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Is your self-image limiting you? You have a self-image, we all do, but have you stopped to analyze it? Have you given serious thought to who and what you are? If you get it wrong, you’ll get everything else in life wrong.

The degree to which we get our self-image wrong, we veer away from our life’s true purpose. If you don’t know you really are, how can you do what you really should be doing? How can you have the right priorities?

Self-image is so powerful that in the classic yoga text, Bhagavad-gita, Krishna uses it as the starting point of His explanations to Arjuna. The very first teaching in the Gita is that we are not our bodies. Right off the bat, Krishna requests His audience to radically reevaluate their self-image, in the deepest sense possible. What to speak of reevaluating the many different aspects of our nature, such as our identity to family, society and work or our personality traits, He makes us question our identity on the deepest possible level: what if we’re not even our bodies? What if we are eternal transcendental souls, wandering from body to body, from species to species? Wow!

Stop for a minute and consider the consequences of being a non-material entity. What would money mean to a transcendental being? Nothing, right? What would getting that new car mean? Zero. What about that promotion at work? Not registering at all, is it?

And here’s the kicker: this is exactly what really happens to all of us. Research after research has shown that these extrinsic goals and achievements do next to nothing for us. You’ve experienced this, I’m sure. If you ever bought a car, you know what a huge endeavor that was. Cars are expensive. And, sure, you were happy. But for how long? Let’s face it, who’s jumping with joy at the thought of his or her car, no matter what car it is, after a few months? Research shows that it’s pretty much no one. Same for that new outfit, new job or even winning the lottery. What we usually do is ignore that feeling and acquire a new target of in our endless conditional happiness list. It’s like we cannot believe or accept that we’ve been duped and that we’re totally on the wrong track, so we just remember that brief pleasure we got (mostly in anticipation) from our latest mundane success or purchase, and move right along to the next empty goal.

This is because we’re not the body. We are on the inside, not on the surface. We need to focus on things that will reach us inside. Stuff on the surface won’t really get to you and won’t satisfy you truly.

I propose there basically two things which really satisfy the true you: service and connection.

I always remind myself of Saint Mother Teresa’s saying: “The fruit of prayer is love and the fruit of love is service”. Service is love in action. Love has no meaning if it’s not conducive to actually doing something for the loved one. Viewed correctly, everything you do can be done in the spirit of love. Every action can be an expression of your desire to serve someone else and even your own self, for example, by sleeping well and staying fit. In my book, The 3T Path, I expand on this concept by explaining the importance of living our dharma.

Connection is that person to person contact you experience when you treat people as people, not objects or machines to satisfy your needs. The smallest exchanges, like saying good morning to someone in the elevator, are an opportunity to connect and experience that soul to soul connection, what to speak of our deeper and more meaningful relationships.

The great spiritual master Swami Prabhupada summed it up nicely when he said: “people want someone to love and something to do”.

The more we understand who we really are, the more we can fine-tune our priorities and goals, which leads to an enormous increase in our sense of fulfillment and joy.

Check out my video on this topic here.

Look what people are saying about my new book: “Healing and sustenance for your mind, soul and body… an inspiring book” – Meg

What will happen when you die? Is there life after death? If so, what destinations are there for those who die in a human body? In the sacred texts of the Vedic tradition, we find detailed information on this which I will summarize here.

There are four possible destinations after a human death. Souls enter material bodies, inhabit them, and then leave. When a soul enters a body, we call it conception. When a soul leaves a material body, we call it death. But for the soul, there is no birth or death; it is eternal. When trapped in a material body, the soul forgets its true nature. Its consciousness is covered, and it identifies with the body.

The first and most cherished destination after death is to attain liberation (moksha in Sanskrit) by developing pure love of God (prema). Since the soul is trapped in the cycle of birth and death (samsara), the very goal of yoga is to free ourselves from this painful cycle and go back home, back to our original personal existence in God’s abode. Those who actively dedicate themselves to finding their true spiritual nature can achieve this. This is the ultimate purpose of human life – the chance to seek and attain enlightenment. For one who reaches this state, there will never again be another birth.

