Question: Is there a recipe for happy marriage?
Sadhguru: The English expression, “Falling in love,” is significant because you don’t rise in love, you don’t fly in love, you don’t walk in love, you don’t stand in love. You fall in love, because something of who you are has to go. It essentially means someone else has become far more important than yourself. Only if you don’t think too much of yourself, you can be in love. When what you consider as “me” falls, a deep experience of love can happen within you.
Embrace and Understand
The closer the relationship with someone is, the more effort you should make to understand them. Someone becomes closer and dearer to you only as you understand them better. If they understand you, they enjoy the closeness of the relationship. If you understand them better, then you enjoy the closeness. If you are expecting the other to understand and comply with you all the time while you don’t understand the limitations, possibilities, needs and capabilities of that person, then conflict is all that will happen.
In everyone, there are some positive and some negative aspects. If you embrace all this in your understanding, you can make the relationship the way you want it. If you leave it to their understanding, it will become accidental. If they are very magnanimous, things will happen well for you. If not, the relationship will break up. It is not that the other person is totally bereft of understanding. With your understanding you can create situations where the other person would be able to understand you better.
If relationships have to be really beautiful, it is very important that a human being turns inward and looks at himself in a very deep way before he looks at someone else. If you become a source of joy by yourself and your relationships are about sharing your joy, you would have wonderful relationships with anyone. Is there anyone in the world who would have any problem with you if you are going there to share your joy with them? No. If you want to experience the profoundness of being with another human being, your relationship should never be about you – it should always be about the other person. If both of you think like this, your relationship will not be an arrangement, it will be a union.
If your relationship is just a bundle of expectations about how to extract happiness out of someone who should make heaven for you, you will be disappointed. They say marriages are made in heaven. They say that because most people created a hell out of their marriage! If your relationship is about extracting something out of someone, it does not matter how much you manage, there will be constant trouble. But if your relationship was an offering to the other person, then everything would be fantastic.
Question: How to boost brain power?
Sadhguru: Essentially, success comes to you not because you desire it, but because you are able to harness your body and mind in the best possible way - a certain amount of intelligence is fundamentally necessary.
Intelligence does not mean a lot of education or accumulated knowledge. It essentially means that your intellect is sharp enough to cut through life and see it as it is. Unless you see life as it is, you cannot act sensibly.
In the last few years, a lot of research has gone into what is known as neuroplasticity. Scientists are saying that by cultivating a different kind of thought and doing different kinds of activity, the grey matter in your brain can increase or decrease in a matter of days or weeks.
The Yogic systems have always said that if you are willing to do certain processes with the right intensity and focus, we can rewire your brain completely in just 24 hours' time, so that you think, feel and act differently.
There have been studies done on the 21-minute Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya practice that we offer as part of Inner Engineering. They found that if you do the practice for over three months, the neuronal regeneration in the brain is much higher than normal, and that replacement of neurons is higher than the depletion. This means your intelligence is constantly growing. Everyone could do with a little more intelligence, isn't it?
Editor’s Note: Inner Engineering Online: A powerful beginners program designed by Sadhguru that imparts practical wisdom and a 21-minute purifying energy technique using the breath.
(Sadhguru is a Yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author. He is also the founder of Conscious Planet – Save Soil)
