, Languages & Lexicon

Six Languages, One Script

The entire GGS is written in Gurmukhi script, but the underlying text draws on at least six distinct languages and dialects:

Braj Bhasha grammatical markers (4,678) slightly outnumber Punjabi-specific markers (3,656) in raw count – reflecting the substantial Bhagat contribution. Scholars call this composite literary language “Sant Bhasha” (saint’s language) – a lingua franca blending Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Punjabi, and regional vocabularies, unified by Gurmukhi script. For full corpus statistics and language analysis, see the corpus overview.

Compositional History

The GGS was compiled in two major stages:

1. Adi Granth (1604) – Guru Arjan compiled the first edition, incorporating compositions by Guru Nanak through Guru Arjan (Mahalla 1-5 – the numbering system identifying each Guru’s compositions), plus the 13 Bhagats. Guru Arjan is both the largest single contributor (42.9%) and the editor who shaped the text’s overall structure and character.

2. Damdami Bir (1706) – Guru Gobind Singh added Guru Tegh Bahadur’s compositions (Mahalla 9, 605 lines). Tradition holds that Guru Arjan had left space in the original compilation anticipating future compositions – Guru Tegh Bahadur’s bani (sacred compositions) was inserted into the existing raga framework rather than appended as a separate section.

This editorial design explains why Guru Tegh Bahadur’s compositions appear distributed across the same ragas as the earlier Gurus, maintaining the organizational integrity of the original compilation.

What I Measured

To analyze the text computationally, I built a lexicon of 124 theological entities with 346 spelling variants in Gurmukhi, organized across eleven dimensions:

This lexicon yielded 60,012 matches across the corpus – 57.3% of all lines contain at least one recognized entity. 114 of 124 entities matched at least once. Every percentage and finding in this blog traces back to these matches. For the full lexicon design and feature dimensions, see the feature documentation.

Musicality & Shabads

The GGS is not a book you read silently. It is a performed text.

Every composition is built around a RAHAU (ਰਹਾਉ) – a refrain, a pause, a line of emotional intensity that anchors the shabad. Our pipeline identifies ~2,685 compositions by these refrain markers. Each one is a complete unit: a poem with a heart-cry at its center.

These compositions are organized into 31 ragas – melodic modes from Indian classical music. Each raga prescribes how the composition should be sung, carrying its own emotional and seasonal character.

Largest ragas (the bulk of the GGS):

Smallest ragas (concentrated, specialized compositions):

Gauri alone (196 angs, 9,626 lines) contains more text than the 10 smallest ragas combined. The range from 2 angs (Bairari) to 196 angs (Gauri) reflects the varying depth of compositional engagement with each musical mode. The Gurus didn’t distribute evenly – they concentrated their engagement heavily in certain emotional registers. For the full raga breakdown and structure, see the corpus overview.

This isn’t a text organized by topic or chronology. It’s organized by emotion.

Entities Referenced

So what does the text actually talk about? Here’s the structural map.

Divine Names

HARI appears 55 times for every 1 occurrence of WAHEGURU. More on this later. For the full entity frequency rankings, see the matching results.

Core Sikh Vocabulary

These are the distinctive theological concepts of the tradition – and they account for 18,166 matches, 30% of all entity matches in the corpus:

Ethical Vocabulary

The Five Thieves (Panj Chor) plus virtues – the inner moral landscape the GGS maps obsessively:

Devotional Vocabulary

The bridal mysticism, the love-longing, the devotional surrender:

Epic and Mythological Figures

This is where it gets striking. The entire cast of Indian mythology is nearly absent:

The complete cast of the Ramayana (one of Hinduism’s two great epics) – Sita, Dasrath, Ravan, Lachman, Hanuman, Ramchandra – appears in only 26 lines combined. HARI alone appears in 9,341. The GGS uses these figures sparingly, almost always subordinated to nirgun teaching. For the complete entity frequency tables, see the matching results.

Perso-Arabic Terms

Only 136 matches across 8 entities:

Scriptural References

One of the most unexpected findings: NA_NEGATION (ਨਾ, 2,229 matches) and BINU_NEGATION (ਬਿਨੁ, 1,656 matches) are in the top 12 entities in the entire corpus. These are negation markers – “without,” “not,” “beyond.”

The GGS defines the divine through negation. Without fear. Without enmity. Without form. Without birth. The data literally shows a text that describes God by saying what God is not. This is the apophatic tradition – theology by negation – and it runs through the entire text, not as a rare technique but as one of the most frequent structural patterns in the corpus. For semantic analysis of entity relationships, see the semantic analysis.

Each Guru’s Voice

The GGS has 18 authors, but they are not interchangeable. The data reveals distinctive theological voices – each Guru gravitating toward different registers, different preoccupations, different ways of reaching the same formless divine.

One striking continuity device: all six contributing Gurus sign as “Nanak.” NANAK appears 5,000 times in the text. Guru Arjan, Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das – they all use “Nanak” as their signature, not their own names. They saw themselves as one lineage, one light passing through different bodies.

Six Gurus account for 90.4% of the text. Twelve Bhagats and Sundar (a bard who recorded a deathbed dialogue) contribute the remaining 9.6%.

The Distinctive Voices

Guru Arjan: The Compiler-Poet. 42.9% of all lines – nearly as much as the next three Gurus combined. As both the compiler of the Adi Granth and its most prolific contributor, his register profile is broadly representative of the corpus mean. His editorial choices shaped the character of the text as a whole.

Guru Nanak: The Balanced Founder. He isn’t the highest in any single dimension except two – but he’s the only author who engages meaningfully with all of them:

He leads in oneness and cleric critique – the universalist and the reformer. Every subsequent Guru took one dimension of Nanak’s template and turned up the volume. Ram Das amplified nirgun. Amar Das amplified ethics. Tegh Bahadur amplified devotion. But Nanak laid the entire territory.

Guru Ram Das: The Nirgun Maximalist. 62.27% nirgun density – the highest of any author. His compositions are saturated with HARI (3,663 occurrences – once every 1.9 lines). Nearly two-thirds of his lines contain formless-divine vocabulary.

Guru Amar Das: The Ethical Voice. Highest ethical density (7.31%) among the Gurus. His compositions emphasize inner moral transformation – SABAD (801), SACH (880), SAHAJ (318) dominate his vocabulary.

Guru Tegh Bahadur: The Devotional-Detachment Philosopher. Highest devotional density (11.40%) and highest ritual engagement (6.28%) among the Gurus. He combines deep longing with sustained engagement with external practice. And he has zero Perso-Arabic vocabulary – the only Guru with no Islamic register at all.

Kabir: The Cross-Tradition Voice. A Muslim weaver whose 4,187 lines carry the highest identity marker density (0.55%) – he’s where Hindu-Muslim vocabulary most frequently appears together. His Perso-Arabic density (1.43%) is the highest among major contributors.

Farid: The Sufi Outlier. The only author whose Perso-Arabic density (5.70%) exceeds his nirgun density (10.13%). His 158 lines read as Sufi devotional poetry – BIRHA (separation-longing) appears 5 times in those 158 lines alone.

Ravidas: The Devotional Peak. Highest devotional density (13.89%) of any author in the entire corpus. A leather-worker considered untouchable by caste Hindus, his 475 lines are the most intensely devotional voice in the GGS.

For detailed register profiles, ASCII charts, and top entities for each author, see the full author analysis.

The Three Pillars

Step back from the individual entities and a structural pattern emerges. Three dominant modes of discourse account for 85.2% of all theological vocabulary in the GGS:

Everything else – ritual critique (2.20%), interfaith engagement (0.29%), mythological narrative (0.51%), identity labeling, Perso-Arabic vocabulary – all of it combined is less than one-sixth of the text.

The things people argue about most – is the GGS Hindu or not, what about Islam, what about ritual, what about caste – occupy a sliver of the text. The overwhelming majority is formless theology, philosophical vocabulary, devotion, and ethics. The data doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity about what the Gurus were focused on.

For the full dimension-by-dimension breakdown, see the feature analysis.

The Advaita Connection

This is the central finding, and it requires some precision.

Nirgun means “without attributes” (nir = without, gun = qualities). Advaita means “not two” (a = not, dvaita = duality). Both point to the same reality: a formless, non-dual divine that cannot be named, imaged, or incarnated. The GGS’s nirgun theology is Advaita-adjacent – they share the same metaphysical core.

The numbers: 42.25% nirgun + 2.0% oneness markers = 44.25% Advaita-adjacent content. Nearly half the text.

The Sanskritic vocabulary (30.21% of lines) reinforces this, not contradicts it. The Gurus used Maya (ਮਾਇਆ, 827 occurrences), Brahm (ਬ੍ਰਹਮ, 165), Karam (ਕਰਮ, 620), Atma, Mukti – the entire Vedantic toolkit. The GGS talks at length about the world as Maya, about the dissolution of ego, about the identity of the soul with the One. The Gurus didn’t reject Vedantic philosophy. They engaged with it deeply and recontextualized it within a nirgun framework.

Sagun narrative – references to incarnations, mythological figures – appears in only 0.51% of lines. When incarnation stories do appear, they almost always serve nirgun teaching (more on this in The Sanatan Question).

Nirgun Bhakti: Advaita Wrapped in a Love Poem

But here’s what makes the GGS different from Advaita Vedanta. Shankara, the 8th-century philosopher who systematized Advaita Vedanta, found non-duality through philosophical analysis – pure intellect, no emotion required. The GGS finds the same formless reality through song. Through love. Through the ache of separation and the ecstasy of union.

Scholars call this “nirgun bhakti” – devotion to the formless. It’s a unique philosophical position: Advaita’s metaphysics combined with Bhakti’s emotional surrender. The data confirms it: 44.25% Advaita-adjacent content sitting alongside 7.24% devotional vocabulary. The formless divine and the bridal love poem occupy the same text, often the same line.

Advaita, in its classical Vedantic form, is intellectual. It’s hard for people to grasp. The dissolution of the self into Brahman (the ultimate reality, not to be confused with Brahma the creator god), the unreality of the world, the logic of neti-neti (“not this, not this”) – this is philosophy for the scholar’s study. The GGS took that same non-dual insight and made it accessible by blending it with emotion. You don’t need to follow Shankara’s chain of reasoning. You need to feel it. The Gurus democratized Advaita – they took the most abstract metaphysics in the Indian tradition and set it to music.

As Osho, the Indian spiritual teacher, observed, Nanak’s place is unique – he found the formless not through renunciation or intellectual dissection, but by singing to it. Just the joy. Just the love. And this connects back to the ragas: every poem in the GGS is wrapped in music, set to a melodic mode that prescribes the emotion. The path to the formless isn’t through austerity or analysis. It’s through beauty.

In today’s language, one might think of this as a quantum field – a nameless, formless energy pervading all creation. The Gurus would have understood the metaphor. But they would have added: you don’t just observe the field. You immerse in the formless light and sing to and with it.

The Stoic-Bhakti-Advaita Triangle

Every author in the GGS engages with three axes – but in different proportions:

The GGS’s center of gravity sits high and slightly right – overwhelmingly Advaita, with Bhakti outweighing Stoic ethics. Each author occupies a different position within this space:

Guru Ram Das sits nearest the Advaita apex (63.57%). Ravidas pulls hardest toward the Bhakti corner (13.89%). Guru Amar Das leans most toward Stoic ethics (7.31%). Farid, the Sufi, sits lowest on the Advaita axis (10.13%) and highest on Bhakti among the Bhagats. But no author is purely any one thing. Every voice in the GGS carries all three currents.

The GGS is not pure Advaita. It is not pure Bhakti. It is not pure Stoic ethics. It is nirgun bhakti – Advaita wrapped in a love poem, sung in ragas, concerned with the mastery of the inner life. That combination is quantitatively unique.

For the full semantic analysis and Stoic-Bhakti-Advaita breakdown by author, see the semantic analysis.

HARI, Not WAHEGURU

This genuinely surprised me. If you grow up in the Sikh tradition today, the two names you hear most are Naam and Waheguru. The data tells a different story.

HARI (ਹਰਿ) appears 9,341 times – more than any other entity in the text. WAHEGURU (ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ) appears 171 times. That’s a 55:1 ratio.

Modern Sikh practice centers on “Waheguru” as the primary name for God. The text itself centers on Hari, Naam, and Prabh. This isn’t a contradiction – it’s an evolution. WAHEGURU became the primary name in the later tradition, post-GGS. But the scripture itself speaks a different lexical language than modern practice.

For the full entity frequency rankings, see the matching results.

The Sanatan Question

The questions that started this project were simple: how much of the text has Sanatan roots, and what percentage references Indian gods? The answers came back in layers, each more nuanced than the last.