The second destination is a birth in the celestial planets of the Universe. According to Vedic cosmography, the Universe has all kinds of civilizations, with different species of advanced beings. Many of these have a much more advanced standard of comfort to what we experience here on Earth. The texts speak of pleasures ten thousand times superior to the best of what we can get here. Longevity, beauty, immense and varied sensory gratification are granted to these denizens. This kind of birth is achieved by those who have accumulated good karma as a human, by dedicating their lives to the good of others, doing their dharma and being ethically and morally strong. Since this destination is just one of millions of possible births in the Universe, it’s also temporary and after death as a celestial being, the soul again has to take birth as a human on Earth.

The third possibility is to immediately take birth as a human, again. This is good because it gives that person another chance to seek enlightenment, but it’s bad because it means that soul did not use its previous human life fully.

Lastly, the soul can take birth in the millions of other animal and plant species. This happens when a human uses his or her life very poorly, accumulating negative karma and cultivating a bestial mentality. In other words, that person failed to make use of the rare human birth and behaved just as an animal, with no thought to spiritual evolution.

For those who did not become enlightened here are also two unfortunate side journeys, two temporary states or experiences which the soul may have to undergo: being a ghost and going to hell.

Ghosts are the subtle bodies of the dead, usually humans. When a human dies and isn’t ready for it, maybe due to attachment, anger, or a desire for revenge, its willpower delays it from moving on to the next birth. It gets stuck between bodies. Because the subtle body is perfectly identified with the biological body, the person maintains the same form as its now dead biological body. When that attachment, anger, or desire for revenge wanes, the hold of that person to its previous incarnation ends, and the forces of nature carry the soul to its next birth.

Hell is a place a human soul gets dragged to work off some seriously bad karma. Hell in Vedic literature is described as a place with hundreds of thousands of different virtual reality zones, each meant to impart on the wayward soul a lesson, to help it overcome a particularly evil trait it has developed. Hell has absolutely nothing to do with religious choices or ignoring God. It’s strictly a type of morality spa or intense sensitivity training to teach the person to avoid the crudest kinds of evil behavior, such as boiling animals alive. After some time in hell, the soul moves on to its next birth, usually an animal or plant incarnation.

If you want to understand more about the soul, God, God’s abode, reincarnation and the process of yoga to reach enlightenment, you’ll love my book The 3T Path – Self-improvement and Self-realization in Yoga, available here: https://3tpath.com/books/.

Watch my video on this topic here.

Look what they’re saying about my book: “By applying clear language, helpful examples, and an thorough grasp of the history of yoga, Das offers a spiritual toolkit that can be used at any time.” – Dotrazn

Despite having become a huge multimillion-dollar business, the truth is that the Law of Attraction doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, it actually makes your life worse. If you’ve tried it and it didn’t work, find out here why. And if you haven’t tried it yet, before you do, read this.

On a very basic level, of course, you generally move towards getting what you want, so you have to want it first. Dreaming and wanting certainly are first steps in achieving anything. But the ridiculous notion that your intense dreaming and wanting are the main factors in success is ludicrous, far from anyone’s practical experience and not backed by a shred of scientific evidence.

But wait, hardcore Law of Attraction types will say. “You got it wrong. It’s not just wanting.” Oh yes, sorry. There are other steps. According to the hack selling the idea, these may differ, but they include such pearls of wisdom as 1) feeling the goal and 2) a personal favorite of mine: overcoming your own resistance to your dreams. These are great because since it’s impossible to quantify and demonstrate whether you have “felt” the goal and even worse “overcome your hidden resistance” to it, there is no question of getting your money back when the course, book or seminar on the subject leaves you frustrated and worse off than before. Then finally they agree you have to actually do something about achieving your goals, which everybody already knew and hardly constitutes a secret.

