“Make Your Life a Work of Art”

I was on my own small search for meaning, and for the most part I was disappointed by the lack of answers. The general plan or arc of our lives (school, work, family) seemed devoid of the richness and magic I craved from life.

I work for a major telecommunication company in Bangalore, India. I write this article to tell you how Eknath Easwaran’s eight-point program is helping me to have a more meaningful work life in the midst of a high tech, fast paced work environment.

My journey began when a long held idea was comprehensively challenged: the idea that professional success is a universal panacea. At the time this caused considerable turmoil and doubt – if this was not true what else was untrue? What forms the foundations of a meaningful life? What was I meant to be doing for the next 50 years? Questions that I had never stopped to consider were demanding to be answered.

I began meditating when I was 23. I had had no prior experience of meditation, but I was eager to deepen my spiritual awareness. The previous eighteen months of my life had been some of the most spiritually and emotionally difficult I'd ever known.

I had been practicing and meditating some time, but agitation at family gatherings was not going away and was quite frankly, a plague that I wanted to be rid of. Through meditation and practice of the eight point program my awareness of this problem had come into sharper focus.

In my daily reading from the Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, I had come across a new challenge. Sri Easwaran said that if a person was irritating you, your best approach was to seek that person out, spend time with him, focus on the good in him. 

As a native of the Netherlands,  I have been practicing Easwaran’s method of meditation since my undergraduate years. In Holland, meditators are not thick on the ground, so I have my own strategies for maintaining a regular practice.