Layer 1: The Gods Are Pointers, Not the Point

The Gurus didn’t erase the gods. They embraced the names – Shiv (86 occurrences), Krishna (68), Brahma (50), Vishnu (40) – but understood each as a finger pointing at the formless light, not as the light itself. The complete Ramayana cast – Sita (8), Dasrath (1), Ravan (9), Lachman (1), Hanuman (1), Ramchandra (6) – appears in only 26 lines combined out of 60,629. The gods are present, but proportionally, the Gurus spent 83x more lines on the formless itself than on the pointers to it.

And here’s what the data confirms: when these figures do appear, 27% of those lines also contain nirgun vocabulary. A characteristic line invokes Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva to argue that even they do not know the divine – using the gods to assert the formless. This is no different from Krishna saying in the Gita that he is the avatar of the formless Vishnu, or Advaita’s core insight that every name, every form, every person is Brahman. The Gurus were doing the same thing – pointing through the names to what lies beyond them.

What does “Ram” actually mean? The clearest proof that the gods are pointers is RAM (ਰਾਮ) itself. It appears 2,019 times across 1,894 lines – one of the most frequent entities in the corpus. If you’re counting “references to Indian gods,” that’s a big number. But the analysis has to go deeper than lexical matching. What does the word mean in the semantic context the Gurus placed it in?

The co-occurrence data is unambiguous:

Every top companion is nirgun-register. RAM co-occurs with sagun narrative entities (Krishna, Shiv, Brahma, Sita) only 7 times at ang level, compared to 27 nirgun co-occurrences. RAM’s semantic neighborhood is indistinguishable from HARI’s.

RAM in the GGS behaves statistically as a synonym for the formless divine, not as a reference to Dasharatha’s son. The most frequently used “god name” in the text is itself a nirgun word. The pointer and the formless are the same.

Layer 2: The Vocabulary Ratio

Now zoom out from individual words to the entire vocabulary. The civilizational density ratio:

For every 1 Islamic-register entity (Allah, Khuda, Qazi, Noor, etc.), there are 99.9 Sanatan-register entities (Hari, Naam, Brahm, Maya, Ram, etc.). The Perso-Arabic register appears in only 0.29% of lines (174 lines out of 60,629). The Sanskritic register appears in 30.21% and the nirgun register in 42.25%.

The GGS’s vocabulary is overwhelmingly Sanatan-derived. But – and this is crucial – it is Sanatan vocabulary repurposed for nirgun theology. The word “Ram” doesn’t mean the prince. “Hari” doesn’t mean Vishnu. “Brahm” doesn’t mean the creator god. The Gurus took the entire Sanskritic lexicon and pointed it at the formless.

Layer 3: When ALLAH Appears

ALLAH appears in only 19 lines of the entire corpus (0.03%). When it does appear:

• 21% of those lines also contain Indic divine names (RAM, HARI)

• ALLAH co-occurs with KHUDA (3 times) and NOOR (2 times)

• The context is consistently universalist-mystical, not legalistic

These are the “Aval Allah Noor Upaya” (“First, Allah created the Light”) lines – moments of explicit civilizational synthesis where the text deliberately bridges Islamic and Indic vocabulary.

Layer 4: HINDU and TURK – Always Together

The most statistically surprising finding in the entire corpus: HINDU and TURK have the highest PMI (6.174) of any entity pair – higher than any divine name cluster, any mythological grouping, any ritual pairing.

When the GGS names religious communities, it names them together. Always. The text structurally refuses to critique one community without addressing both. Only 31 lines in the entire 60,629-line corpus contain explicit religious identity labels. The GGS almost never names communities. When it does, it names them as a pair to transcend.

A linguistic note: the GGS’s primary term for Muslims is TURK (ਤੁਰਕ), not Musalman (which appears in only ~7 lines). “Turk” is an ethnic-political term – it references the Central Asian Turkic rulers of medieval India – the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526) and early Mughal Empire, the Muslim dynasties that governed the subcontinent during the Gurus’ era. The Gurus used a word that identifies this community by its foreign political origin rather than by its religious identity. Whether this reflects that the Muslim community was still primarily associated with the ruling class and not yet fully integrated into the indigenous fabric, or simply the common colloquial term of 15th-17th century Punjab, is a question I’ll leave to historians. But the word choice is striking.

Layer 5: How the Text Achieves Its Multi-Traditional Character

Register mixing at the line level is almost nonexistent – only 0.12% of register-carrying lines contain both Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic vocabulary on the same line. The GGS achieves its multi-traditional character through composition-level juxtaposition, not line-level blending. Kabir’s compositions sit next to Guru Arjan’s. Farid’s Sufi verses share the same raga section as nirgun hymns. This is deliberate editorial design – the diversity is structural, woven into the organization of the text itself.

The Answer

So how Sanatan is the GGS? The vocabulary is 99.9% Sanatan-derived. But the theology transcends Sanatan tradition just as it transcends Islamic tradition. The Gurus took the Sanskritic lexicon – Ram, Hari, Brahm, Maya, Atma – and redirected every word toward the formless. They didn’t reject the vocabulary. They repurposed it. And in the rare moments when they engaged Islamic vocabulary, they did so to synthesize, not to divide.

This does not mean the GGS is “Hindu.” The nirgun theology explicitly transcends both Hindu and Islamic categories. But the vocabulary through which that transcendence is expressed is overwhelmingly drawn from the Sanskritic-Punjabi lexical register.

For the full RAM analysis, ALLAH context, and civilizational density ratios, see the semantic analysis. For register mixing patterns, see the mixing analysis.

The Five Thieves and Inner Sovereignty

The GGS devotes 5.46% of all lines to ethical vocabulary – inner vices and virtues, the moral psychology of the self. It devotes 2.20% to ritual references – pilgrimage, fire ritual, idol worship. That’s a 2.5:1 ratio. The text cares 2.5 times more about what’s happening inside you than about what you’re doing at the temple.

The Five Thieves (Panj Chor)

Sikh theology names five inner enemies – the Panj Chor (Five Thieves) – that steal the mind’s capacity for the divine. The GGS maps them obsessively:

The ordering is the data’s, not mine. Moh (attachment) dominates – it appears nearly as often as the next two thieves combined. The GGS’s primary ethical concern isn’t lust or anger, as in many ascetic traditions. It’s attachment to the world. Worldly entanglement. The inability to let go. This is distinctly non-ascetic – the text isn’t against the body or against desire per se. It’s against the grip that the world has on the mind.

Then there’s HAUMAI (ਹਉਮੈ) – ego, self-centeredness – which the GGS tracks separately at 627 occurrences. In Sikh theology, Haumai is the root from which the Five Thieves arise. Ego creates attachment. Attachment breeds desire. Desire produces anger when thwarted, greed when indulged, pride when satisfied. If you include Haumai alongside the traditional five, the total rises to 2,237 matches.

The Virtues

The GGS doesn’t just diagnose. It prescribes

*NIMRATA returned zero matches – a known lexicon limitation. The word exists in the GGS but our spelling variants didn’t capture its actual orthography. This is one of 10 unmatched entities in the 124-entity lexicon.

Seva alone (814) outranks every individual thief except Moh. Jap – the practice of meditating on the divine Name – appears 576 times, making it the third most frequent virtue. The text gives as much weight to the cultivation of service, compassion, and remembrance as it does to the diagnosis of vice. This is a complete ethical system – not just “avoid evil” but “actively cultivate good.”

The Quantitative Knockout

Here’s what struck me most: the 3,632 ethical entity matches exceed ritual (1,439), cleric critique (616), sagun narrative (337), Perso-Arabic (195), and identity (42) – combined (2,629). The inner life gets more textual attention than every external category put together.

The Stoic Parallel – With a Twist

This maps remarkably well to Stoic philosophy. Inner sovereignty. Mastery of the passions. Cultivation of virtue. Equanimity in the face of the world’s chaos. Marcus Aurelius would recognize the language – conquer the thieves within, and the world outside loses its power over you.

But the GGS goes somewhere Stoicism doesn’t. For the Stoics, self-mastery is the destination. For the Gurus, it’s the prerequisite. You conquer the Five Thieves not to achieve ataraxia (Stoic calm) but to dissolve the ego that separates you from the formless. Ethics clears the path. Nirgun theology is what lies at the end of it.

The Five Thieves are not the enemy. Haumai – the ego that gives them power – is the enemy. And the cure for Haumai is Naam – the dissolution of self into the formless divine. The ethical and the theological are not separate dimensions in the GGS. They are two stages of the same journey.

For the full ethical dimension analysis, see the feature analysis. For entity frequencies, see the matching results.

A Love Poem to the Infinite

The GGS is not just philosophy. It’s a love poem. And like any love poem, it has a structure: a lover, a beloved, a longing, and a resolution.

The Bridal Metaphor

The GGS’s central devotional device is bridal mysticism – the soul as the lover, God as the beloved. This isn’t occasional imagery. It’s a sustained literary architecture with its own vocabulary:

The soul speaks as a lover waiting for the beloved to come home. The Sohagan – the blessed one, the one who has found her beloved – is the GGS’s image of spiritual fulfillment. Not enlightenment as intellectual achievement. Not salvation as rescue from punishment. Union. The lover finds the beloved.

The Emotional Engine Is Separation, Not Union

BIRHA (26 occurrences) is small in count but enormous in function. The dominant emotional state in the GGS is longing, not arrival. The lover aches for the beloved who is felt but not seen. The night is dark. The bed is empty. The beloved is everywhere and yet the lover cannot hold on.

This is the emotional engine of the entire devotional register. The GGS doesn’t describe the joy of union nearly as much as it describes the ache of separation. And that ache is what drives the devotee deeper – into Naam, into Sahaj, into the dissolution of the self that separates lover from beloved.

RAHAU: The Heart-Cry

Every shabad is built around a RAHAU (ਰਹਾਉ) line – 2,685 of them across the text. RAHAU means “pause.” It’s the refrain, the line you return to, the emotional core of the composition. A shabad isn’t a linear argument. It’s a poem that circles around its own center of gravity – a cry repeated, a truth returned to after each verse.

The RAHAU line is where the poet’s voice breaks through most directly. It’s the line that gets sung again and again. In a text of 60,629 lines, there are 2,685 of these emotional anchors – one for roughly every 22 lines. The entire text is punctuated by pauses, by heart-cries, by returns to what matters most.

SAHAJ: Where the Love Poem Resolves

SAHAJ (ਸਹਜ) appears 976 times – one of the most frequent entities in the entire corpus. The destination of devotion isn’t ecstasy or trance. It’s Sahaj – equipoise, a natural state of spiritual balance. Stillness. Calm.

The love poem resolves not into frenzy but into peace. The lover doesn’t burn forever. The ache of Birha, the longing of Prem, the crying out for the Pir – it all resolves into Sahaj. The beloved was never absent. The separation was Haumai – the ego that imagined it was separate. When the ego dissolves, Sahaj remains.

Philosophy and Longing in the Same Line

Here is the paradox that makes the GGS unique: the text moves between metaphysical abstraction and raw emotional ache within the same compositions, often within the same line. A line will assert the unreality of the world (Maya) and then cry out for the beloved (Pir) in the next breath. The Gurus saw no contradiction. The philosophy says the divine is formless. The poetry says: and I love it as my beloved anyway.

This is nirgun bhakti at the line level. Not “formless theology” in one section and “love poems” in another. Both, simultaneously, woven into the same verse. 7.24% of all lines carry devotional vocabulary, and much of it appears alongside nirgun entities. The Stoic and the lover sit in the same line.

For devotional entity frequencies, see the matching results. For the devotional dimension analysis, see the feature analysis.

What Kind of Text Is This?

Is the GGS a Bhakti text? An Advaita text? A Stoic-ethical text? An interfaith text? A Sanatan text?

The data says: it is all of these and none of them. It is a convergence text that:

1. Speaks overwhelmingly in nirgun vocabulary (42.25%) – nearly half the text is about a formless divine that cannot be named, imaged, or incarnated.

2. Engages deeply with Sanskritic philosophy (30.21%) – Maya, Brahm, Atma, Karam. The Gurus didn’t reject Vedantic thought. They repurposed its entire lexicon for nirgun theology.

3. Sustains a powerful devotional register (7.24%) – love poems to the formless. Bridal mysticism, separation-longing, the ache of Birha resolving into the stillness of Sahaj.

4. Prioritizes inner sovereignty over external ritual (5.46% vs 2.20%) – the Five Thieves and their cure get 2.5x more attention than pilgrimage, fire ritual, and idol worship combined.

5. Uses mythology as pointers to the formless, never as standalone narrative – the gods appear (Shiv, Krishna, Brahma, Vishnu) but 83x less often than the formless itself, and 27% of those lines also contain nirgun vocabulary.