The Law of Attractions fails on three crucial points: 1) it’s not enough to want something, you have to deserve it, 2) time scales may operate on very different levels than you previously thought and 3) the whole concept of focusing on your future desires is, itself, the very source of all your misery and a surefire way of being anxious and frustrated.

The reason why the Law of Attraction doesn’t work can be explained when we study the Law of Karma. The concept of the Law of Karma is that in fact everything that you experience, every single aspect of your material life is a result of your actions in the past. So, in that sense, your actions and thoughts did “attract” everything in your life. However, it’s not based on mere desire, but the combination of desire with merit – mostly merit. Everything you have in your life is there to help you become a better person. Every challenge, every facility – a chance to grow and improve. Nothing happens by chance.

Another important point we learn from the Law of Karma is that we are immortal beings. Our timescales operate on multi-life scales, not months or even just a few years. Whether you can own fancy cars in this life, be the next YouTube sensation or any other fanciful dream – or  not – was decided way long ago. Wishing for it today won’t change this reality any more than wishing it was Christmas in April. You’ll just have to wait until December. While wishing hard for some material situation may bring effect, it might take a lifetime or more before you get to experience it. This lifetime has already been bought and paid for. You wished all kinds of things in the past and, voilà, here’s the result – your life now. Any further request will be duly noted and brought to you in some unknown time in the future, in a version suitable to your karmic merits.

Lastly, and here’s the real problem – totally verifiable and undeniable –, the whole concept of wishing for things in the future is just plain mistaken. The idea that a fancy car, prestigious job, millions of dollars, fancy houses or a yacht will result in a joyous life is infantile, bordering on insane. This is the root of all our suffering (check out my video where I explain this here). This is not just some spiritual baloney – it’s scientific fact. Research after research has confirmed that above middle-class levels of economic success, there is zero gain in happiness in getting more money and that true satisfaction has little to do with external goals and the accumulation of things. Endlessly seeking out more toys and more adjustments in the future result only in anxiety, fear, frustration and depression. The secret is to change inside, to change how you live your life, not the things surrounding you. Change how you live now to achieve true lasting joy, harmony and peace. This is confirmed by both ancient wisdom and the result of thousands of scientific studies.

If you want to learn more about what this means and how to go about it, check out my new book “The 3T Path – Self-improvement and Self-realization in Yoga”, available at www.3Tpath.com.

Watch here my video on the of the Law of Karma, why the Law of Attraction doesn’t work and why it’s better to live the here and now.

What they’re saying about my book:

“The 3T Path: Self-Improvement and Self-Realization in Yoga is one of the most thorough, honest, and straightforward books I have ever read.” – Jill Baker, giving a five-star review of the book on Amazon.com.

Are you messed up? Caught in an endless loop of lamentation? Depressed, angry, frustrated, sad… and you just can’t break away from it? Here’s the only way to break free from this.

It happens to the best of us. We get caught up on repetitive and negative mental patterns. Luckily, for most of us, we get back on track quickly. But sometimes, people get seriously messed up. They get trapped for months or years in a cycle of lamentation and depression, a lot of time accompanied by some sort of addiction. This can be fueled by anything from having a bad self-image worsened by school bullying to a traumatic event like a nasty divorce, a life-changing accident, bankruptcy or the loss of a loved one.

The trap is the same: an endless loop of negativity, always going back to the same root-cause. It’s a profoundly selfish pit, where the whole world, and everyone in it, basically is not important. All that matters is how horrible the world is and how pitiful the person feels. In my book, The 3T Path, one of the key concepts is that we must live beyond victimhood. When people get profoundly messed up, it’s usually the very opposite: total victimhood. The whole Universe is against them and all they perceive is how unfair and horrible life is.

