The Rat in the House
July 23, 2020 • Insights on Life, Learn
I have the honor to work with an athlete who is one of the best in the world in his category of the sport he competes in.
In a recent conversation with him, he asked me if an unresolved issue he had was affecting his performance on the field.
I answered, without hesitation, “Yes. Absolutely.”
I went on and elaborated to him how I viewed it.
Imagine a large house. A mansion with many rooms. Now imagine a rat that lives in this mansion.
Will this rat confine itself to the kitchen and just stay there because this is where the food is and most likely he can nibble on crumbs every night? Absolutely not. The rat will travel and explore the mansion.
It will make its way to the living room where it will possibly find more crumbs or pieces of popcorn that rolled off the palm of the owner’s hand into the cracks of the sofa as he dozed off on the couch while binging on a Netflix series way into the night. There’s always a buffet of crumbs on the couch.
It will also explore the bedrooms, the pantry, and anywhere else it can make its way to in the mansion. And wherever this intrepid rat goes it will bring along with it its diseases and germs, contaminating every part of this home.
The mind is your mansion. If you have a rat in your subconscious, and in this case when I refer to a rat I mean an unresolved emotional experience, then you can be sure it is affecting every part of your life be it in a large or subtle way. Unresolved emotional experiences in our subconscious affects the way we act, how we respond and react to experiences, it affects our state of mind, our physical body and more. This is the barrier to growth and change.
Left unattended, this mischief of rats in the subconscious will only create an increased fecundity of mental baggage.
The goal, therefore, is to eradicate the rat.
How many rats do you have in your mansion?
Part 2 – Let’s Talk Meditation
Everybody and their dog has an opinion on meditation (including me). Most of these folks don’t meditate or have never been formally trained or even more so seriously committed to one meditation path. The latter truly is a telltale sign of how seriously one takes his or her meditation practice. Wh...
Read More
Let’s talk Meditation! – Part 1
I’m starting the year by writing a 3-part series on meditation with the goal of bringing some clarity around it and dispelling a few myths. First things, first. Let’s get clear on terminology. This is important because we want to train our subconscious to understand the specific meaning of a word...
Read More
Old Soul, Young Soul
If I can accept myself for where I am in my evolution, then I can accept others for where they are in their evolution. As a Hindu and from personal experiences, I believe and subscribe to the concept of reincarnation. Simply said, reincarnation describes a belief that we are a soul living in a ph...
Read More
The Things We Tell Ourselves
Well, it has been a really long time since I’ve sent one of these emails out. Apologies for my hiatus. October and November were filled with events I spoke at in the US, across Europe and in India. My travels culminated with a retreat that I held in South India where I led a group…
Read More