6. Engages Islamic vocabulary rarely but with deliberate synthesis (0.29%) – when ALLAH appears, 21% of those lines also contain Indic divine names. The 99.9:1 vocabulary ratio is Sanatan, but the theology transcends both traditions.

7. Treats religious identity as something to transcend, not to defend – HINDU and TURK have the highest PMI in the entire corpus. When the text names communities, it names them together. Always.

This combination is quantitatively unique. That isn’t a claim of superiority. It’s a structural observation from the data. No other scripture has this particular architecture: Advaita metaphysics expressed through devotional longing, grounded in ethical self-discipline, spoken in Sanskritic-Punjabi vocabulary, with selective cross-civilizational synthesis – all set to music.

The Dark Matter

But this analysis captures only half the text. 49.7% of lines are unmarked by our 124-entity lexicon. We’ve mapped the theological skeleton – the divine names, the philosophical vocabulary, the ethical terms, the devotional metaphors, the identity markers. But the poetry, the grammar, the Gurmukhi wordplay, the emotional texture of individual lines – that’s the flesh we haven’t measured.

The unmarked lines aren’t empty. They’re full of connective tissue – the narrative, the imagery, the turns of phrase that make the GGS poetry and not just a catalogue of theological terms. Our lexicon captures what the text talks about. It doesn’t capture how it talks. That’s the next frontier.

Limitations

This analysis is honest about what it can and cannot do:

• String matching, not semantic disambiguation. The pipeline matches Gurmukhi tokens. It doesn’t understand context. When ਕਰਮ appears, it could mean karma, action, or grace – we count it once under KARAM.

• Polysemous terms (ਕਰਮ, ਕਾਮ, ਜਗ, ਪਿਰ, ਮੂਰਤਿ) are flagged but not disambiguated. Five entities in our lexicon carry multiple meanings.

• Co-occurrence is measured at ang level, not shabad level. The corpus lacks shabad boundary markers. Ang-level grouping is coarser than ideal.

• Author attribution is regex-based – Mahalla headers and Bhagat signatures. Lines near section boundaries may be misattributed.

• 10 of 124 entities returned zero matches, including NIMRATA (humility) – a core Sikh virtue whose GGS orthography our spelling variants didn’t capture.

The Invitation

This project is open source and fully reproducible. The pipeline processes raw Gurmukhi – no English translation drives any analytical logic. Every percentage, every count, every finding traces back to specific lines and entity matches.

I’m not a data scientist. I wrote the product requirements with ChatGPT and the code with Claude. If there are issues, the project is on GitHub. File a bug. Fork the repo. Improve the lexicon. Add the missing spelling variants. Build a shabad-level co-occurrence engine. Measure what we haven’t measured.

The numbers don’t interpret theology. They describe what the text actually does, line by line, word by word. And what it does is remarkable.

For the full analysis – all 13 findings, methodology, and per-author breakdowns – see the complete analysis documentation.

Coming Home

What I didn’t expect was what the data would show me about myself.

I spent three decades walking the earth, exploring philosophies. I studied meditation traditions, read the Stoics, sat with teachers from different lineages. Eventually I landed on Advaita – non-duality. The formless. And I found my practice settling into something Sahaj-based – not devotional intensity, not intellectual analysis, but equipoise. Joy. The natural state.

Then the data came back. 44.25% Advaita-adjacent. SAHAJ appearing 976 times – one of the most frequent entities in the entire text. Nirgun bhakti: Advaita wrapped in a love poem. The Mool Mantar was always Advaita in one breath. Every word – formless, timeless, beyond species, without fear, without enmity – was pointing where I eventually arrived by walking the long way around.

I truly walked the earth and came home to find the lessons were here already.

The data didn’t tell me what to believe. It showed me what was always there. The 99.9% Sanatan vocabulary, but a theology that transcends both Hindu and Islamic categories. The gods as pointers, not the point. The Five Thieves as the real obstacle, not the wrong temple. HARI, not WAHEGURU. Ram as the formless, not the prince. And through it all, the love poem – the ache of Birha resolving into the stillness of Sahaj.

The Gurus knew. They always knew.

Quick Glossary

For readers unfamiliar with the terminology. A full glossary is available in the project documentation.

Scripture & Structure

Theology

The Five Thieves (Panj Chor)

Devotional Vocabulary

Cultural & Religious Terms

Analysis Terms

Past few years, I have offered a meditation practice once or twice a year as my way of giving back.

I put together something for February, starting Feb 1st. The aim is to get people to commit to a 21 day cycle (max 30 minutes/day) and build a practice—You can do it on your time—emails with videos drop in everyday and Sunday live (also recorded) session to get help. The charge is $21—as a commitment to yourself to follow through.

I go through three 3 themes with a layered set of practices in each theme. The intent is that you can find something that works for you.

January flew by…

January flew by. Our resolutions were hijacked by the pace of everyday life. We’ve likely lost the calm of the last week of December and are carrying more stress than we realize.

This 21-day journey is designed to help you anchor back into peace, and from there rediscover clarity, flow, and joy—not by forcing positive thinking, but by gently cultivating inner state, layer by layer.

What You’ll Receive

21 daily guided practices delivered via email each morning
4 live integration calls on Sundays at 8:30am PT (sent later as email)
Lifetime access to all recordings

Investment: $21

Join the journey here

Starts February 1. Registration closes January 31.

For Full Details, Read On

What This Journey Is About

Real inner change doesn’t happen by jumping straight to “feel good.”

It happens by cultivating state through layers—like peeling an onion or opening the petals of a lotus.

Over 21 days, we will gently move through:

• Nervous system regulation

• Attention and emotional release

• Identity softening (resting as awareness)

• Energy circulation through the body

• Gratitude, joy, and compassionate intention

Each layer prepares the ground for the next. No strain. No forcing. Just natural unfolding.

This is not about chasing experiences. It’s about returning to a quality of being from which life feels lighter and clearer.

My Background

My own journey has drawn from multiple traditions, and this series reflects that integration:

• Shamanic journey practices learned from Peruvian shamans

• Mantra, Tantra, and gratitude-based healing from Indian spiritual lineages

• Advaita (non-dual) inquiry—resting as awareness and self-recognition

• Certified Peter Hess Sound Practitioner (therapeutic singing bowls)

• Emotional release techniques inspired by Lester Levenson / Sedona Method

Rather than teaching one rigid system, I use multiple doorways into the same inner states, because different people open through different paths.

How the 21 Days Are Structured

Each week cultivates a different inner capacity, building progressively.

🟢 Week 1 — CALM (Nervous System Reset through Sound)

Goal: Deep relaxation and safety in the body

• Days 1–3: Guided sound journeys (shamanic style)

• Days 4–5: Continuous singing-bowl resonance as a calm anchor

• Gentle breath and body awareness supported by sound

Purpose: Rapid down-regulation, emotional settling, and strong positive association with practice.

🔵 Week 2 — PRESENCE + EMOTIONAL RELEASE

Goal: Stabilize attention and release emotional weight

• Day 6: Aana-paana—breath as attentional anchor

• Day 7: Body scan—embodied awareness

• Day 8: Simple mantra—rhythmic attention

• Day 9: Emotional release (welcoming, allowing, letting go)

• Day 10: Presence during emotion—integrating attention and release

Purpose: Less mental noise, lighter emotional load, greater inner stability.

🟣 Week 3 — BEING, FLOW, AND JOY

Days 11–14 — BEING (Advaita-Style Inquiry)

Goal: Softening identification with mental narrative

• Observing the observer

• “Finding the next thought” (quieting the mind)

• “Who am I?” inquiry

• Resting without technique

Purpose: Experiencing yourself as awareness rather than only thoughts.

Days 15–18 — FLOW (Chakra-Based Energy Circulation)

Goal: Emotional openness and vertical coherence

• Day 15: Heart / lotus meditation

• Days 16–17: Chakra scanning and energy circulation

• Day 18: Full sound bath for whole-system integration

Purpose: Vitality, coherence, and emotional flow.

Days 19–21 — JOY & INTENTION

• Day 19: Gratitude as a lived bodily state

• Day 20: Embodying the quality of your future self

• Day 21: Loving-kindness and gentle intention setting

Manifestation here is approached as: what changes naturally when your inner state changes.

Daily Practice Format

Each session follows the same supportive rhythm:

1. Opening singing bowls (state transition)

2. Short arrival practice (noticing your current state)

3. Guided practice for the day

4. Closing singing bowls (state anchoring)

5. Brief integration reflection

No lectures. No philosophy debates. Just experience and integration.

Live Integration Calls (Sundays, 8:30am PT)

Feb 1: Live opening
Feb 8: Week 1 integration + Q&A
Feb 15: Week 2 integration + Q&A
Feb 22: Final integration + closing

All calls recorded and available with lifetime access.

Who This Is For

• If you feel stressed, scattered, or emotionally heavy

• If you want calm without suppressing emotions

• If you’re curious but don’t know where to start

• If you already practice and want to go deeper

No meditation experience required. Beginner-friendly, but not superficial.

How to Join

Investment: $21

Starts February 1

Join the journey here

After registration, you’ll receive:

• Welcome email with Day 1 practice on February 1

• Google Meet links for live Saturday calls

• Daily practice emails

Questions? Reply to this email or if you read on substack, reply to this post

.

Last year, I took a sabbatical in 2025 to travel. One of the stops on the way was to go to India and spend time with family. I was especially looked forward to spending time with my aunt. This is the first time, I truly had time to spend with her. There was no agenda, no flight to catch in a typical trip to India that lasts a week.

I did spend time. In a completed unexpected way.

We ended up in the hospital that night.

Earlier that morning, she joked that her time to leave earth has come. Prophetic.

She looked reasonably well for the first few days.

We kept hoping each day would be the turn. That the next test would finally show improvement. That tomorrow she’d stabilize and we could breathe.

It never did.

It was like whack-a-mole.

Get one thing under control, another system shutdown up. We moved her to a bigger hospital. Better care, more tests, more expertise.

Same pattern: on and off, stabilize then cascade down. Same result.

Once the tipping point hit, the shutdown happened fast. Two weeks total.

She was gone.

During those weeks, I kept trying to help.

Find better doctors, ask better questions, research treatments. I have seen this pattern a few times now, as shutdown of various systems cascade, you are an ant on a twig in running water of fast moving spring.

In this case, somewhere around day 4 or 5, I noticed something.

I wasn’t steering this.

Effort was happening—conversations, decisions, hope. But I wasn’t the one doing it.

I was just there, watching it unfold.

There’s a text from ancient India called the Ashtavakra Gita.

It’s considered one of the original non-dual philosophies.

It says:

You are not the doer, and you are not the enjoyer or sufferer—you are the awareness in which all actions appear.

I used to wonder why no one taught me this earlier.

Now I think: because you can’t really teach it. You have to see it for yourself.

And I saw it in those hospital rooms and ICU.

Family frustrated with the doctors who are up against it. Keeping the ant on the twig while they try to find the nearest off-ramp off the river. I feel for them—an impossible job in the ICU—nothing they can do is going to be enough.

Though, this isn’t just about hospitals and dying.

It’s the same with work that doesn’t land despite perfect execution, relationships that won’t shift no matter what you try, plans that fall apart for no clear reason. Most of us carry a background belief:

It’s on me to make this work.

That creates a particular exhaustion.

The feeling that if it goes wrong, you didn’t try hard enough. The constant strategizing, optimizing, pushing.

But sometimes things just move in their own direction. You are in the river of life.

And no amount of effort changes that. You can show up, care deeply, give everything—and life still does what it does.

Not because you failed, but because you were never in control to begin with.

When you stop fighting that fact—even for a moment—something softens.

Actions still happen, you still show up, you still care. But there’s less self-blame, less constant strategizing, less feeling personally targeted by outcomes you never controlled.

Not powerless.

Just not in control. There’s a difference.

And that difference changes everything.

You are not the doer. You are the awareness in which all actions appear.

I’m still sitting with that. Some days it feels like relief.

Other days, it feels unsettling.

Both are true.

Writing a book has been a lifelong dream and I finally published my first mini-book on Amazon and I am excited to share the book with you.

Buy the book

For years, I thought of writing a book. I started the journey a couple of times, even getting a publisher for an idea (it was a technical book). However, the ideas never culminated into a book—the topic was never right, the passion for the topics was usually missing and finally I was too engrossed in reading books to write one.

The idea for this book came about as I was recounting the lessons I learned from my dog (Spock) to a good friend. I was struck by the parallels of his simple life with many of the lessons in various spiritual philosophies.

The idea eventually baked into writing 13 chapters—one for each year of Spock’s life. However, I scratched the entire manuscript because the language was too heavy, too philosophical—a direct contrast to Spock’s life.