There is but ONE solution to this: get out of your head! Stop thinking about how unfair the world is, and what a sorry victim of reality you are. But since it’s not possible to not think of something, the trick is to think of something else, to focus your mind on something else. If I tell you don’t think of an elephant, it doesn’t work. You’ll think of an elephant. So, if you’re trapped in your head, in an endless cycle of victimhood, the solution is to focus on the opposite of victimhood. Victimhood means you feel you can’t help yourself. The opposite of that is to help others, to serve. So the solution is to serve, to do your duty, and to live again your true essence. In yoga terms, this means to follow your dharma.

Stop thinking of what others have done to you. Stop focusing on what life has done to you. Instead, focus on what you can do for others, on what you can do for the world. You have a purpose, you have an essence. Living that essence, living that purpose means to serve others and the world. This is dharma.

Instead of complaining about how others behave, start finding ways to serve others. Help your family, help your friends, help your community. Serve the world according to your nature, be it with music, dance, carpentry, athletics, accounting or science. Whatever it is you can do, do that. Not for you. For others.

Serve your own self. Take care of your body and your mind. Exercise, find ways to get fitter and healthier. Better yet, get spiritual. Serve the cause of all causes, God. Transcend all mundane reality in seeking your deepest transcendent essence.

This is the secret to a great life: enlightened action. This is the way out of your head and out of a meaningless self-centered life.

I explain in detail all the many components to achieve this in my book, The 3T Path.

Check out my video on this subject here:

Look what they’re saying about my book:

“a well thought and important book” – Ithamar Theodor (Isvara Krsna Das)

The foremost quality of a yogi emphasized in the Bhagavad-gita is equanimity – to be equal, remaining the same, no matter what life throws at you. How is this to be achieved?

The secret for advancing in equanimity is to change the focus of who you are, and what matters to you. Clearly, you cannot experience equanimity if you’re on the “surface” of life. Materially speaking, everything is changing. Ups and downs, day and night, hungry and satiated… superficially speaking, things are just different all the time. If you’re fixed on the idea of how the world should be, how things must turn out and how people around you should behave, there is zero hope for equanimity, zero hope for a peace and well-being.

But we need not be superficial, because we are actually not on the surface. Our existence is not happening skin-deep. Your consciousness is not material. It’s something else entirely.

By focusing on values, purposes and meaning, you are no longer operating on the surface level. The deeper the importance you attribute to your core values, purposes and meaning, the less affected you’ll be by the surface variations life throws at you. What external events bring you and what others do does not affect your core values. Your response will be aligned with your values, and you’ll continue to find purpose and meaning by acting with such integrity. Thus, you remain stable, equal, in all situations.

As you get deeper and deeper into your values, purposes and meaning you’ll enter the stage of transcendence, where pure equanimity can be achieved. Surface variations, variations of external material reality, are ultimately inconsequential for the transcendental soul. The soul, the real you, is operating in another frequency. The more you advance, the more you’ll experience this. What the soul needs to be joyous has no connection with matter.

The Bhagavad-gita also tells us that the yogi has joyous and unlimited happiness. Practicing equanimity means experiencing bliss, no matter the challenges life is bringing to you on the surface.

In fact, the single most important way to gauge your spiritual advancement is to observe your level of equanimity. How stable is your well-being? How long does it take you to regain your harmony and inner peace when you’re confronted with some type of adversity? Are you like a little row boat, thrown every which way by the stormy seas, or like a submarine, indifferent to storms on the surface?

Embrace the challenges life sends you as a golden opportunity to practice equanimity and become stronger and more joyous, more and more focused on what really matters in life.

Check out my video on equanimity here.

And be sure to check out my new book, “The 3T Path”, where I explain in detail how to gradually progress towards this blissful state of mind.

