The Cellular Alchemist

As humans when we choose to just exist - we carry on with our day-to-day chores - we eat, we live, we sleep, we do our jobs, and we take care of our life’s business as we know best.  At any given point in time - we can create a life of consumption and myopically focus on our surroundings without seeing the broader landscape around us, consuming day after day without any perspective on what surroun...

When we feel challenged, pushed into a corner, or helpless, the quote says, \"Find your power within you in a disempowering situation.\"  Whenever we feel powerless, it\'s always a delusion since we never are entirely powerless. It\'s just our state of mind, and one of the options we have is helplessness. There are many more options, but why do we choose helplessness as the only option we have? In...

When we run away from making choices in our life, it\'s likely, someone else starts making them for us.  And then after a point of time - we start resenting them. We start feeling like a victim. When we encounter a crisis, it is essential to consider how we handle it. When we encounter minor disappointments and setbacks, it is critical to choose our response to them. In situations like when we do...

Beliefs sometimes are almost like a disease we catch during our growing-up years. But where does this disease come from?  It is something that we learn from our parents.  As an act of love, we believe what they say or do. We are all a product of our prejudice and ignorance and we keep passing it on. However, if we knew that the universe is a reflection of our beliefs, then how would we be able to...

Loss is tough for all of us, and the trauma of loss translates into the biology of our bodies. The emotions we experience when we lose someone or something are embedded inside our bodies. They become an inseparable part of us. The stress that we experience thereafter affects our brains and body\'s development.  One might move away from the trauma of loss mentally, but emotionally, spiritually, and...

Is it possible to reprogram the brain? In neuroscience research, it has been found that we are only using 10% of the brain\'s potential. In order to maximize our brain\'s storage capacity and capitalize on our latent potential, we need to remove the negative emotional stress that stands in the way of our goals and dreams. The common integrative area, or CIA, is a  part that actually determines you...

The human tendency is to avoid hidden stress, especially something that hurts us and causes anxious situations. But the thing that we avoid gets embedded into the body and stays concealed. Sometimes we try to avoid it by conjuring fanciful daydreams of the future or the past. We think that we cannot face a stressful or challenging life situation and we wish to evade it. But if we cannot recognize...

The body stores memories of the past.  Memories of past experiences, encoded in our bodies, can have a very strong impact on our present. It is possible to experience the physical expression of a past memory without having conscious awareness of where it came from. Time has reality only to our conscious belief system. The brain makes no distinction between past and present. A triggering experience...

Imagination is where the magic starts. It is at the heart of creation, it is what makes us human. Imagination is not about escaping from reality.  It is the art of creating the possible. You have to first see it in the mind\'s eye. Through imagination, you build flexibility of thought and then a new reality. Human intelligence is the means, imagination is the road. Where it leads is up to you. You...

Beliefs are foundational. They are at the core of how we function.  It doesn’t matter if our beliefs are true or not if they are based on reality or imagined. The truth is what we believe dictates how we interact with the world around us. Our belief system is an invisible force behind our behaviour.  The good news is that you are not a victim of your preconceived beliefs. - Beliefs can be examined...

Anticipatory anxiety is the fear of what could happen in the future. With this type of anxiety, we may fixate on the things we can\'t control or predict. The future always seems out of our reach. It is out of reach because it does not exist.  The only place it can be found is in our heads. The unknown represents a possible threat.  What we don\'t know we cannot control and what we can\'t control i...

Emotional Maturity is the ability to be mindful of ourselves and of our thoughts and feelings that result from what happens inside or outside of us. It primarily means to consciously choose our response with intention and care. Emotional Maturity is the ability to know that we’re at the crossroad, possibly stuck in the mud and in order to grow and become who we want to be, we need to hold ourselve...

What were you thinking about one second ago? Maybe you were internally voicing your thoughts or adding images or feelings to them. We all do this automatically throughout the day. We spend a lot of time listening to ourselves talk inside our heads. Every time you read or decide or imagine something there’s an inner voice and 40% of the time we’re attending to that inner voice. When silent talking...