I aimed for simplicity in language from “The Alchemist” and “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull”—two of my favorites. There is magic in balance of the simple language vs. the profound lessons communicated in these books.

I eventually settled for capturing the conversation between me and my friend. Rewriting 13 chapters twice is quite an undertaking, so I decided to split the book into three themes and publish each as a mini-book.

The last twelve weeks have been quite interesting working with an editor, a book designer, layout, understand Kindle publishing platform. I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

This mini-book is the first in that series and the first theme (“Joy of Being”).

Early feedback has ranged from “love the idea,” “love the book,” “will share it with all pet parents mourning their pets” to “the language still is too philosophical.”

I would love for you to check it out.

The blurb from the back of the book.

"In death, Spock gave me a gift I had been searching for my entire life."

When Harpreet Singh's beloved dog, Spock, passed away, it shattered him.

Grieving, Harpreet found himself revisiting old wounds - the loss of his sister decades earlier, a tragedy that had propelled him into a lifelong search for meaning, spirituality, and self-realization. But something was different this time. Through the profound stillness of grief, Harpreet experienced a shift - an awakening born not from study or philosophy but from love, loss, and the quiet wisdom of a dog who had been teaching him all along.

In this heartfelt and deeply personal reflection, Harpreet shares the powerful life lessons that Spock's simple, unassuming life revealed - lessons echoed in the teachings of Advaita, Tantra, Taoism, and other spiritual paths. Through candid conversations with a close friend, he distills years of searching into simple, accessible wisdom on love, loss, and living fully in the present.

This book is part of a more significant journey that began with grief but led to awakening. You'll recognize yourself in these pages if you've ever loved and lost a pet. If you've ever wondered about the nature of happiness and self-realization, you'll find the answers may be closer than you think.

"Spock wasn't unique - but he was extraordinary. And in his ordinary life, I found the lessons I had spent a lifetime chasing."

Discover the first in a three-part series on Embracing Life's Journey - a heartfelt guide to seeing the sacred in the everyday.

Summary Non-dual meditation is a profound practice rooted in self-inquiry and the teachings of sages like Ramana Maharishi. Learn what non-duality means, explore its foundation, and discover 10 powerful questions to guide your practice.

Introduction

This newsletter explains non-duality and how it forms the foundation of a transformative meditation practice.

Non-dual meditation offers a path to transcend mental noise and awaken to the clarity of thinking.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand the essence of non-duality and walk away with 10 transformative questions to guide your practice.

The TLDR on Non-duality meditation

The mind is constantly chattering away. It likes tasks and thinking. Non-dual questions don't have an immediate answer—they essentially outwit the mind into silence.

As soon as the mind realizes it cannot answer a question, it momentarily is stunned into silence.

This silence bubbles up to the surface, bringing a sense of peace.

The Meaning of Non-Duality

Non-duality, or Advaita, means “not two.” I think of this as one of the peaks in Hindu philosophy.

It’s the recognition that the apparent separation between self and the world, or between subject and object, is an illusion. Non-duality teaches that all existence arises from a single, indivisible reality. In essence, it’s the realization that the “I” observing life and the life being observed are the same.

This recognition is the foundation of non-dual meditation.

Ramana Maharishi’s Teachings on Non-Duality

Ramana Maharishi, one of the most revered teachers of non-duality, emphasized the practice of self-inquiry.

He asked seekers to investigate the nature of the self by asking a single, profound question: “Who am I?”

According to Ramana Maharishi, the ego—a construct of thoughts and emotions—is the root of our suffering. By turning attention inward and dissolving identification with the ego, we awaken to the truth of our being: pure awareness.

Plenty of variations on the "Who am I?" question help your mind recognize the world and you as non-dual. You choose the question that most resonates with you.

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13 Transformative Non-Dual Questions for Mental Clarity and Silence

Non-dual meditation often begins with inquiry, which gently dismantles the illusion of separation.

Here are 12 powerful questions to guide your practice:

1. What is my next thought?

2. Who am I?

3. Where am I?

4. When am I?

5. What is it that is aware of this moment?

6. What is it that is aware?

7. Who am I beyond my thoughts and emotions?

8. Can I observe the observer?

9. What remains when all thoughts subside?

10. Where does the sense of “I” arise from?

11. Is there a boundary between myself and the world?

12. Who experiences this experience?

13. If there is no self, who is asking this question?

These questions serve as doorways to discovering the essence of non-duality.

Why Non-Duality Matters

Non-duality isn’t just a concept; it’s a transformative way of experiencing life.

By dissolving the illusion of separation, you release the grip of ego-driven thoughts and discover profound peace. Non-dual meditation connects you to the present moment and frees you from the cycle of mental chatter, allowing clarity and awareness to emerge naturally. It’s not about becoming someone new—it’s about realizing who you’ve always been.

This realization is the essence of liberation.

Conclusion

Non-dual meditation is a path to clarity, peace, and self-realization.

Rooted in the teachings of Ramana Maharishi and practices like self-inquiry, it helps dissolve the illusion of separation and reconnects you with the truth of your being. With the questions provided, you can begin your journey into non-duality and explore the transformative potential of this practice.

Key takeaways:

• Non-duality teaches that there is no separation between self and the world—there is only one reality.

• Ramana Maharishi’s practice of self-inquiry is a cornerstone of non-dual meditation.

• Asking transformative questions helps you dismantle ego-based thinking and awaken to clarity.

• Start your journey today—begin with the question, “Who am I?”

What if there was a way to cultivate gratitude, a deep sense of compassion, and a connection with the world while enhancing your meditation practice?

Enter Metta meditation or Loving-Kindness Meditation. This ancient practice from the Vipassana tradition in Buddhism has been a cornerstone of mindfulness for centuries. Its power lies in its simplicity and universal applicability.

Here’s how it works:

What is Loving-Kindness Meditation?

Metta is a practice of consciously generating feelings of goodwill, kindness, and love. You start by generating these feelings within yourself and gradually extend them outward to encompass all living beings.

It’s a step-by-step process of softening the heart and dissolving barriers, one layer at a time.

The Steps of Loving-Kindness Meditation

1️⃣ Start with Yourself

Begin by sitting comfortably, closing your eyes, and repeating phrases of goodwill toward yourself. For example:

• “May I be happy.”

• “May I be healthy.”

• “May I be safe.”

• “May I live with ease.”

• Focus on truly feeling these words as you direct them inward.

2️⃣ Extend to a Loved One

Next, visualize someone you care about deeply — a family member, friend, or mentor. Repeat the same phrases, directing the feelings of love and kindness toward them.

3️⃣ Shift to a Neutral Person

Now think of someone you neither like nor dislike — maybe the cashier at your local grocery store or a colleague you don’t know well. Send them the same heartfelt wishes.

4️⃣ Include a Difficult Person

This step is challenging but transformative. Picture someone you’ve had conflict with or find difficult to deal with. As best as possible, direct thoughts of kindness and goodwill toward them.

5️⃣ Expand to All Beings

Finally, extend these feelings outward to encompass all living beings everywhere. Imagine radiating love and kindness like a ripple across the universe:

• “May all beings be happy.”

• “May all beings be healthy.”

• “May all beings be safe.”

• “May all beings live with ease.”

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Why Practice Loving-Kindness Meditation?

1. It Cultivates Gratitude. As you extend goodwill to others, you naturally start to appreciate the interconnectedness of all life. Gratitude flows as you recognize your shared humanity.

2. It Dissolves Resentment. Directing kindness toward difficult people may not change them, but it will change you. Metta meditation reduces anger and resentment, leaving room for peace.

3. It Boosts Emotional Resilience. Studies have shown that regular practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation increases positive emotions and decreases anxiety and depression.

4. It Deepens Your Meditation Practice. By focusing on goodwill, you anchor your mind in positivity, making it easier to stay present and mindful.

How to Get Started

If you’ve never tried Metta meditation before, start small. Spend 5 minutes focusing on yourself, and gradually add more people as you get comfortable. The beauty of this practice is that it grows with you.

Set aside a few moments each day to try this. You don’t need perfect silence or hours of free time — just a quiet corner and an open heart.

A Parting Thought

In a world that often feels divided, Metta meditation is a simple yet profound way to foster connection, gratitude, and peace.

As you go about your day, consider what it would feel like to send just one moment of goodwill to yourself and someone else. Start there. The ripple effect might surprise you.

If you try this, I’d love to hear how it felt. Hit reply and let me know.

With kindness,

Harpreet

Summary: Discover how gratitude can transform your meditation practice with 3 powerful reasons, 3 daily routines, and 3 common mistakes to avoid.

Introduction

Gratitude is the secret ingredient to make your meditation practice more joyful, consistent, and transformative.

It’s about weaving gratitude into every moment of your practice so that it’s something you do and feel. Many people struggle with meditation because it feels like a battle with their thoughts. Gratitude shifts this battle into a practice of peace.

If you’ve ever wondered why some people meditate while others give up, the answer may lie in the power of gratitude.

Why Gratitude Changes Everything

Gratitude isn’t a "nice-to-have" — it’s a "must-have" for your meditation journey.

It’s not just about feeling good in the moment. It’s about rewiring your brain to find peace, even on difficult days. When you build gratitude into your practice, meditation stops being a task and becomes a deeply rewarding experience.

This shift is what separates those who stick with meditation from those who abandon it.

You’re Probably Thinking This...

"Sure, gratitude sounds nice, but how does it actually make a difference?"

Here’s the thing: gratitude isn’t just a feel-good concept — it’s backed by science. Research shows that gratitude activates the brain’s reward system, which makes meditation feel more like a treat than a chore. On a simpler note, gratitude just makes you feel good!

And that’s why people who use gratitude as a foundation for meditation tend to stay consistent, even on tough days.

The Blueprint for Gratitude-Fueled Meditation

If you’re ready to infuse gratitude into your practice, here’s the exact playbook.

3 Reasons Why Gratitude is Vital for Sustaining a Meditation Practice

1. Creates Positive Reinforcement: Meditation becomes something you look forward to because gratitude activates your brain’s reward center.

2. Strengthens Emotional Resilience: Gratitude builds mental strength, helping you stay consistent even when meditation feels hard.

3. Encourages Mindfulness: Gratitude naturally draws you into the present moment, the very essence of meditation.

3 Daily Routines for Nurturing a Gratitude Mindset for Meditation

1. Morning Gratitude Practice: List 3 things you’re grateful for before starting your day.

2. Midday Gratitude Pause: Take a 2-minute pause during your day to reflect on one good thing that happened.

3. Evening Reflection: End your day by reviewing moments of gratitude to prime your brain for rest.

3 Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Being Too Generic: Specificity is key. Instead of "I’m grateful for my family," try "I’m grateful for the way my child’s laughter filled the room today."

2. Focusing Only on Big Events: Small moments matter. Gratitude grows stronger in the small, quiet moments of daily life.

3. Forcing Gratitude in Negative Situations: You don’t have to "fake it." Real gratitude means allowing space for discomfort while still noticing the good.

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What This Means for You

If you’ve ever struggled to "clear your mind" in meditation, you’re not alone.

Gratitude shifts the goal from "silence your thoughts" to "appreciate this moment," which is much more achievable. It’s a perspective shift that transforms meditation from an obligation into a gift you give yourself.

This change alone can turn meditation from a frustrating chore into a habit you crave.

Closing Takeaways

Gratitude is the simplest way to sustain a meditation practice.
Here’s a quick recap of the key takeaways:

• Start with 3 small gratitude routines: morning, midday, and evening reflections.

• Avoid common mistakes like generic gratitude and only focusing on big events.

• Let gratitude be your guide and watch meditation shift from a struggle to a joy.

Meditation doesn’t have to be hard. With gratitude as your foundation, it becomes a place of comfort and renewal.

Start with just one small moment of gratitude today and see how it transforms your next meditation session.

If you ever find yourself wandering the rolling plains of Montana, you might come across a man named Quincy O’Hai.

He’s not your average rancher. Yes, he tends to the land, the cattle, and all the hard-worn beauty of ranch life, but behind that rugged exterior is a man who’s walked a much quieter, deeper path.

A couple of decades ago, Quincy had his "awakening."

You won’t hear him shouting it from mountaintops or selling it as a 10-step program. You’d have to sit with him before he’d even mention it. But if you’re lucky and ask the right question, Quincy might share one of his most profound insights.

That’s precisely what happened to me.

I was looking for a way to "get off the train" of beliefs that keep us stuck. I wasn’t interested in everyday beliefs like "I’m not good at X" or "I need Y to be successful." I wanted something more profound. I was searching for meta-beliefs — those foundational beliefs that control everything underneath them.