What they’re saying about my new book:

“In this book, Giridhari Das offers an invaluable present to humanity. Works such as this are true treasures – manifestations of divine compassion in the service of dharma, the higher purpose. I would also say that The 3T Path is a practical survival guide in difficult times.” – Sri Prem Baba

There is one root cause to our anxiety and you can develop the power to switch it off. It takes some training, but it’s something real you can work on. You can learn to switch off anxiety.

All our anxiety is born out of the habit our mind has to slip into future. We become anxious about what might happen and then dread the consequences of that, in a cascade of worry. Worry born out of nothing concrete yet. It’s just our mind playing tricks with us. Right now, nothing’s happened.

Look back, search your memory, and see how many hundreds and hundreds of times your heart rate went up, your stomach tightened and fear surged through your mind, making you miserable, for things that never happened. Search your memory further and notice that even when something unwanted happened, most of the time it wasn’t such a big deal. The anticipation of a problem is worse than the problem itself, most of the time.

The trick, then, is to train your mind to quit this horrific, useless, habit of living out disaster scenarios in the future. Does this mean we go through life like fools, with no planning, not a care in the world? Not quite. We can not only reduce useless anxiety, we can make ourselves more efficient at making our lives better with the same mental adjustment.

As soon as you feel you’re getting anxious, take a couple of deep breaths, and bring your focus to the here and now, more specifically, to the job at hand. Don’t put mental energy into fear, into foreseeing disaster. Perceive the best action now, and put your attention in that, as much as you can. Ideally, all your attention. Mindfulness – your full mind focused on the subject at hand. Even in life or death, or especially in life or death situations, being able to focus your mind entirely on the action, on the job at hand, is crucial to success.

Studies show that adventure athletes – those courageous types who kayak down waterfalls, sky jump, rush down uncharted trails on perilous slopes, etc. – have the greatest ability to enter the state of flow, sometimes called “the zone”, that golden state of maximum ability and concentration, precisely because they are dealing with life and death moment-by-moment decisions. If these athletes let their mind drift to anxiety, to the future, they die. So, they don’t and experience awesome states of wellbeing because of their high-level mindfulness.

You can bring this reality to your day-to-day life. Bring your mind to the here and now. Train your brain to live the moment and concentrate on the task at hand. No matter how much you have to do, you can only do one main thing at a time. Don’t be doing one thing, worrying about the other thing you should be doing AND anxious about the many unwanted future scenarios you’ll face if you fail. Shut those other programs down and fix your mind on what you’re doing right now. That way, you’ll switch off anxiety.

Learn more techniques, and many other important tools for a better life, by reading my book, “The 3T Path”, out now, by clicking here.

You can see my video on this topic here.

Research shows that we have a very limited reserve of willpower. So, how can we affect change in our lives and better ourselves? The solution lies in the unlimited ability we have to do what we want – “wantpower”.

Willpower is a single reserve tank, which you drain whenever you resist an action. For example, if you resist eating cookies to avoid the extra calories, research by the lab of Roy Baumeister showed, then you’ll give up more easily on trying to solve a puzzle. The mental strain of resisting the cookies was drawing from the same reserve as that needed to persevere with a tough puzzle. Another research showed that volunteers who had been asked to suppress their feeling while watching a movie, had less physical stamina than the control group.

Even more troubling, research shows that social interactions naturally deplete our willpower reserves, due to the need to restrain certain reactions or suppress inappropriate comments.

The term used in psychology for this reduction in willpower is called ego depletion.

The bottom line is that you better not count on willpower to reshape your life or to trail the path of self-improvement and self-realization. As you’ve probably experienced, more often than not, this leads to frustration and failure. So, are you destined to eat foods you shouldn’t, fail to exercise as much as you want, not meditate and otherwise be unable to improve yourself and your habits? No. You can change, but the change has to come from a deeper sense of purpose.

Research already shows that beliefs strengthen your ability to resist urges. The simple idea is that you’ll do what is true to you. What is true to you is what you want to do. My wife coined the term “wantpower”. You have unlimited power to do what you want.

