Vacation time!

Vacation time for school kids would soon start  in India. It’s around this time that the working parents try to use their leave balance to plan a vacation with their kids.

So here’s a list of benefits that taking a vacation brings:

1.  Quality Family time: Family bonding is one of the main reasons why one should take a vacation with their loved ones. Especially because of the fast pace of life and stressful lives that we generally  lead these days. A vacation helps focus on the most important aspect of your life for which we struggle to make ends meet. Our family! For singles who plan a solo trip, you connect with the most important person on the earth aka You!! 

2. Sense to your slogging: This may be applicable more to the working class. We lead a life where we work hard, earn money, slog to sustain our life and make something of it. We do things that are supposed to be done routinely. Kids have to study, elderly people have to lead a mundane routine life. Thus, the welcome break of a vacation helps us to make sense of all our slogging during the normal course of life. 

3. Time for reflection:Sometimes we are so caught up in our own lives that we do not even have the time to wait and smell the roses, to reflect on where our life is heading to. Sometimes all it takes is a change from the daily routine to get an epiphany to what we really want from life. Thus helping us to plan our lives ahead.

4. Open doors to a new world: If our vacation involves sight-seeing and visiting new places, then it’s an awesome chance to enhance our horizons to new cultures, way of living, food, language and generally help us engage in a life different from ours. Sometimes an added benefit is, we also learn to be grateful for the small things you take so much for granted. I remember visiting Leh Ladakh (a small beautiful place in Kashmir, India) and feeling immensely grateful for all the food available back home when i saw the lack of availability of fresh fruits and veggies all throughout the year. Realised we take some things for granted and forget to be grateful for what we have. 

5. Renewed vigour for routine: After a vacation, we come back energetic with a renewed vigour for tackling the routine life and its' stresses. We are refreshed to go back to the grind knowing that it’s just for some more time. We soon can start planning our next vacation!

After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ☺☺

PS: Yours truly is so excited about the upcoming vacation and family time planned!!

The right start!

I usually do not prefer reading the news paper, following new channels on TV/Internet first thing in the morning. I noticed more often than not,  the top head-lines contains "not" so positive news.

E.g. : assault/rape cases, plummeting stock markets or  deaths due to natural calamities/accidents. I get affected at some deep level and feel unsettled when I read these news articles. I accepted the fact that I am not really made up of iron to read the gory updates and go through the day unaffected.

So no news first thing in the morning. Then how do I start my day? 

I kept reading about all the successful people and their morning routines. Most of them, if not all, start their day with some sort of self care and love. Taking a clue, I enrolled for a meditation session and learnt the right way to do it. I think with that I gifted myself a life skill.

Now I have built up a morning routine as below:

1. After waking up, Thanking God for giving me one more day on this planet - 1 min

2. Hydrating myself with plenty of water. Warm water, if the climate is chill - 2 mins

3. Warm up and some exercise - 20 mins (Listen to music or do it with my partner to make this enjoyable)

4. Meditation - 10 mins.  

Total - 33 mins that set me up for an awesome day ahead.

There are few more things that I want to incorporate in my morning schedule like eating some fruit, writing in my journal etc. Planning to do that eventually but it is a good start to feeding my soul some good things☺👸 

Motto is to live today better than yesterday.

Sunday!

Sunday Special, Dint have words to express what a blissful day it was. So prepared the colourful blog picture ☺☺

Quality time with hubby, Good food, a little bit of cleaning of our house and grocery shopping for the week ahead. Nothing great, in fact, quite a mundane day if you ask anyone but it was special for me because today I have multiple experiences that I savoured. (Read this blog if you want to know more about my savouring technique - Pause And Savour!)

The savouring technique really works wonders for me and today when I look back I feel it was really an awesome day. I get 10/10 for mindfulness today because I was 100% involved in whatever I did and that's my definition of success. A perfectly mindful day!

Hope you all had a great day too..!

Until next time,

Mindfully yours G ✌ 💖

To be or not to be married?!?