I asked the question in a meditation group, and Quincy responded.

At first, I thought, “Here we go, another 'do this and all your problems will vanish' tip.” But what he shared was simple, practical, and honestly… kind of genius.

Here’s the method from Quincy O’Hai — and it’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something you live with daily.

The Painless Deconditioning Technique

(According to Quincy O’Hai)

1️⃣ Make a Gratitude List
Take out your journal, phone, or even a sticky note. Write down at least 10 things you feel grateful for right now. These can be big or small. A cup of warm coffee. A laugh you shared with a friend. The roof over your head. If you feel stuck, you can just start with the basics.

2️⃣ Keep It Close
Don’t let that list collect dust. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it daily — in your phone notes, on your bathroom mirror, or at your desk. The list isn’t meant to be made and forgotten. It’s meant to be lived with.

3️⃣ Review It Daily (And Update It Often)
Here’s the part that makes it painless. You don’t need to carve out hours to "practice" it. Just glance at the list in the morning. Then again at lunch. Maybe once more before bed. If you notice something new you’re grateful for, add it to the list. If an old one feels stale, swap it out. This way, your gratitude list becomes a living, breathing document.

4️⃣ Practice Gratitude for Challenges
This one might feel counterintuitive, but it’s crucial. When a challenge or setback arises, instead of reacting with frustration, see if you can find one thing about it to be grateful for. Maybe the challenge taught you something. Maybe it made you more patient. This shift, Quincy says, is one of the most powerful moves you can make.

5️⃣ Embrace Uncertainty with Enthusiasm
This is where it gets deep. Instead of seeing uncertainty as something to fear, Quincy invites us to lean into it enthusiastically. Why? Because uncertainty is where all possibilities live. It’s the fertile ground where gratitude grows the strongest.

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Why This Technique Works

Quincy didn’t just share the technique — he shared why it works.

He explained it like this:

“This exercise is training your brain, which is your interface with the Universe, about what to attract into your life.”

Read that again. Training your brain, which is your interface with the Universe.

When you make gratitude a daily habit, you’re reprogramming your mind. You’re telling it, “This is what I care about. This is what I want more of.” And like any good system, it responds.

You might notice more joy in simple moments. You might see new opportunities where there were none before. You might even notice that you start believing different things about yourself — not because you forced it, but because your mind learned to see the world through the lens of gratitude.

Why It’s Different

Here’s the part that surprised me most: it’s painless.

Most techniques for "deconditioning beliefs" sound like work. Shadow work. Self-inquiry. Inner-child healing. While all of these are powerful in their own right, Quincy’s method isn’t about digging or forcing. It’s about noticing. It’s about living with gratitude daily until the old beliefs fade away on their own.

There’s no fight. No struggle. Just the soft, persistent light of appreciation, gently unraveling the mental knots we tie ourselves in.

A Parting Note from Quincy

This technique is from Quincy’s new book, "New Awakening," which is still in progress. But this insight alone feels like it could fill a chapter. He’s proof that awakening doesn’t have to come from a monastery or mountaintop. Sometimes, it comes from a rancher in Montana who learned how to train his brain to see the world differently.

Start with this if you’ve been searching for a way to shift your beliefs — not just the small ones, but the big, cascading meta-beliefs.

• Make the list.

• Keep it with you.

• Look at it daily.

It works. It’s working on me right now.

If you give it a try, I’d love to hear from you. What shows up on your gratitude list today?

Please just hit reply and tell me.

Gratefully,
Harpreet

Introduction: Why ThanksFeeling Is Different

Thanksgiving is a time to pause and reflect.

But too often, we treat gratitude as a ritual or a fleeting moment in the rush of our day. We say “thank you” out of habit, but we rarely feel the power of gratitude in our hearts. What if we could go deeper, turning saying “thanks” into a practice that transforms our lives?

This Thanksgiving, let’s explore why “feeling” gratitude (ThanksFeeling) unlocks profound peace and joy—and how you can experience it yourself.

The Difference Between Saying Thanks and Feeling Thanks

Most people think gratitude is about words.

We’ve all been taught to say “thank you,” while that’s important, it barely scratches the surface of what gratitude can do for us. Feeling gratitude—ThanksFeeling—activates a state of abundance and grace in your body and mind. It reduces stress, enhances relationships, and creates a sense of peace that saying the words alone cannot achieve.

ThanksFeeling is the key to moving from politeness to transformation.

How ThanksFeeling Changes Your Body and Mind

Now, you’re probably thinking, “How does this work?”

Here’s the thing: gratitude isn’t just a mindset—it’s an embodied experience. Focusing on feeling gratitude triggers physical changes in your body, such as reducing cortisol (the stress hormone) and increasing oxytocin (the connection hormone). This is why it feels so grounding and healing.

Let’s discuss why this is important: Feeling gratitude helps you reconnect with your body and the world, bringing a sense of wholeness and peace.

The Three-Tier ThanksFeeling Exercise

Here’s how to experience ThanksFeeling this Thanksgiving.

1. Zoom In: Thank Yourself. Sit quietly for 5 minutes and thank yourself. Acknowledge your resilience, effort, and how your body supports you daily. Feel a sense of appreciation for all that you are.

2. Zoom In: Thank Your Body. Spend 10 minutes thanking each organ in your body. Focus on your heart for beating, your lungs for breathing, and your senses for connecting you to the world. This practice helps release physical tension and creates calm.

3. Zoom Out: Thank Your Circle. For the next 10 minutes, extend your gratitude outward. Thank your family, friends, neighbors, and even the planet for their role in your life. This broader perspective fosters connection and inner peace.

Practicing these steps will turn simple thanks into a deeply felt transformation.

Why ThanksFeeling Matters More Than Ever

In a world full of stress and disconnection, gratitude is a superpower.

ThanksFeeling doesn’t just improve your mood—it changes how you experience life. It shifts your focus from scarcity to abundance, from isolation to connection. You’ll notice how it transforms your day, relationships, health, and overall well-being when you practice it.

ThanksFeeling is a simple practice with profound ripple effects.

Conclusion: How to Get Started

You don’t have to wait to feel the benefits of ThanksFeeling.

Try the three-tier exercise today and experience how gratitude can transform your Thanksgiving. For additional guidance:

• Check out my free resource on gratitude meditation here.

• Explore my deeper, guided course on Gratitude Meditation here.

Feeling gratitude is one of the simplest yet most profound habits you can build—and it all starts with ThanksFeeling.

Introduction: Why Big Goals Are Both Inspiring and Dangerous

Big goals feel exhilarating.

They promise transformation, success, and a sense of achievement. But there’s a hidden downside: they often tether our self-worth to an outcome we may or may not reach.

Why should you care? Because constantly striving for an elusive milestone can leave you feeling unworthy, stressed, and disconnected from the joy of everyday life.

Here’s the question: How do you pursue meaningful goals without losing happiness in the process?

In this post, I’ll share three simple strategies that will help you shift focus, find joy in the journey, and build resilience along the way.

Why We Fall Into the "Happiness Trap"

Think back to the last big goal you set for yourself.

Was it running a marathon, landing a promotion, or launching a new project? Now think about what drove you. Was it the excitement of the challenge—or the fear of falling short?

Most of us are taught to measure success by results: the raise, the medal, the applause. This belief system ties happiness to outcomes rather than the process. As a result, every step we take toward our goal feels incomplete until we “win.” And if we don’t? The failure hits harder than it should.

Let me paint a picture. Imagine climbing a mountain, but every time you stop to rest, someone tells you, “You haven’t reached the summit yet, so it doesn’t count.” That’s the trap many of us fall into when we pursue big goals—an endless loop of “not enough.”

The Problem Isn’t the Goal, It’s the Attachment to It

Now, you’re probably thinking:
“But isn’t ambition a good thing? Don’t big goals inspire us to achieve greatness?”

Here’s the thing: ambition itself isn’t the issue. The problem arises when we tie our self-worth to achieving the goal. This attachment creates stress, self-doubt, and even burnout because every setback feels personal, like a reflection of our worth.

Let’s talk about why this matters. When you detach your identity from the result, you gain freedom to enjoy the process. The pressure lifts, and suddenly, you’re climbing the mountain for the experience—not just the view from the top.

So, how do you actually make this mindset shift? Here’s how.

3 Simple Strategies to Crush Big Goals Without Crushing Your Happiness

1. Practice Introspection Before Setting Goals
   Before committing to a goal, ask yourself:

   • Am I pursuing this because it excites me, or because it’s what society expects?

   • Will working toward this goal bring joy, or just stress?

   By sitting in silence and reflecting, you can uncover whether a goal aligns with your values—or if it’s a “me too” goal driven by external validation.

2. Track Progress, Not Perfection
   Use a simple tool like the Seinfeld Method (or a spreadsheet) to track daily actions toward your goal. Mark an “X” every day you take a step, no matter how small. Progress isn’t about getting it perfect—it’s about consistency. Remember: missing a day doesn’t mean failure. Focus on getting more days right than wrong.

3. Reconnect With Your “Why”
   Write down a sentence or two about why this goal matters to you. Revisit this note whenever you feel stuck or overwhelmed. A strong “why” will ground you in intrinsic motivation, making the process feel meaningful regardless of the outcome.

Why This Mindset Shift Changed Everything for Me

I’ve lived through the joy and stress of pursuing big goals. Hiking to Everest Base Camp was one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences of my life. Some days, I climbed higher; other days, I descended to acclimate. The summit wasn’t always in view, but I kept going because I focused on the path, not just the destination.

This perspective changed the way I approach every goal. Instead of tying my happiness to a single result, I now find fulfillment in each step, no matter how small. And the irony? I achieve more—and feel better doing it.

Conclusion: Key Takeaways

You don’t have to sacrifice your happiness to achieve big goals. With the right mindset, you can climb your metaphorical mountain joyfully, one step at a time. Let’s recap:

• Reflect on your motivations: Joy vs. societal pressure.

• Track consistency over perfection: Progress is about small, regular steps.

• Reconnect with your “why”: Motivation grounded in meaning is sustainable.

Big goals don’t have to crush your happiness. Start with these strategies and reclaim the joy in your journey. 🌟

What’s your next big goal? Let me know how these strategies help you approach it differently!

I have been practicing Meditation for 30 years.

I didn't realize it then, but it started as a way to feel happy, and the practice intensified after a death in my immediate family.

Along the way, I have done all sorts of things to try to get better at meditation as a means to be content and peaceful:

• Books: I have likely read most books on meditation practices. I especially like the ones by Rupert Spira. He focuses on Non-duality or the Advaita school of meditation.

• Podcast/YouTube: I love the talks from Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira's teacher. I also love the sessions from Avdhoot Shivanand—he lays out straightforward frameworks and messages that are easy to incorporate into one's life.

• Etc.

And all of these things helped me a ton.

But if I had to start all over again (as a beginner), this is the simple framework I wish I had for learning how to meditate & feel happy:

Step 1: Morning ritual for gratitude

Starting the day with gratitude wires you positive and happy for the rest of the day. You typically don't get derailed off the train of positivity. No matter what the day throws at you, you can take it very well.

Step 2: Evening ritual for gratitude

Being thankful as you drift off to sleep also takes away all the stress from the day. I have noticed that sleeping with this ritual makes the next day smoother.

Step 3: Random reminders for gratitude during the day

I have a few phone reminders randomly. As soon as they go off, I take a minute to sink into gratitude.

The key is not to pick the same thing to be grateful for. Find what you are thankful for in that moment. If you go to the same thing, the mind stops feeling gratitude after a few sessions.

I would lean in so hard on gratitude because it is super easy to get you to feel good, and most people meditate because they want to feel good.

It had been a long weekend with RD, and our conversation turned to embracing life and specifically to the question:

What does it mean to live a rich life?

The Problem: The perception of lack in our lives

Lack is a learned behavior

HS: I remember walking into business school relatively unworried about money. My focus was on building technology for social good and social entrepreneurship.

RD: And?

HS: When I walked out, I was focused on money. Despite all my resistance to being money-minded, business school had subconsciously rewired me. Social entrepreneurship was replaced by Private Equity, something that is diametrically opposite to social entrepreneurship.

In many ways, I walked into a business school as a rich man and walked out poor, and this wasn’t due to the fees I had paid for the school.

RD: Right. Talking about “learned behavior”—the media doesn’t help. Everywhere we turn, advertisements bombard us about the ”lack” in our lives. This creates a lack in our mind

and completely mirrors your experience with your MBA.

HS: Everywhere we turn, the environment constantly trains us to spot what’s missing in our lives.

Lack shows up when comparing yourself to others

HS: “Living up to your neighbors” is another way lack creeps up.

RD: Have you heard the concept of relative poverty?