What you want is based on your self-identity. You’ll naturally want to do that which is the expression of who you are. The trick, then, is to understand who you really are, to define your values consciously.

Understand yourself to be a rational being with a human body that needs maintenance to work well. If you see yourself like this, naturally exercise becomes something you want. You are a person who wants your body functioning well, so that your mind will function well too. If you truly experience this identity, exercise is now something you want.

The same applies to having good dietary choices. “I’m healthy”. That’s who you are. So, you eat healthily. “I’m compassionate”. So, you eat foods free of suffering. “I’m ecological”. So, you want to choose foods and products that don’t destroy the planet. “I’m spiritual”. So, you want to cultivate your self-realization, meditating every day, practicing bhakti, etc.

Be the best person you know you are. Feel that you are this person now. Absorb deeply the values of who you are. And take great pleasure in living the expression of the best of you.

Check out my video on the subject here.

Karma in Sanskrit means “action.” The law of karma is thus the law of action. Beyond the Newtonian law of action and reaction governing the physical world, the law of action and reaction also affects the experience of embodied souls. Karma should be understood as one of the laws of nature, acting on the metaphysical plane.

The law of karma is an educational system built into nature, designed to help the embodied soul improve its moral, or dharmic, behavior. Every action you perform has a moral quality to it. Was it the right action? Was it within your dharma to be doing it? If so, did you do it with attention, with care? Did you do your best? If so, then you generated an appropriately positive result. If not, then you get an appropriately negative result. The law of karma puts a mirror in front of you. You get what you give. Or as the Bible says, you reap what you sow.

The reactions produced from our actions come in the form of objects, facts, and situations in life. Everything in your life now – your DNA to your social status, bank account, job situation, neighborhood, planet, health, and everything you own – is the result of your past activities. At every moment, the entire configuration of external reality in your life is a karmic reaction.

The only exception is divine intervention. The more you develop your spirituality, and especially your devotion to God, the more your karma may be adjusted by God to suit your spiritual elevation. It’s like getting a presidential or royal pardon. You were tried and found guilty, but the ruling power of the country pardons your crime. Or to give an even better example, if you become a star pupil, then the school may take special interest in your education and adjust your syllabus to help you develop your full capabilities.

Note that the law of karma has nothing to do with devotion to God. One fascinating fact found in the Bhagavad-gita is that atheism does not generate any bad karma. There is zero karmic reaction in not loving God. Let’s say I have a pot of gold coins. You come to my place and I say, “Please take as many as you want.” If you take the gold, you become richer. If you don’t, there is no crime. No one can punish you for not taking it, and there is no moral wrong. Devotion to God is like this. If you take to it, you’ll benefit. If you don’t, you won’t get punished. But you will have missed a golden opportunity.

Krishna explains in the Bhagavad-gita that karma is complex. Attempts to simplify it by saying, for example, that if you hit someone in the head, you’ll be hit in the head, are just simplifications to help you understand the concept. The system is mind-bogglingly complex, since everything that happens is caused by karma. Everyone deserves exactly everything being done to them. There is perfect justice. In this sense, the law of karma is compared to a perfect cosmic justice system. But like any good justice system, the main objective is education, not revenge or punishment.

Sadly, many people have turned away from God due to not understanding the simple concepts of karma and reincarnation. They blame God for the suffering they see around them. Yet these same people have no difficulty understanding that a wrongdoing must be addressed with a combination of just punishment and education to avoid future wrongdoings. And suffering is precisely that – a combination of just punishment and education to teach the soul to avoid future wrongdoings.

Does this mean we should become callous and lack empathy for other’s suffering? Of course not. It’s part of our universal dharma to practice compassion and do our part to help diminish suffering around us.

The best way to help diminish suffering is to teach people not to create it in the first place, by emphasizing the benefits of a dharmic life and by teaching them to practice mindfulness. Practically speaking, these two – dharma and mindfulness – are the main focus of the teachings of Buddha.

