Buzz By The Bay: Spiritual Solutions For Life’s Challenges | VIDEO

Mumbai, Feb 23: When life feels overwhelming and rational answers fall short, many of us turn to spirituality for clarity, healing, and direction. In this powerful episode of Buzz by the Bay, we sit down with Toronto-based Vedanta teacher and spiritual author Manisha Melwani to explore practical spiritual solutions to life’s toughest challenges.

Visit rhodia.club for more information.

A devoted disciple of Swami Chinmayananda, Manisha shares timeless wisdom rooted in Vedanta philosophy and discusses insights from her book, Your Spiritual Journey: A Guide to Unfolding Your Divine Self.

In this episode, we discuss:
The art and power of introspection.
How to deal with negative emotions and break unhealthy patterns.
Why the universe repeats lessons until we truly learn them.

On introducing Vedanta to modern audiences

Ques: Your book, Your Spiritual Journey: A Guide to Unfolding Your Divine Self, is a great introduction to Hindu philosophy. It’s like a Vedanta 101, which would be ideal for Western audiences?

Ans: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Because people who are in the West, they need more information, more meaning in their lives, but they don't know where to look. And they do look to the Eastern traditions, and they end up at a yoga studio. They might take a meditation class, but there are many of them who have questions.

The book is also useful for a person who is here in India because the knowledge that we get from the Masters is scattered in so many books, and a lot of it is in Sanskrit and in different regional languages. But I’ve compiled it as an introduction and overview to your spiritual journey.

Applying Vedanta to modern problems

Ques: You specialise in spirituality and wellness solutions for life and stress management. Do you essentially apply the principles of Vedanta to modern-day problems?

Ans: Yes. Essentially, that’s what I do. When we understand that we are spiritual beings on an evolutionary journey through lifetimes, that's when it brings a higher perspective to life.

Ques: Which areas of life do people face the most problems in your experience?

Ans: Relationships are always an issue for a lot of people. We always question why a person behaves in a certain way or says certain things. We have to have a higher understanding, or you could say, a deeper understanding of the real meaning of relationships.

For example, that they are like a mirror. It's not about the other person. It's the other person who is providing a mirror to you. And whatever you see in them is what you have within you. So if I get angry at you, it's because I already have anger in me, right?

On recurring life lessons

Ques: How do you support people who come to you with such problems?

Ans: The way that I support people's lives is by giving them a higher spiritual perspective. Their real identity is that they are spiritual beings on an evolutionary journey, and if they learn and grow from the challenges that they face in life now, then they don't have to relearn the lessons again. Because the universe is relentless. Unless you learn the lesson, the same problems will repeat themselves.

Ques: So you’re saying the universe will keep sending you the same situations till you learn your lesson. Can you give us an example?

Ans: So supposing there is someone who says, I don't want to have this person in my life anymore, I'm separating. Well, you can separate, but you will find that another person with similar issues will come into your life because the universe wants you to learn. What we're actually here to do is grow and learn and evolve, and that's the real purpose of our life, to evolve and to bring out the spiritual shine from within.

Relationships are gold. This is where we really learn. They come into our lives to teach us what we need to learn, whether it’s forgiveness or acceptance or overcoming jealousy.

A personal turning point

Ques: Let's talk a little bit about your journey and how you got onto the spiritual path. You became a seeker at the age of 20, when you lost your father suddenly?

Ans: I always liked metaphysical things as a teenager, and I was into things like palmistry, astrology, face reading, body language, you name it.
And then my father passed suddenly. He had a heart attack, and he was only 54. I was 20, and it was devastating. My mother was like a bird with just one wing, and I was closest to her. Together, we started seeking solace through satsang, religious gatherings. Because when my father passed, I had so many questions. Why did you have to go so quickly?
Where's he gone? They brought the body back to the house right after he passed before they took the body to the crematorium. And I remember looking at the body. It didn't look anything like my loving dad. And I remember saying, just take it away. There was no sense of identifying with that body. And I wanted to know, where is he? Because the real he is not there. Why are we going through this? What is the journey of the soul? What's my real purpose? These are the deep questions that started really festering in my mind.
That was the turning point that brought me onto the path of a seeker.

On suffering and spiritual growth

Ques: You have said in one of your articles that suffering is not random, that it's designed to move us towards our goal solely. So what is the purpose of suffering?

Ans: That’s the beauty of having a spiritual perspective, because it adds purpose even to your suffering. Otherwise, I become a victim. People carry all this baggage. It becomes a part of the identity, that I suffered and I'm a survivor, but these are the things we need to let go. Why not just be free? Maybe what you need to learn is acceptance. Maybe what you need to learn is how to love, how to give. The suffering can teach you all of that. And imagine if you tell the universe, ‘Hey, you didn't do the right thing, this is unjustified. I shouldn't be going through all this’. Who am I? One single creature in creation, challenging the infinite intelligence of the creator. So this is why we need to understand that there is a supreme intelligence that is guiding us, and that we're here to evolve.

The discipline of introspection

Ques: You've spoken about introspection and said that it is an indispensable habit of a spiritual seeker. Explain the process and what are the benefits of introspection?

Ans: Introspection is not meditation. It is a time that we dedicate—maybe ten, fifteen minutes, at the end of the day—to look back. You sit by yourself, you look back into your day.

You start from the morning and then you observe all the interactions that you had throughout the day. And you don't just go through them like a movie. You are observing your inner motives. For example, when I spoke to this person, was I paying a compliment because I wanted something back? Or when I spoke to this person, could I have said it in a nicer way? When you're examining your motives and your actions, your speech, you're doing your own introspection, you're going within. It's a four-step process that Swami Chinmayananda has explained.

Ques: What are the four steps?

Ans: The first is you look within—the introspection. The second is detection. You detect what you didn’t realise at that time and what you could have done better.

Buzz By The Bay: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar On Mahashivratri, Meditation, And Why Inner Peace Matters Today

Unless you detect, you would start another day and you might make the same mistakes again because you are not aware. The next step is to negate. And you don't leave it there because that becomes a void.

The fourth step is to substitute with a positive action, something that you can do to help you remember not to do the same thing again. So you introspect, you detect, you negate and you substitute.

Read full story at source