HS: Go on

RD: I was reading about Rajat Gupta, the CEO of McKinsey, who was convicted of a felony because he passed insider information to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund manager.

HS: Rajat must’ve been incredibly wealthy, so why did he do it?

RD: Yes, he was extremely wealthy. His net worth was $100M.

HS: $100M! Who knew there was that kind of money in consulting?

RD: Despite his $100M net worth, Rajat felt relatively poor because he hung around with billionaires like Raj Rajaratnam. He was a small fish in a pond with much bigger fish than him.

HS: Whew. A poor man at $100M!

RD: The theory is that he did feel poor! It drove him down a slippery slope, and he paid for it with imprisonment.

He is the perfect example of a rich man who lived a poor life.

In contrast to Rajat, whenever I looked at Spock, I thought he lived a prosperous life.

HS: Isn’t it? Let’s see how he extracted every ounce of juice from life.

RD: Let’s do that.

The solution to perceived lack: Recognizing the incredible richness in our lives

HS: After years of being wrongly wired by my MBA, I have come to the realization that wealth does not have a whole lot to do with money. Simple things like indulging and appreciating our senses, a good night's rest, and good health define abundance.

Lesson # 1: Indulging the senses

HS: Most meditative practices emphasize the practitioner withdrawing from one’s senses because senses stimulate the mind. If you have ever been in a Vipassana retreat, they take it to the extreme—you are on a minimal diet, and you aren’t supposed to look at other people because the act of looking opens a new stream of thoughts in your consciousness.

You are parsimonious in every interaction in the retreat as a way to cultivate a balanced life.

This notion then expands into your daily lives, where the prescription is that moderation is the key.

RD: I have been reading about Stoicism lately, and the premise is similar.

HS: Indeed, now overindulgence isn’t good, but not leaning into your senses isn’t great either. I remember seeing Spock wholly lean into his senses.

RD: How so?

A thought exercise to appreciate our visual experience

HS: Let’s start with the sense of vision. Spock’s days would be filled sitting in our front yard, watching the world go by. I had to set up a glass fence outside our main door so that he could sit there and see the world because you could not keep him restricted in the house. If there wasn’t enough action in the front yard, he would come inside, cross the entire house, head to the backyard, and spend the day looking at various birds and squirrels. This back-and-forth dance continued throughout the whole day.

Evenings were meant for the front yard because there were a lot of people walking by. He would insist that he sit next to the curb so that he could interact with people—the glass fence, which was 15 feet away from the curb, put an unbearable distance between him and the world.

His eyes locked on Hummingbirds, following their magical flight paths through our yard. He could spend hours looking at them. Now that he has taught me to pay attention to these birds, I often enjoy their mesmerizing flight paths through our backyard.

RD: That sounds immensely satisfying, and I have never done that.

I realize I don’t do enough sitting and watching the world go by. I’m either on the phone, the laptop, or the television, or I'm focused on getting some work done.

HS: We take our vision and the world's wonders for granted.

RD: True. I have read about several folks who have near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and come back to see the world in a new way. They are in awe of everything the human experience has to offer.

How do you capture the sense of amazement in our daily lives?

HS: I want you to do this thought exercise with me. I invented this exercise as I was trying to decode why Spock found the ordinary so extraordinary.

RD: Alright.

HS: Imagine that the world was designed by businesses on the internet (like Google or Facebook). Specifically, the thing to remember is that what the internet delivers are advertisements hugging close to whatever you want to experience. Two-thirds of browser windows show content, while the rest is interspersed with random ads.

RD: Alright, I get the picture.

HS: Look at the sky outside. What would the same sky look like if one-third of it showed you ads?

Or imagine that for the privilege of experiencing the same sky, you had to look at advertisements, just as when you experience television. Thus, every few minutes or so, you are interrupted by ads.

Or imagine that there is a paywall between you and the sky. You get one-third of the sky free but have to pony up the money to two-thirds of the sky and then upgrade to the premium tier to get to the entire sky.

RD: This would be such a horrible way to live life.

HS: Exactly. Here, we are surrounded by such immense riches—a night sky full of stars, beautiful sunsets, trees, and animals. Every bit is free, and we have lost the sense of wonder for this extraordinary experience around us.

Do this thought exercise whenever you see the sky, the tree, or whatever, and you realize how lucky we are to have this experience of the world that we take for granted.

HS: Next time you look at the sky, see the vast emptiness between you and the stars. Or visualize that photon that has traveled from space a billion light years away to hit and merge with your eye.

You will soon discover an appreciation of what’s available around you.

A thought exercise to appreciate our sense of smell

HS: Let’s try this with the sense of smell.

HS: We all know about dogs' acute sense of smell. How they experience the world with their smell. Spock wasn’t any different. He would be out smelling flowers, holes, and many other things.

HS: I want you to remember the loss of smell that came with COVID. I didn’t appreciate my sense of smell until I ran into COVID-19 and couldn’t smell for the next few weeks.

RD: Right, I presume that thought experience is to go back and see how colorless life became when you lost the sense of smell.

HS: Absolutely! Once you go back to that place, bring perfume, close your eyes, and experience your sense of smell—how wonderful it is!

RD: Perhaps add the mental exercise we did in the previous exercise. Imagine you only get to smell something for a minute before an “Upgrade” button shows up.

HS: Right. You can invent similar games to appreciate the other senses.

Lesson 2: Moving to change your emotion

HS: Years ago, I participated in a workshop with Tony Robbins. Tony is a famous self-help guru who has curated a plethora of ideas related to self-help.

RD: I’ve read a book or two from him. How was the workshop?

HS: It had an insane energy. He had 10,000 people in a stadium and kept them on their feet for around 12-14 hours daily for three days.

Imagine a rock concert and imagine that energy going for three days.

RD: Did you mean you were on your feet for three days?

HS: Indeed. The music kept you on your feet. He would get you moving, dancing, and jumping in place every few minutes.

RD: Okay—I presume this has to do with keeping you moving and physically healthy.

HS: Yes, and more so mentally. He says…

Emotion is created by motion.

Whatever you’re feeling right now relates to how you use your body.

- Tony Robbins

Your body has millions of nerve endings called proprioceptors, which detect how your body is positioned in space and send the signal back to your brain. The signal passes the limbic system as it passes through the brain. This system controls your emotions and behavior.

RD: In short, it is not just that your posture changes when you feel down, but you could change your posture to “deflated shoulders” to feel down.

Did I get that right?

HS: Absolutely!

So Tony says the more you move, the better you feel. Better yet, if you spend time jumping and dancing, you will be ecstatic.

That was precisely my experience in the workshop. After three days of non-stop dancing, I felt great.

RD: How does that tie back to what you learned from Spock?

HS: I noticed that dogs have an instinct to move continuously. They are walking and running around all the time.

The constant back-and-forth between the front and the backyard, and you had this incredibly happy dog most of the time.

I saw him sad largely when he wasn’t able to move as he used to. I often wondered how much of the sadness came about through the lack of movement rather than “feeling sad.”

RD: That makes sense, and it lines up with all the research that indicates that working out, moving, and going to the gym are the things that make you feel good.

You tell me that we instinctively know this but have ignored it while pursuing modern life.

HS: Right

At this point, we decide that “we should walk the walk,” and the next conversation should happen while we go for a walk.

Lesson 3: Leaning into rest

Ironically, as we head out the door, the conversation turns towards the importance of rest. If moving is the Shakti (energy), the rest is Shiva, which is in the Shiva-Shakti (yin-yang) balance of life.

RD: One thing that has amazed me in the US (and not in a good way) is the deification of working beyond reasonable hours.

HS: This has trapped me, especially as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

RD: You bet. I have seen you do that—life in Fresno is much more balanced.

RD: I remember seeing a presidential debate in which the candidate mentioned a single mom working three jobs to support her family. He made her a hero. I remember thinking this was wrong—when is she living life?

HS: I work with many Europeans, and they go on multiple vacations in a year while we slog it out. It always bothers me that we Americans slog it out and don’t get to enjoy the world despite our wealth.

RD: I was thinking not so much on the macro level but about day-to-day things. We talked about dynamism, movement, and going for walks. I noticed that we would do so with Spock and come back home, and he would immediately doze off. He would take a micro nap and completely recover for the next adventure.

HS: Yes, there is absolutely something to learn from this behavior. It isn’t practical to take the number of naps he took during a day, but prioritizing rest is something we could do.

RD: Do you? I know you are the kind of person who would be off to do the next thing.

HS: I did so after his passing. I took a lesson from him: “I just be and not do do do.” It’s funny how quickly you doze off as “just be.” I did come to the conclusion that this nonstop work culture leads to missing the human experience, and I no longer want to miss the human experience.

RD: Good for you.

Lesson 4: Eating good food

HS: While we are at the “Living the rich” life topic, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up eating good food.

RD: You're bringing up good food! Your mantra was “food is a chore,” and you were stingy in indulging your sense of taste.

HS: Yes, I was, but we are talking about Spock.

RD: And Spock loved his food. I have never seen a dog that pampered. He was eating a variety I hadn’t seen a dog eat before.

HS: Haha…my family loved to spoil him. He really loved good food—ghee, (dog) ice cream, and a variety of Indian foods. You name it.

RD: Don’t tell me you adopted this trait from him.

HS: Well, somewhat. I decided that being Vipassana-like (not indulging in food) misses a crucial piece of the human experience. I indulge more than occasionally.

RD: WOW! I never expected to hear this from you.

HS: Stranger things have happened in the world.

Summary: Abundance is getting what you need when you need it

RD: I came across this quote: “Abundance is getting what you need when you need it,” when you think about it, you don’t need much more than enjoying your senses, moving, and resting.

HS: Yep, and all this is always available to us. There is no real reason to chase down money.

RD: And Spock, indeed, lived a rich life.

HS: Indeed!

Like most beginners, I made a lot of mistakes when I first started practicing meditation.

But this was the biggest one, by far:

Trying to stop my thoughts and become thoughtless

Here's what happened:

I don’t where and when but I had picked the notion that “meditation = stopping your thoughts.” I see this fairly common fallacy and a common question from new comers who are trying meditation. Worse yet, even some of the popular apps online take you down this path.

I would try to stop my thoughts as I sat through my meditation sessions.

This fallacy lead to extremely frustrating sessions.

I would walk out unhappy because there wasn’t a moment of peace in the meditation session.

It felt that my mind was fighting itself—the mind tells the mind to stop thinking and the mind fights back the mind—fun, fun and fun :-).

But, it's also worth acknowledging that making this mistake taught me a ton.

Now if you have done a meditation practice where you have tried to stop your mind from thinking, you know it doesn’t work. It’s like asking you to NOT to think about pink elephants and all you can think about are pink elephants.

This is where I discovered that there are easier and better ways to meditate. In fact, you can use your mind and emotions to lead you into deeper meditation. Over the years, I learned that gratitude is one of the best ways to learn meditation—it is in fact all you need if you are meditating for some peace, quiet and beating stress.

PS: I believe in this particular version of meditation so much that I ended up creating a short course work for it as means to spread it. Do check it out.

I have been interested in Meditation as a means to get to Enlightenment for about 30+ years now. I owe a lot of the progress I've made to these people and the practices that they offered:

The “Kundalini” path using Kriya Yoga with Yogiraj Gurunath

I came across An Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yoganand while randomly walking the library in University of Cincinnati. Little did I know that would alter the course of my life. (Steve Jobs asked this book to be handed out at his funeral.)

Yogiraj gives the “no mind” or “samadhi” experience in his meditation sessions. The transmission of this experience shows the eventual destination in meditation.

There wasn’t any turning back for me once I experienced “no mind.” Some men run after wealth, others after women and I was all about “no mind.”

I practiced Kriya Yoga for seven years.

You can find Gurunath here and on YouTube.

The “Tantra (emotional)” path using Sri Vidya with Avadhoot Shivanand “Babaji”

In the 90s, I read a book called Living with the Himalayan Masters by Swami Rama where he talked about Sri Vidya, Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism as a way to get to enlightenment.

However, I couldn’t find any Gurus teaching it because Sri Vidya has been kept secret through ages.

Years later, I came across Babaji and fell in love with Sri Vidya and practiced it for about 10-12 years (and still do). Sri Vidya is a mix of kundalini yoga, energy work (think advanced Reiki master work), manifestation work and more. The energy has to be experienced—it is impossible to describe.

Babaji rewired me completely. I went from a ”mostly unhappy” to a “mostly happy” person.

“No mind” or “Turiya” became accessible though I needed to put in an hour to get there. One to two or even three hour meditation sessions became the norm for me in this practice.

You can find more about Avadhoot Baba Shivananad “Babaji” here or on YouTube.