All suffering is thus within the scope of education – an instrument for creating change. Suffering exists to help you improve the moral quality of your actions and to prod you to investigate your existence. And it works. An enormous number of people have arrived at a deeper understanding of life and spirituality as a result of suffering. But you shouldn’t wait for suffering. Delve deep into the mysteries of life and God while the going is good.

Something done in one life may bring effects only hundreds of lives later. Every act creates what is called a karmic seed. Once you understand where you went wrong, however, you need no longer suffer the karma generated by that kind of wrong. The seed is burnt. Comparing karma to an education system, if you prove you have learned the subject matter, you no longer need to take the course. We have an unfathomable number of karmic seeds stored away. Sacred texts tell us that we are like trees. In this life we will generate the seeds to many future lives, just as a tree generates seeds for many future trees.

On this planet, only humans accrue karma. Our free will and sophisticated intelligence give us power. With power comes responsibility. With responsibility comes accountability. Human life is so important and rare and comes with so much power, that in one human life you can generate karma seeds for thousands of lives. Animals, plants, and other beings live out karma accumulated in past human or human-like lives.

Human life is also the only opportunity on this planet to extinguish your karma. As long as the soul remains in the material world, going from one body to another, it will experience the effects of the law of karma. But if you take the lead in your own education, if you take to the path of self-improvement and self-realization, you can, in one human life, achieve the final goal of all karmic education. You can graduate and leave school. To quote the Bhagavad-gita, by cultivating knowledge (jnana) you can reduce your karma to ashes.

The law of karma is another example of how this metaphysical knowledge of the yoga tradition helps you to better understand the experience of life and to live better. A rational explanation for all suffering brings relief to any thoughtful person. And seeing every event in your life as justly deserved and an opportunity for growth gives you great power to overcome obstacles and abandon lamentation. The law of karma ultimately confers upon you 100 percent control over your life. You are the sole architect of your destiny. No one other living being in the universe has power over you. No one can do anything to you that you yourself have not brought upon yourself. Others are just external agents of your own deeds. You have the power to choose what kind of life you want to live.

You can watch my video on the topic here.

Just got dumped? Got a broken heart? Trying to deal with a divorce? This might be a good moment to look at how you’re tackling life and review some of your core concepts.

When we’re hurting because a relationship has ended, this is a good wake-up call. You can start with the simple question: “Why am I hurting?” If the answer is: “because the person broke up with me”. Then you have to ask yourself, “but why is this painful?” Is this real?

In other words, where and when did you decide that you needed that person in order for you to be happy? Better yet, why? How is it that you crafted a view of reality that mysteriously necessitates someone else acting a certain way for you to be happy? If you stop and think about it, you can see this is a recipe for disaster. Each of us is going through life experiencing a million things, having 70 thousand thoughts per day, with all sorts of conditioning and all kinds of karma fructifying. How can you expect somebody else to act a certain way for you to be happy? It’s nuts!

In yoga, we actively wok to remove such items of “conditional happiness” from our minds. Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita, “That person [the yogi] has no interest… in depending on any being” (BG 3.17). We need not depend on others for our happiness. Our happiness is ours alone to craft. Just as you created in your mind the idea that you needed another person to be by your side to be happy, so to you can adjust your mental map to understand that joy comes from living life well as it is, not as you falsely thought it should be. You don’t need anyone else. What you need is to adjust your mind to reality.

First, we have to learn to love ourselves. Our needy side is just a lack of self-love. Whatever our “surface” situation, in other words, no matter how faulty and unattractive you may find yourself, deep down you’re a spark of God, a beautiful luminous being. You should connect with that best, deepest version of yourself. Great relationships can only happen between people who already love themselves.