Happy Happy Saturday ☺💖 

Today was a very chill day for me. Hubby dearest was at home, it is always good to have him around the whole day!

We also saw a movie together after a long time. It was this funny movie where both the male and female protagonists were super afraid to get married. But due to pressure from their respective families they are dragged into marriage and how they end up loving each other. Very typical love story but why I decided to write about it is, these days single people are actually feeling afraid about getting married and settling down seeing the increasing number of divorces in our society. They may fear that life won't be the same any more, there may be limitations to their freedom and way of living life.

I agree that these fears may have some element of truth but I would also like to highlight some pointers as to why married life is super cool.

1. Yes, you may never be able to live life as you used to as a single person because of course you need to consider your life partner's preferences and make some adjustments but in a true partnership even they do the same. It is always a give and take in this relation too, as any other.  

2. Together you are strength. You always have that one person no matter what happens in your life. Your better halves not only help multiply your joys but also divide(sharing helps reduce) your lows, sorrows.

3. This pointer for the practical ones - you have a bigger pool of resources like money, sharing of responsibilities or even day to day chores.

4. Your partner is a potential best friend - You get to have fun together if you share hobbies or expand your fun activities by trying out things that your partner likes. You never know, you may take a strong liking to something which you had never thought of trying earlier. Apart from that, this person always has your back, come what may.

The list can go on but I think you get the gist, I am totally for the institution of marriage. It comes with its cons but the pros far out way them, if you really manage to find your soul mate/better half/life partner!

Pause and Really Savour!

Life goes on a fast pace, days come and go in a jiffy. You get up, chalk out your to-dos for the day, go to work, finish assignments to meet deadlines, come back home, have dinner and sleep. Repeat the whole cycle the entire week. Finally Friday comes with a big bang ☺  You hope that for the next 2 days  - you get to live life the way you want to. Saturday is full of fun, sleep, good food, relaxation and boom comes the Sunday! The day which again promises you LIFE on your terms!

You wish life was one big never ending weekend where you enjoy it daily!!

In fact you can actually do that. YES, you can really enjoy every single day of your life even when you follow the routine mentioned below. 

By way of using the practice of Savouring.

A quick definition of "savour" is taste (good food or drink) and enjoy it to the full. But who said it should be limited to good food or drink? When life is happening to you, if you mindfully look at your life events as a third party, there will always be something or the other which you can savour. Really experience the "good event" happening to you, be fully present in the experience and try to close your eyes and feel the sensations passing by you. You should experience the moment so fully that the memory of it should be etched in your mind so that you can actually feel the same sensations when you think of the event again. Believe me, our mind has that power to re-create the experiences, provided you are mindful and really savour the moment!

Today it happened to me early morning, I was watering my rose plant and was really feeling awesome looking at the pretty yellow roses that had bloomed. There was this cool breeze that was passing by and suddenly I really felt joyful. I just had to close my eyes, feel the breeze and pop came the image of the beautiful roses and I really savoured those 2 mins of breeze, sunshine and roses. (Captured it in above pic for you!). It kind of set the tone for me today, the whole day has been passing in a happy mood.

If we savour one moment every day, it will be 365 happy memories for the year. This treasure trove may even help us get out of foul mood on some rainy day!

So what is it that you savoured today? Do let me know..

Believe in yourself before anyone else does..

I took time to realize this but not all that your good meaning elders say is true and not all that your bad meaning acquaintances say is false. In fact, nothing anyone says is true or false, it is just their perspective on it. The main thing is where you place your belief.

Scenario 1:

There was this old lady I knew, who kept making snide remarks about me being a single girl and not knowing how to cook. She always poked fun of me and was dead sure my lack of cooking skills will be detrimental to find a husband. Sometimes her remarks made me feel inadequate but soon after meeting my future husband all my worries were soothed as he believed that I should play on my strengths. He wanted a happy partner not a superb cook for a wife. (For all who are still being judgmental, I do cook for my husband these days but that I do when I feel like and it turns out to be just to his liking!)