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The ”intellectual path” with Advaita Philosophy with Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille and Ramana Maharishi

My years in the earlier practices took me deep into meditation but no closer to enlightenment which became frustrating. I came across a chance video on YouTube from Rupert Spira that said “enlightenment isn’t esoteric, in fact it is our default state and it is so common that we overlook it.”

This took me down the rabbit hole of “Advaita,“ “non-dual” or the “intellectual” path. I came across wonderful lessons from Rupert, his teacher Francis Lucille and spent hours on YouTube internalizing them.

Advaita or Non-duality is an age old practice but was advocated in modern times by the famous Indian sage “Ramana Maharishi.”

It starts from asking yourself the question “Who am I?” or ”What am I?.” The question gets you to “no mind” instantly. The practice established me in a place where “no mind” is always and instantly accessible to me.

You can find each of the teachers at … and on YouTube.

• Rupert Spira

• Francis Lucille

• Ramana Maharishi

Osho—The master of all paths

There is no spiritual philosophy that Osho has not talked about. He was and has been my go to resource if I want a quick intro and guide to a particular philosophy.

My regret is that I never went to his commune though I lived in Pune.

I am afraid I just cannot describe Osho in a pithy paragraph. You will have to discover him yourself.

The path of devotion with Guru Nanak

He founded the Sikh religion in the 1400s which was very modern for its time and continues to hold its own space today. (equality of men and women, no caste system and an emphasis on karma or work).

He prescribed a path of devotion (which unfortunately wasn’t my thing). However, his lessons is what I have grown up with and continue to follow. Osho’s writing on Guru Nanak’s prayer “Ek Omkar Satnam” (there is one God and its name is truth) is a fantastic read.

These people have taught me so much—and, just like they did with me, I hope to pass along my own learnings to the next person.

Do adventures have to be grand?

About a year ago, I embarked on a project to write a book. The book is about the lessons I learned from my dog, Spock. It is about how the lives of animals offer profound lessons that mirror ones from philosophy and ones you arrive at in meditation. However, I’ve been stuck because I couldn’t find the right voice. A chance conversation with another author helped me unlock it. He told me to write it as a conversation between friends. This resonated because the idea for the book started with a similar discussion with a friend (“RD”).

I am putting a chapter out here to see if the tone of voice works.

HS: Do you like adventures?

RD: Who doesn’t? We grow on stories that recount these adventures. You are quite an adventurer yourself.

HS: I think of myself as a tiny adventurer - it's a part of who I am.

RD: Absolutely. Your trip to the Amazon jungle to drink ayahuasca with the Shamans has made for many entertaining post-dinner conversations.

HS: Here we go again. Might I add, I did the Ayahuasca thing before it became fashionable to go on one!

RD: Maybe :-). That said, flying down to Peru after reading an article in National Geographic that called the visions emanating from it as something people experience when they die takes some fortitude and definitely qualifies you as an adventurer.

HS: Thanks. The five nights of drinking Ayahuasca are the most intense experiences of my life.

RD: Or the other time you convinced a bunch of friends over a dinner party to sign up to hike to Everest Base Camp. I missed that trip, but it did sound “epic.”

HS: Yes, it was.

RD: Before we go down the rabbit hole of recounting adventures, why the question about adventures?

HS: I have often wondered why we like adventures. Is it getting the bonafide credentials to brag or something else?

RD: The element of risk and the corresponding adrenaline rush that makes you feel alive is critical.

HS: Agreed. The adrenaline rush is a crucial component.

RD: Does that mean that to feel alive, we must always seek out these big adventures?

HS: Great question. “Why do these adventures have to be grand?”

I have managed to string “just” a handful of these adventures in the last dozen years, even after identifying myself as an “adventurer.”

Does our life have to be punctuated by occasional but planned events where we stop and put ourselves in some danger to feel alive? Or is there a better way to feel alive all the time?

RD: Every story is framed as a grand adventure. Why can’t an adventure be small? Can we have adventures in our daily lives?

HS: Let me take you on a short journey and see if we can answer that question.

Lazy Augusta — fertile ground for adventures

The year was 2012.

My parents had moved to Augusta, Georgia, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Moving to a new country in your late sixties is also a “severe” case of adventure. This was the second time they had moved a nation; the first time, they were in their forties, from Mumbai, India, to Malaysia. So maybe they are adventurers, too, but I digress.

In Augusta, they moved to a beautiful home in a community with a golf course. As with other homes in this community, and as is the case in the US South, this was a gargantuan southern home. Massive 10-foot tall windows on either side of the gorgeous door, painted pitch black, contrasting against the beautiful white of the house. As your eyes got past this beautiful facade, you noticed through the window on the right that there were stairs leading to another floor on the top. There were bay windows on this floor looking into the front yard. A bay window and a setting that you invited to spend the afternoon reading and watching the world go by. As your eyes moved from the windows towards the kitchen on the right on the lower floor, you noticed a beautiful outhouse with a small vegetable garden separating the kitchen and outhouse. The outhouse was something out of a French village, and I imagined artists sitting on the upper floor capturing the moods of this picturesque setting against the thunder and lightning that happens almost every day.

The backyard stretched a hundred meters, with a single tree in the middle. It was not yet majestic but promised to be one in the years to follow. The backyard wasn’t fenced; a number of trees lined it, and it felt that they were intentionally planted to prevent you from discovering a creek that lazily made its way around the community.

Augusta is on a migratory path from Florida to up north with a fantastic variety of birds and the Cardinal—the king of them all, paying a daily visit to our backyard.

If this idyllic world got too dull, you could hop in the car for a ten-minute drive to walk by the Savannah River.

Several animals made their way through the backyard, including hares and deer.

Spock was two and was busy discovering the new world where I had taken him for a few months. He was discovering this world with the indefatigable energy of a puppy.

Adversaries show up in our backyard

I woke up groggy at about 3 a.m. to incessant barking. The barking echoed through the house, amplifying an already high-pitched bark that usually stemmed when Spock sensed danger.

"Wait, wut. Why are you barking?" I asked, rubbing my eyes and squinting in the dark, only to find Spock had run down the stairs from the upper floor. So now I had to follow him down to see what he had seen and shut him up so I could go back to sleep.

I found him squarely pointed at something in the backyard. I saw a family of three deers lazily munching something from our garden in the darkness.

If you knew Spock, you knew it would be a herculean effort to remove his laser focus from what had caught his attention.

His adrenaline pumping, he was not going to let them go unless we let him out (we didn't) to face this adversary—a veritable David taking on a Goliath that was 5-8 times bigger than he was.

Once he had driven them away with his barking, he was happy. He gave me a proud look, the one he reserved for "I saved you from the danger of the beast called the postman," and followed me upstairs. However, he kept his vigil through that night and all subsequent nights we stayed in Augusta.

I hadn't realized that Spock could now discern the smell of deer. Over the next few days, I realized that he could also pick out the smell of hares and a variety of other animals.

He had now ranked them in the order of perceived danger and excitement that each animal brought with them and tuned his behavior according to the threat assessment.

Mini-adventures in chasing down adversaries

Life became a series of mini-adventures involving cat and mouse (dog and deer, perhaps) games with put-your-favorite-Georgia-animal-here and Spock.

HS: You mentioned that what makes adventures exciting is the rapid beating of the heart, which is caused by adrenaline pumping through one's arteries.

RD: Right!

HS: Well, every night, we had Spock laser-focused, attention locked outside the house, waiting for the family of deers or hares or whatever animal he could now smell.

His heartbeat was usually racing. Excitement level jumped up a few notches if he heard a rustle.

Every walk was a new mini-adventure, him straining at the leash, eagerly pulling me across the road towards the creek because he had smelt a deer.

He was out in a flash if he smelt a deer and was off-leash. Streaking past the roads, running after the deer who were too fast for him. If they lost him, he would pick up the scent of their trail and follow them. This scene was repeated so often that I was soon known in this neighborhood as the Indian-guy-running-after-his-cute-puppy.

My heart used to be racing at every one of these chases because I didn't know if I could keep up with him or lose Spock.

Or face a problem far worse.

Spock also figured out that getting into the Savannah River usually brought out a snake to check out what animal was in the water and if the animal could be a meal.

This thought of a snake doing a reverse check-in on Spock got my adrenaline going.

The Mexican standoff

I must admit, I enjoyed these chases. So, I used to play a little game of "Russian roulette" by occasionally leaving him off-leash to see what he did next.

The unpredictability made me feel alive.

One evening, we were lounging on the swing in our backyard.

It was a languid, laid-back, warm, humid, typical southern evening. The sun was setting to the echoes of Cicadas all around us. It was the evening when time stood still, and it felt like nothing interesting would happen.

Then...we heard a rustle.

In walked a deer

It somehow had missed seeing us.

Then they both saw each other.

Time stood still.

For that micro-second, both looked at each other and sized each other. It felt like a Mexican standoff was in the air. Nobody was moving, as both sides evaluated who would make the next move.

I can imagine a complex algorithm going through Spock's head as he evaluated the two choices in front of him in that microsecond.

Choice status quo: Let it be. Let the deer go.

Choice mini-adventure: Chase the deer down. (and to hell with all the "Spock! No's! " from Harry)

The choice of status quo would lead him down the regular boring track in life. There would be no excitement, entertainment, or opportunities to recount grand stories at the end of the evening.

He had no idea where the choice of mini-adventure would lead him to. He might be running through the mud and come out completely dirty to a heavy scolding by Harry. He might catch the deer and stand triumphantly over the deer, getting it to submit for some game of play or he might end up in a joust with the magnificent creature.

Any guesses on to what he chose?

Life as a series of mini-adventures

HS: We have many micro "Mexican standoff" moments throughout the day. We are too busy browsing Instagram or watching the next WhatsApp forward to notice any of them.

If we do happen to be out on walks and have the opportunity to trod a path less taken, we don't.

We take the predictable turn while listening to some music or podcast.

We have lost the ability to spot any opportunities for these mini-adventures.

The joy of shared mini-adventures

RD: A key component of your story is that these aren't mini-adventures of a lonely David out fighting a mini-Goliath.

HS: What do you mean?

RD: What made these mini-adventures special is that you both did these together. There was a sense of a shared experience. A thrill that was shared by both of you.

RD: I imagine you both walking back tired after a long chase through the creek. Thoroughly tired, thoroughly spent but completely satisfied.

HS: Absolutely, the walk back home was joyous. I would pretend to scold Spock, and he would look back at me, utterly satisfied, and then with a look that said, "Don't tell me that you didn't enjoy that. C'mon, really!" he would run off after the hare he just spotted!

RD: The truth is that you did enjoy these shared adventures. What fun!

# Mini-adventures abound everywhere

RD: So where do we end up with the question, "Do adventures have to be grand?"

HS: Yep, we have settled it definitively that they don't need to be grand. You can find plenty of these mini-adventures around.

RD: Right. Step back and see what you could have done differently today. Could you have pulled out a box of paints and sat down to make a painting, enjoying the thrill of putting color on paper, not knowing if there was something fantastic on the other end?

Could you have gone out on a walk in a lesser-known neighborhood?

Or a hike that is rather edgy.

When was the last time you made a prank call to someone?

(I don't recommend it, but hey that will get the heart racing)

(originally published on April 20th, 2024 on harpreet.io)

Go with the flow—Life lessons from my dog. About a year ago, I embarked on a project to write a book. The book is about the lessons I learned from my dog, Spock. It is about how the lives of animals offer profound lessons that mirror ones from philosophy and ones you arrive at in meditation. However, I’ve been stuck because I couldn’t find the right voice. A chance conversation with another author helped me unlock it. He told me to write it as a conversation between friends. This resonated because the idea for the book started with a similar discussion with a friend (“RD”).

I am putting a chapter out here to see if the tone of voice works.

Introduction

Change is the only constant in life. We've all heard it.
Embrace change. We've all heard it.
Tackle hard things. We've all heard it.

However, every philosophy seems to make life harder.

Is there an underlying philosophy to navigating life?

Something that makes life seem effortless and joyful?

My philosophy in life was to take really hard things and go at them. Sure, life seemed a struggle, but "Isn't the obstacle the path?" I recently talked to a friend who espoused the same belief while expressing how hard things were—oh, the irony!

When I visited a Zen temple in Kyoto, I realized there was another way.

Picking the conversation back up with my friend RD.

HS: I have also marveled at Spock's innate ability to handle change and navigate life. He made it look so effortless.

RD: How so? When I think of dogs or animals, I don't think they have a choice, or do they? Change is forced on them through external agents. They are just surviving life—aren't they?

HS: Not quite. There is this beautiful innate ability to navigate life that humans have lost sight of because we make life complicated.

Let me illustrate with a zen metaphor.