If you’ve advanced more in yoga and have attained the highest aspect of spiritual life, devotion (bhakti), then you can further experience being loved by God. There is an inexhaustible supply of love coming from God, the source of all love. God knows how special you are. You are, after all, unique. God’s love for each one of us is inconceivable. If a regular human parent can have such unfathomable love for his or her child, just imagine the love God has for you, His child. Of course, all this sounds wacky if you have not yet accessed bhakti. But, when you do, you’ll know it’s true.

With all this wonderful self-love and love coming from God, you’ll be overflowing with love. You’ll no longer need to beg for it from others. You’ll no longer lament not getting it from people who don’t even want to be with you anymore. With all this love, you can now bring the focus to your actions. You can now love others. Happiness is derived from loving, not from expecting to be loved. The joy is in giving.

So, be grateful for being dumped. Re-evaluate and recalibrate your goals and find all the love you need in your own heart.

Here’s my video on the topic.

Roughly speaking, affective forecasting is a term used in psychology to indicate the emotion experienced by the thought of a future event. It’s often used to refer to the positive feeling that arises when we plan for something pleasurable in the future. Sounds harmless enough, right? But is it, really?

It turns out affective forecasting is quite damaging. It’s an integral part of what I call the fantasy paradigm, the seemingly inescapable habit we have of dreaming up ways to be happy in the future.

The untrained mind constantly strives to look for external solutions to life, and a person will constantly seek to adjust external reality to suit his or her desires. Lists of conditional happiness are continually updated. The untrained mind will thus spend a lot of time in a fantasy world daydreaming about what seems like a brighter future. Basically, these desires involve changing the future in three ways: 1) getting things, 2) getting people to cooperate with your plans, and 3) hoping for favorable situations to arise. But usually, not much changes when one of these goals is achieved. Desires, once attained, satisfy very little, and other pressing desires soon take center stage. Living like this is one of the components of a terrible life. When the mind is in the future desiring results, anxiety about future outcomes is unavoidable, as is frustration with life as it is today, anger when apparent obstacles postpone these future desires, and fear that it will all turn out badly. We have all tried to live like this, and it just doesn’t work. It has never worked. It is no way to attain peace, contentment, and joy.

We need a change of paradigm. Instead of focusing on the future, on the illusory belief that some combination of external reality (these things, with those people, under that situation) is the key to happiness, we should focus on just living life well, here and now, focused on our dharma. Life vs. fantasy.

Life is happening at every moment. It’s in flux – a constant stream of events. The challenge is to be fully present as it’s happening. The joy arises from doing your dharma well, here and now, and moving from one dharma to the next. Being the best person you can be today, right now – true to yourself. It’s that simple. There is no need (and very little use) to daydream about the future. Reality is more beautiful than any daydream if you learn to access it completely. Future events will unfold under the all-powerful force of time. And life usually plays out very differently from anything you had imagined. This is neither good nor bad; it just is – it’s reality. The more we can be attuned to reality, the happier we will be. Instead of imagining that a certain combination of things and people will bring you peace and joy in the future, you should seek to attain peace and joy with life as it is, with the wonderful blessing of being active in your dharma, of being alive right now.

The buzz we get with affective forecasting is not too different from a drug high. Feels nice enough while you’re on it, but very quickly the sensation passes over and you’re left worse off than before, frustrated and unhappy with reality, looking for the next high. Meanwhile, we’re doing a poor job of living life as it is. We’re missing out on life.

We’ve been trained since childhood to insist on this fantasy paradigm, getting another quick fix of affective forecasting. We convince ourselves that we’ll be happy when we buy the new gadget, new shoes, find a new romantic partner, get a new job or just win the lottery. But research shows, this is just not the case. Even when the most coveted of such things happen to us, such as winning the lottery, the joy all too quickly fades and we’re back to feeling exactly how we felt before the event.

The solution is to change how we live, to adjust our mind, to reshape our brain, to live well now. This is the focus of the 3T Path I teach and the core message of my soon to be published book, The 3T Path, which explains just how you can do this.

Check out my video on this topic.