Through my eyes

We all have the same amount of time on this Earth and time is rolling away for all of us at the same pace. It is how you manage your time and store your energy that will determine what kind of life you get to experience.

A recently published book, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy, is a spiritual and self-help book by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. The book is intended to be a spiritual guide with practices for personal growth, and also a look at the author's own spiritual journey.

Here are a few fascinating pointers Sadhguru mentions in his book that I hope will help you through the week;

* Choose one thing about yourself: your breath or your heartbeat. Pay attention to it for 11 minutes. Do this at least three times a day. Feel free to continue what you are doing. If you lose attention, simply refocus. This will allow you to move from mental alertness to awareness.

* Sit in any comfortable position, with your spine erect. Remain still. Allow your attention to slowly grow still as well. Do this for five to seven minutes a day. You will notice your breath will slow down. This will help you to achieve alignment and stability.

* When it comes to food, you must learn to listen to your body. Eating natural foods, uncooked, when the cells are still alive, will bring an enormous sense of health and vitality to the system.

* There is no need to fix a quota for sleep: when you feel sufficiently relaxed you come awake. If you keep the body very relaxed through the day, your sleep quota will go down naturally. What the body needs is not sleep but restfulness.

* Keeping yourself fit and well is not a battle. Do some activity you enjoy: play a game, swim, walk, run. There is no incompatibility between being active and relaxed at the same time.

* Try sitting alone for an hour. No reading, television, phone or communication. Just see what thoughts dominate your mind. This will help you know what stage of life you are at.

* Try reminding yourself at least once an hour that everything you're carrying — your handbag, your money, your relationships — are things you've accumulated over time. This will help you to move towards a state of meditativeness.

* Love is never between two people. It's what happens within you. Try this for 15 minutes or so: sit with something that means nothing to you now — maybe a tree, a pebble or insect. Do it for a few days in a row. After a while you will find you can look upon it with love. And if you can look at everything lovingly, the whole world becomes beautiful in your experience.

People are desperately trying to stretch time. But if you live very long you live many years of inefficiency, so the best thing is to manage the energy, not to try to manage the time. You can't hold time back, nor can you store it, save it, or accumulate it. So live it one day at a time, one breath, one heartbeat one love.