All too often we look at life with the eyes of yesterday. Everything that we see has our thoughts attached to it. As we look at something we attach a label to it, presume that it will be as it was before, and then act accordingly. We never really know what we’re looking at, even when we’re seeing the most familiar things. Try to look at someone you live with, with fresh, new eyes…feel what you see...

Goals, targets, destinations, deadlines - we are all surrounded by these words. How often are we mentally in the present but our minds are moving into the future? We focus so much on the destination that we lose out on the experiences and enjoyment of our present.   It is difficult to avoid a result-driven world, but if we are mindful, we can still reach the destination while enjoying the journey....

“Does life have meaning? What is the point of it all?” Is it just the mere living of a life, pursuing goals like family, finances, academic accomplishments or success, however we define it? To understand this let’s get to the basics first… you might think I’m being ultra-philosophical but isn’t it human nature to attach meaning to everything? If we didn’t, we couldn’t make sense of all the crazine...

The power of listening to yourself. Our inner speech turns out to shape our thoughts and decisions in more ways than you might have imagined. In reality, our fear of and struggle against these ‘givens’ is the source of our troubles. Once we embrace them we realize that they have exactly what we need to gain the courage, wisdom and happiness we’ve always desired. When we are mindful and make choice...

We all want to take a more light-hearted approach to life. The best and only way to do it is to consciously shift perspective....to accept that your perception of reality becomes your reality! That is to say that your reality is coloured by your expectations, and your expectations are a direct result of your beliefs and your beliefs sprout from the thoughts you constantly dwell upon. To connect, w...

There’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’...and in time we realise that it’s just our social self that labels or accepts these labels. Though it can get scary when you begin to lose the long-held sense of self. But as you stay with it the essential YOU embrace that loss. To connect, with Ritu, just drop her a message at https://wa.link/0bpbgz About Ajna Center for Learning: Since 1987 AJNA has provided the tools...

Empathy has also been called ‘vicarious introspection’, commonly described as the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes. Though it’s important to make sure that you’re assessing how they would feel in their shoes not how you would feel in their shoes! Most often, the problem is, despite the fact that we yearn for others to try fitting into our shoes, are we ready to do the same for them? To c...

I find myself searching and asking the ultimate question, “Does life have meaning? What is the point of it all?” Is it just the mere living of a life, pursuing goals like family, finances, academic accomplishments or success, how do we define it? God is not something outside of ourselves…not some cosmic universal truth waiting to be discovered. It’s a resource we must cultivate ourselves. Meaning...

Human beings have been telling stories since the dawn of civilisation...sharing our own and listening to another. We love to get lost in stories: through a film, a book or a play. We’re drawn into the lives of characters whose heartbreaks and talents reflect our own.... there is comfort in knowing that we can re-live our story whenever we like. Think for moment the story you tell yourself about yo...

Whether it is coffee, cocaine, substances, gambling or social media it’s time to listen to the silent voice within…de-clutter and lighten the load! It’s time to be good to yourself. It’s time to take action, cut unnecessary ties and free up space and time because inaction and indecision take a heavy emotional toll. To connect, with Ritu, just drop her a message at https://wa.link/0bpbgz About Ajna...

“what you want will find it’s way to you”!  How much more evident could it get? Yet because of our conditioning, we are programmed to expect a specific outcome and we channel all our stress and anxiety towards it. By doing so we actually make the outcome less likely to happen. We push it away, distance it from us. It’s important to understand that your happiness doesn’t lie on the other side of a...

Hidden Anxiety Many times we mask what we feel inside. Even when these emotions are negative and stressful we are programmed to hide them. Over time this is detrimental to our well being and shows up as anxiety... even though we function well enough it festers and infects unseen. Listen to this podcast to learn adaptive and productive strategies to help yourself. To connect, with Ritu, just drop h...