Peace is within us, as is joy. Sylwia Niemczyk asks Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spiritual teacher and founder of the Art of Living Foundation, about tough times and ways to deal with them.
It is late in the evening when we talk. Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has just finished giving a lecture that lasted several hours, but there are no signs of fatigue on his face. For dozens of years, he has been on the road constantly, giving lectures and leading meditation and breathing workshops all over the world. He has been mentioned for years as a possible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize due to his charitable and peace-making activities (in Colombia, Ukraine, and Iraq, among others). He has visited Poland several times. We meet in Taraska, a village near the city of Łódź, Poland, where the Polish center of the Art of Living Foundation—which he started—is located.
You mentioned in today’s lecture that everyone should be a teacher for others. Was that the reason you started teaching?
Not only should we all be teachers, but in fact, we all already are, whether we want to be or not. Everyone plays the role of a teacher in their lifetime. The mother is the first teacher of her child, as is the father. Every day we teach others and learn from others because every behavior we exhibit is an example, and providing examples is teaching. But it’s true that some of us take this role as a primary one. I took mine with joy. I like meeting people, talking to them, showing them how to find peace. I enjoy encouraging them—to smile more often, for example. I believe that everyone should teach others to smile. We can spread positivity, we can all be teachers of joy.
You are well known for that.
I really think that everyone has the potential within them to share positivity with others. We just need to recognize that we have it and let it grow; if we give joy more space, it will fill it all. Let’s show this joy of life to others—that is exactly what teaching is all about. Little acts of kindness can also have a large positive effect. In our brains there are mirror neurons, or nerve cells, which cause all of us to influence each other and to infect each other with our emotions. This means: smile, and the people around you will smile, too! It’s simple, isn’t it?
But it’s not only about the smile—at today’s meeting you taught us delight, too. You advised us to greet each thing we encounter in life with a joyful “wow!”
That’s another simple truth: our lives depend on ourselves, for the most part. Not for the whole part, but really for the most of it. Our “wow!” can be an expression of delight as well as an expression of dreadfulness. It depends on us how we pronounce it.
Aren’t you surprised that today we still need to remind ourselves of such simple truths?
Our inner positivity is often covered up by stress, tension, and ignorance. People these days often feel unhappy—I hear this at every meeting. I think one reason is that they don’t have anything to compare their life to—they don’t really realize how good, how comfortable the times we all live in are. Of course, that is only one of the possible reasons. Another might be how deeply we—both children and adults—are immersed in social media these days. We glean a lot of good things from social media, but we receive just as many bad things, too. We feel judged, and we lose focus—this can create a sense of danger in us, and that leads to anger and malevolence. We don’t even realize this is the exact way in which we are punishing ourselves. I believe that every child comes into this world fearless, but they soon learn fear from us. An infant is not afraid of being ridiculed, it is not afraid of losing anything.
Today at a lecture, you also heard a question about how to cherish joy. A young boy asked how to retain his euphoria regarding his birthday.
I advised him to stop being afraid of losing it. He should stop thinking about losing his joy, and start showing it and sharing it with those around him instead. The more he shares his joy, the more joy there will be—that is the way it works!
As adults we are filled with fear of losing something all the time.
I remember that when I was a little five- or six-year-old boy, I was afraid of losing my grandmother. I would watch her breathing, and when her breath slowed down because she was falling asleep, I would shake her to wake her up. I was so afraid of her dying. So, I must have believed at that time that things could come to an end.
You don’t think this way any longer?
As people, we only perceive a particular scope of existence, of the being that we are. Death does not mean losing life.
People that have come to meet you often recall that they felt safe around you. How do you build this sense of security?
You need to be patient and neutral. Refrain from judgment. You must realize that everyone is a part of your family—and treat everybody that way. If you do this, it is very easy for others to feel safe around you.
A part of your family?
That’s how I perceive every single person on this planet. I feel sympathy for everyone’s suffering and tension in the same way.
How do we get rid of those emotions?
I still can’t understand why children are taught so many things in schools all over the world, but never how to deal with stress. How to breathe, how to calm their minds. How to meditate. Everything we need is inside of us. Why don’t children at school practice saying “wow!”? They could do it in every lesson!
One of your books is titled Celebrating Silence. What does that mean?
We are immersed in noise, but the key to everything is silence. This doesn’t mean to say nothing or to listen to nothing, but to withdraw all our senses. It doesn’t need to be quiet around us, but we need to calm down our minds. It is our mind that needs to be fully, completely silent. This is the remedy.
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