Point here is I believed in myself, I believed that if I could get college degrees in first class I was totally capable of learning how to cook too. And that made all the difference, today I love the process of cooking and feeding my dear ones.

Scenario 2:

After slogging for years in smaller IT companies, I finally got my dream job in a big MNC, where the pay was good and the profile was challenging.  Add to it, I thought my manager, senior most in our team, to be an elderly good-meaning chap. But as days passed, he started turning into the boss from "Devil Wears Prada", criticizing all my work, belittling my efforts in trying to handle the overwhelming work load which he kept dumping on me. I really gave the job my best but in most appraisal meetings, the feedback I got was about how inadequate I am and how there are others who are much better than me. To top all the negative feedback, he kept mentioning to me that I may have been a wrong hire at my grade and that I should have been hired at a level below than the current one! All this was too much for me to handle, I had really started believing that I am not good enough in the job and that I was putting up a very sorry show. I was thoroughly miserable, each day going to the office was one tremendous effort for me. I did what I best knew, to flee from the site. I quit my job and resigned to the fate of being labeled as a loser (Oh yes! There are people who think that you are a failure because you are unemployed and you quit without an alternate job in hand. Office politics is a taken and everyone faces them at some point, apparently most of them put up with the same or tackle it adeptly. I did neither.)    

Ok, coming to the crux of the matter, I totally started believing that I was a loser, not a capable employee and a totally wrong hire for the position. Had I not believed it, I would have had the strength to fight the situation, come up with a plan to deal the critic and stick to the job.  

Two very different scenarios with different outcomes. The differentiating factor was my level of belief in myself at both these times. I now realize that there will always be people voicing their opinions (right or wrong), some sadists trying to pull you down, destroy your self confidence or image but if you know who you are, what your worth is, even the naysayers' voice don't affect you. 

So always believe in yourself, root for your own progress. Eventually people will follow your lead!

Reminiscing the awesome weekend that I had!

So the weekend starts with a bang!

Preparing to-do lists, ensuring no surface in the house has dust, all furniture and glass in the house looks spic and span. Shopping for items that make the house more comfortable, throwing of junk, aesthetically bad looking stuff and buying new ones.

Reason? A house party at our place! Yay! On Saturday we have the husband's besties coming and on Sunday, mine. A catch up long due with both set of friends.

My main intent was to make all invitees super comfortable and get them to rewind from the hectic work week they have had. So after all the clean up, ensuring fresh bed-sheets and cushion covers were in place, my house was ready to host a warm cozy party for our dear friends.

Saturday night started at 7.30 pm with a bang. Friends poured in and hurray... warm conversations, tasty food and fuzzy drinks on the go!  As the party built up, funny past incidents and group memories were discussed and re-lived. All of us really enjoyed a hearty laugh. I still recall one moment where all of us were wiping tears rolling due to laughing so hard, I wanted to freeze the moment, all smiley faces - really happy in the moment. I remember thinking, when was the last time I laughed so hard? I really don't recall, may be while seeing a comedy show I was following lately but then is it the same as sharing a few laughs with good old friends?

By 1 am our party came to an end, 5 hours of bliss ended and I crashed on bed. The last coherent thing I remember for the day was my husband's blissful smile that said "he had a blast".  That sure made me a happy soul!

Sunday was again a repeat of the whole cleaning process and ensuring the place is ready for my gang. My friends came at 7.30 pm and this time there was a lot of catching up to do. We chatted for a long time, heart to heart that happen only with your oldest and closest friends. We also played cards accompanied by fun banter through the night. This was followed by dinner and some more conversations. Eventually at midnight, my dearest buddies left me just like Cinderella may have left her prince charming. All warm and happy but wanting for more!

So if you guys out there haven't been in touch with your besties, this blog post is to gently remind you that there is something more in life than work or whatever it is that is keeping you away from a catch up. Do plan and meet up your friends, it really does make one a happy being ☺☺☺