Sunday, December 19, 2010

Lighten Your Baggage

  Once upon a time a big monk and a little monk were traveling together. They came to the bank of a river and found the bridge was damaged. They had to wade across the river. There was a pretty lady who was stuck at the damaged bridge and couldn't cross the river. The big monk offered to carry her across the river on his back. The lady accepted.  The little monk was shocked by the move of the big monk. "How can big brother carry a lady when we are supposed to avoid all intimacy with females?" thought the little monk. But he kept quiet. The big monk carried the lady across the river and the small monk followed unhappily. When they crossed the river, the big monk let the lady down and they parted ways with her.                                                                  

All along the way for several miles, the little monk was very unhappy with the act of the big monk. He was making up all kinds of accusations about big monk in his head. This got him madder and madder. But he still kept quiet. And the big monk had no inclination to explain his situation. 

Finally, at a rest point many hours later, the little monk could not stand it any further; he burst out angrily at the big monk. "How can you claim yourself a devout monk, when you seize the first opportunity to touch a female, especially when she is very pretty? All your teachings to me make you a big hypocrite.                              

The big monk looked surprised and said, "I had put down the pretty lady at the river bank many hours ago, how come you are still carrying her along ?"Emotional Baggage_image008

 We encounter many unpleasant things in our life- fear, guilt, pain, negative belief, regret, etc, they irritate us and they make us angry. Sometimes, they cause us a lot of hurt, sometimes they cause us to be bitter or jealous. We just burden ourselves with them and they become obstacles in our life. But like the little monk, we are not willing to let them go away and to some extent it becomes painful. We keep on carrying the baggage of the "pretty lady"  with us. We let them keep on coming back to hurt us , make us angry, make us bitter and cause our self-esteem to drop. Why? Simply because we are not willing to put down or let go of the baggage of the "pretty lady". We should let go of the pretty lady immediately after crossing the river that is after the unpleasant situation is over. It may sound easy when said, but it is much better when done. It will not only make us feel lighter but easier for us to move on in our life. There is absolutely no need hurt ourselves with these unpleasant feelings, especially after it is over. Infact, be grateful that it happened and learn from your past.

Take a while, note down on a piece of paper, a list of all the baggages you carry with you, analyze them and ask yourself,” is it really worth carrying all of this on my head ?”  I’m sure the answer is, “No, not at all !”

So promise yourself to shake off those unwanted baggages from your life. It is not worth, especially if you cannot do anything about them, right?

Lighten up!

Vishal D

2 comments:

Unknown said... [Reply]

Excellent awareness post~

~He who has no Christmas in his heart will never find Christmas under a tree~ Merry Christmas~

Unknown said... [Reply]

Thanks Dorothy...
Well Said :-)
Merry Christmas to you and your family!

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