I learned of this metaphor in Kyoto, and it changed how I thought about living life. When I contemplated it, I realized that Spock exemplified living this way.

There are many temple complexes in Kyoto, and one of my favorites is the Daitokuji temple complex. The Daitokuji complex has a series of temples and rock gardens. Nestled within the serene confines of the Daitokuji temple complex lies Daisen-in, a small temple. The karesansui, or dry landscape rock garden, is an absolute masterpiece of Japanese Zen garden design from the early 16th century.

It's a place where Zen monks have contemplated the profound mysteries of existence.

When I first heard the metaphor of this particular garden, I thought, "Well, they didn't have anything better to do than labeling stones with some meaning." But the labels and metaphors didn't leave me, and luckily, I was forced to internalize them.

RD: Alright, let's hear it. As you speak of this deep metaphor, how about a cup of chai?

HS: Sounds good.

About 10 minutes later...

HS: Let's lay out the setting, which symbolizes the stages in a human life. I called it the setting for the game of life.

Setting for the game of life

Visualize a garden made of rocks and laid out in a rectangle from left to right. The garden's beauty is that it is all rock, and the monks have given each rock a symbolic representation. Thus, the river, the waterfall, and the animals are all rocks.

At the extreme left is a mound with some rocks in front of it—picture the mound as a mountain from which a beautiful waterfall falls on those rocks. The waterfall turns into a river and moves to the end of the garden.

This left-to-right movement of the river signifies a human life moving from the source until it meets its ultimate destination.

The Early Struggles and Foundations

The journey begins with a group of seemingly haphazard but deeply symbolic rocks. These formations represent the early struggles and challenges we face in life. Just as these rocks withstand the elements, we, too, learn to weather life's trials. This stage is about building a solid foundation and developing resilience and character. It's a reminder that the difficulties we encounter are not mere obstacles but stepping stones to a more profound understanding of life.

The Window of Transition

As you move through the garden, a window marks a distinct transition, symbolizing the passage from the formative years into the next phase of life. This literal and metaphorical window offers a new perspective and a different light. It draws a line between youth and maturity, between learning from the world and understanding it.

The River of Life

The river, depicted by raked gravel, is central to the garden's narrative. This river is the flow of life, moving inexorably from birth towards death, its ultimate goal being enlightenment. The river's course reminds us of life's transient nature, its constant motion, and the inevitability of change. It's a call to embrace the journey, with all its twists and turns, as the path to wisdom.

Buddha at the end of the garden
The Buddha on the extreme right in the garden signifies the end of life or enlightenment.

Playing the game of life

The monks have mentally marked three key rocks. Two are animals—a turtle and a cow—and one is a boat. The animal species don't signify a whole lot; they just remind you of a turtle and a cow (if you really look hard—playful monks at play here).

The approach that these entities take defines the approach that one can take in life.

The Turtle: A life of struggle

Amidst this flowing river, a formation resembling a turtle appears to swim upstream, symbolizing the human tendency to struggle against life's natural flow.

The turtle's upstream battle poignantly reminds us of our often futile efforts to resist change, to fight against the currents of life instead of embracing them. This struggle, while natural, often leads to unnecessary hardship and suffering.

HS: I was a turtle before I came across this metaphor. I used to proudly think that I like to do "really hard things", and would go out of my way to court really hard things. Each day, tackling these giant goals was a challenge.

RD: Well, isn't doing hard things good? How is one supposed to grow if one doesn't take on hard challenges?

HS: That's a fair point and one that we constantly see in the Western consciousness, which is why I think most of the Western world are turtles. The key lesson here is not recognizing whether you are beating your head against a wall doing something that isn't fun or doing something that you truly love.

For example, I hate running, but nevertheless, I signed up for a marathon—it was absolute misery, but I did it because "hey, I liked to do hard things."

The point is that you should avoid picking something that feels like a struggle and that you don't quite enjoy. You should also avoid choosing something that doesn't represent your true nature.

RD: Sounds about right. There is a lot of wisdom in it.

The Cow: Living in the Past

HS: Opposite the turtle, a cow-shaped formation looks towards the garden's beginning. This represents the human inclination to gaze back at the past, sometimes with nostalgia, other times with regret.

The cow's backward glance is a metaphor for our own preoccupation with what has been. Dwelling on the past signifies a natural human tendency, but one that can keep us from fully experiencing the present and moving forward.

While the turtle experiences misery by choosing things that don't represent us, the cow signifies another kind of misery: one in which we never fully live the present and waste it for the past.

The Boat: Acceptance of the flow of life

Finally, the most profound lesson of Daisen-in's garden is embodied in the boat-shaped rock. The boat goes with the flow of life. It is aware of the current and the wind; it accepts these elements that it cannot control while skillfully and effortlessly harnessing them and moving downstream. Unlike the struggling turtle or the backward-looking cow, the boat moves with the current. It represents a life lived in harmony with the way of things, a life that understands the wisdom of adaptation and acceptance.

This boat is not just a passive vessel; it requires a navigator. It's a call to take charge of our journey, to steer mindfully through life's waters, making conscious choices while accepting the uncontrollable forces around us. It's a balance of effort and surrender, doing and being, shaping our destiny while accepting life's unfolding mystery.

Spock's living: The boat effortlessly sailing through life

HS: As I think about this allegory, it is clear that Spock embodied the boat.

RD: Now that I think of it, it reminds me of the serenity prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference

HS: Indeed.

RD: So tell me, how did this boat metaphor manifest in Spock's life?

HS: It is hard to find significant instances, but if you saw him living life day-to-day, you would instantly recognize it.

HS: Let me think more about moving with the current of life by "acceptance."

Acceptance

(After a few moments...)

HS: Too often, people say dogs will do anything to avoid pain. It is valid to an extent, but there is more to it.

Throughout his life, Spock exemplified a remarkable level of resilience, especially in the face of severe pain, especially during his later years.

He had a couple of knee surgeries; the doctor botched the first one, and thus, he had to go through another one to fix the first one, and both were very painful. Spock's spirit remained unbroken. Post-surgery, he insisted on walking out to the bathroom by himself, hobbling with dignity rather than showing any sign of weakness, and our doctor was amazed by this behavior (and other similar ones) and thought of him as a reasonably atypical dog.

Months after the first surgery, Spock lived each day with as much zest as he always had, even in visible discomfort. He continued to chase squirrels in the playground, running with a mix of eagerness and pain. He had calibrated what he was capable of, and his squirrel-chasing jumps had mentally worked in the limitations.

He found a way to accept the pain and find happiness in his everyday activities despite the pain. Something that a lot of humans struggle with.

Avoidance

HS: However, there was a Rubicon line beyond which he wouldn't go. A series of instances that are seared in my brain are his decisions around avoiding tough emotional challenges.

RD: What do you mean?

HS: If you remember, he was very close to my mother-in-law. For about ten years, he would wait for her to come back from her dialysis routine and sit with her as she recovered from the intense procedure. Her routine was thrice a week, and he did that thrice a week. In addition, he spent a lot of other time with her in the room.

Once she passed away (in a hospital and not at home), he refused to enter her bedroom. It always amazed me to see how he concluded that he was never going to see her again after seeing the 911 medics take my mother-in-law to the hospital.

After that day, he never entered that room again by himself. It took him months before he would enter the room again, and only if my wife or I were in it. He would be eager to remove himself from that environment even in that event.

It was as if the pain was too much for him to bear.

Some battles are better not picked.

In other words, if you are on the boat and see a lot of rocks in the water ahead, the smart thing to do is to avoid them.

Summary

This chapter has a relatively simple but profound takeaway.

Sit back, think about the Daisen-in garden, and see what entity you are as you navigate life.

If you are anything other than the boat, it is probably time to re-think your approach to life.

(originally published on April 2nd, 2024 on harpreet.io)

Beating Stress, Anxiety, and Finding Joy

Last November (2023), amidst the festive spirit, I wanted to give back and embarked on a journey I hadn't anticipated. It began with me offering an online beginner meditation retreat—a small gesture to share meditation's profound and life-changing benefits during the holiday season. Little did I know this course would pave the way for an enriching experience that extended beyond my expectations.

My First Meditation Retreat: Using Gratitude to Meditate

The retreat was offered on Zoom and ran for about three weeks. I offered it in two time zones: India and the US. My India retreat had a smaller audience and included my sister-in-law, who gave me feedback on what worked and what didn't, which I tailored for the US course.

Her comment that she has done many courses, but my approach took her away deeper than any other meditation course, inspired me to see if I could take the approach elsewhere.

Presenting Meditation Sessions at India Community Center

That was going to be the end of the retreat. However, something unexpected happened.

I was invited to conduct a few classes at the India Community Center (ICC), a vibrant community hub for seniors in the Bay Area. I found myself presenting to a couple of different cohorts.

This group holds a special place in my heart because my parents have been going here for the last few years.

The ICC caters to Indians, and most attendees are parents of Indians who have moved to the US. This group is navigating the challenges of moving to the US in their 60s, and the biggest challenge is adjusting to the disconnected life in the US. They make this sacrifice to stay close to their children. The age group ranges from 60+, but it is a very active group determined to make the best use of their time.

What's impressive about this set of people is their openness to try the flavor of new things.

My First In-Person Meditation Class

I have never presented a meditation class live. I have spoken at large venues plenty of times, and a presentation deck has always guided people's attention. The difference is that you hold people's attention when their eyes are closed and their minds run haywire.

It is a challenging task. I have a new appreciation for the Gurus out of India :-).

The task was daunting—guiding 50-75 people to meditate for an hour, many of whom found it difficult to focus for just a few minutes.

To my pleasant surprise, the sessions were incredibly well-received. The participants, with their rich tapestry of experiences and wisdom, embraced meditation with open hearts.

A question that consistently emerged from online and in-person events was, "Do you have an online course?"

My first meditation course: Leaning in on Gratitude for Meditation

Taking this feedback to heart, I've developed a course. It's a culmination of lessons learned from my practices, challenges overcome, and the joy of connecting with oneself on a profound level.

If you grapple with stress or anxiety or seek a more profound sense of happiness and gratitude, I invite you to explore what I've created. It's designed not just for those new to meditation but also for anyone looking to enrich their practice and manage the complexities of modern life, especially in the high-pressure tech world.

In crafting this course, I aimed to share the transformative power of gratitude. Gratitude is a bridge to a more mindful, stress-free, and joyful life.

Why yet another meditation course?
Meditation is a great way to deal with stress. Most meditation courses ask you to be mindful, which most people interpret as "STOP ALL THOUGHTS." This is a disastrous approach, where they are fighting their minds—a battle that cannot be won.

I know it because I did it for a number of years.

Gratitude is the easiest (hack?) way to meditate, especially when it comes to beating stress. When I discovered this path, I couldn't believe how easy meditation became.

I have split the course over three weeks. Three weeks is short enough to stay energized trying something new and long enough to get an authentic flavor of an approach.

From the course site:

• Week 1: Embracing the Body: A Grateful Journey. Begin your journey with a deep dive into body gratitude. Engage in a comprehensive body scan meditation, expressing thanks for each part of your body and acknowledging its unique functions. This week lays the foundation for recognizing and appreciating the physical self.

• Week 2: Consciousness Within—Exploring Inner Spaces. Touching Transcendence". Delve into the profound spaces within your body, focusing on the microscopic and the vastness within. This week's meditation encourages reaching a deeper consciousness by acknowledging the 'empty' spaces within the physical body.

• Week 3: Using Chakras and Gratitude to go deeper. We will learn about Chakras and how they can be used as a super-effective tool to practice meditation. Adding gratitude to Chakras is a potent practice. Culminate your journey by integrating loving-kindness into your gratitude practice. Embrace unconditional love and deep, empathetic understanding in your meditations, bringing together all elements of gratitude from the previous weeks.

As we continue to navigate the ebbs and flows of life, let us remember the power of gratitude, the strength found in ourselves, and the peace that comes from within.

The path starts here for those ready to embark on this journey. The course is available on two sites:

Thinkific

Udemy

I would love it if you could forward someone you think can benefit.

We live in incredibly stressed times. Meditation is a great way to deal with the stress. However, I see people struggling with it because meditation ends up as a practice where they are fighting their minds. I know it because I did it for a number of years.

Gratitude is perhaps the easiest (hack?) way to meditate and especially to beat stress. I couldn't believe it how easy meditation became when I discovered this path.

I would love it if you could forward someone who you think can benefit. Folks dealing with stress, or wanting to start or stuck with a meditation practice.I hope to bring this to attendees and get the new year started a great note.

The Gratitude Path: A free Online Weekend Meditation Retreat at Home - Dec 9, 16 and 23. An Hourly Beginners Meditation Series for better stress management.

You can register on the events page. Hope to see you there.