Why Working on Yourself Isn’t Selfish
As you uplift yourself you uplift everyone you are energetically connected to, so the work you think you are doing selfishly in isolation is reaching all of them.
In his first months at the monastery Dandapani felt selfish for leaving a family he loved, and asked his guru about it. His guru laid a tissue on the table, put him at the centre and his family at the corners, and lifted the middle. Dandapani applies the same picture to leaders, and argues that you have to measure the change in yourself or you will not know whether you are growing.
What this talk covers
- He went to his guru early in his monastic life and asked whether it was selfish to be living there by himself, away from the mother he loved.
- His guru pulled a tissue from a Kleenex box, placed him in the middle with his mother, father and brother at the corners, lifted the middle, and said that as you uplift yourself you uplift everyone you are energetically connected to.
- Doing the work in the monastery, he watched the change in himself land on his family and the people around him.
- The same holds for a business leader: reach a higher state of consciousness and your whole team is affected, because everyone who interacts with you for even thirty seconds walks away feeling good.
- One way to measure whether you are in a higher state of consciousness is whether your actions and reactions result in a better outcome for everyone, and if you do not measure you do not know whether you are growing.
As you uplift yourself, you uplift everyone that you're energetically connected to.Dandapani
Questions
-
He asked his guru exactly that. The answer was the tissue on the table: lift the middle and the whole thing rises. The work you think you are doing in isolation reaches everyone you are energetically connected to.
-
He gives one measure: whether your actions and reactions produce a better outcome for everyone involved rather than a lesser one.
-
Because if you do not measure, you do not know if you are growing. He points out that if you have been meditating for two years and nothing about you has changed, it is obviously not helping.
Transcript
684 words · 3:50
You have your story, I had this story in your app that just has stuck with me. And I think it's when I originally reached out to you because I did a video saying that I learned from the story of the napkin. Oh, yes.
Yeah. Will you tell the story and about how it helped me, this one story helped me completely become at peace with people disliking me or people having comments about me, even if they were my loved ones.
Yes. It changed my context completely. Yeah. In the first few months of going to the monastery, I felt very selfish that I have a loving family
and I left them, especially my mom, my love very much. And I went up to my guru and I said, you know, am I selfish to be living here by myself? And I went and talked to my mother again, you know, in my life. And he reached over to his box of Kleenex and he pulled out a tissue and laid it on the
table and he says, you're in the middle and your mom's in this corner, your dad's in this corner and your brother's in the other corner. And he grabbed the middle and he lifted it up. And he says, as you uplift yourself, you uplift everyone that you're energetically connected
to. So the work, in essence, what he was saying is that the work that you're doing on yourself, though you might think you're doing it in isolation and very selfishly, you're actually impacting so many people around you that you're energetically connected to.
And it completely flipped the narrative in my mind. And then during the spending this time in the monastery, during work on myself, I realized was impacting people and I could see the change of my life being a monastic and how it had on my family and different people around me. And the same for business leaders, right? If you run
a company and you're a leader and you work on you to uplift yourself to get to a higher state of consciousness where you react and react in ways that have better outcomes. That's one way to measure if you're on a higher state of consciousness that your actions and reactions result in a better outcome for everyone, right, than a lesser outcome, then you impact your whole team just by doing
that work on yourself. Because your presence in the office, in the company, every time someone sees you, they interact with you, even if it's for 30 seconds, they walk away feeling good. When I went to see my guru in his office or whenever I saw him, I walked away. I always felt uplifted. Just from his presence, sometimes just looking at him, walking, I go like,
and I have a smile on my face. It was because of the work he did on himself. So I think that's, you know, one of the greatest gifts leaders and companies and businesses can do is to do the work to uplift your consciousness and measure the change. Because if you don't measure, you don't know if you're growing.
I think that's one of the most profound things from you too is that idea of measurement. That probably triggers a lot of other spiritual people. Triggers all the spiritual people because the new age spiritual people don't like structure. They don't want a path. They don't want rules. They don't want guidelines. All the successful
people I've met with are so extremely disciplined. Their life is filled with guidelines and practices and rules and frameworks, the spiritual people, none of that. And they are committed to not being committed. And they're extremely devoted.
They have so much devotion to not being committed. So when you talk to them about measuring your meditation, your spiritual unfolding, they're like, what is this? Why should you measure it?
What, do you think it's business? I'm like, yeah. If you're meditating for two years and you're still a jig, well, obviously it's not helping. you