Life and Spirituality

As I changed the pillow covers on my bed today, the thought struck that I may as well share a useful tip with readers, something we all know but forget so often. I also I took a picture of my bed as shown above for this brief post. All of us know the importance of cleanliness and this begins with our selves and then proceeds to our surroundings. Cleanliness is the beginning of a good quality of life, it is also the beginning of yoga next to basic morality of truth and non-violence ( see here ) A Dust Mite One item of cleanliness is to change our bathing towels and bed linen regularly. However, due to the rush of life, many of us forget to do that every now and then. That cannot be the best thing for one’s sleep, dreams and health. While one may wait a few days more to change bed sheets, do not forget to change pillow covers more often. They are a small light item of bed linen therefore one can easily afford extra sets that can be washed more frequently. That is

Clean from the Toilet   Note: This post contains potty humor that some may find offensive. Take care :) A friend from Australia mentioned that some call Australia down under because it is the A---   of the world. However, this note is about our bottoms, not geographical ones and how to keep them clean. Bottoms tend to get dirty every time we produce poop and while they wash thoroughly with water in many eastern countries, it seems they are still wiping with modern versions of leaves of the forests i.e. toilet paper in the West. I have often wondered what they did in winter back in the old days when there were no toilets and when it snowed so that there were no soft or even prickly leaves on the bushes. Conifers remain ever green but one would hardly recommend the pins and needles they have. They probably picked up a bit of snow as a wipe. Can imagine it must have frozen stiff, LOL While a water wash may be cleaner, it takes practice and unless a Westerner ca

A Window near the South East corner of the author's home   I n one of the earlier posts it was mentioned that the life of ancient Himalayan sages living in lush green surroundings was so disciplined and regulated and they were so aware of their own bodies that they could discern the effect of any new food or herb on their bodies readily. From this was born the ancient Ayurveda science of Herbal medicines. My own life though far removed from that of ancient sages has been fairly well disciplined over the last several years and I too can sense the effect of new foods or changes on my body. Therefore when I noticed that I am sleeping right through the night rather than waking up in the middle of it once every night recently, I wondered what new food or change had taken place in my routine, thoughts or environment. There was nothing new in food etc. but one change had taken place. My home is around a quarter century old. It was self designed and self built on a plot

Cleanliness W hen Patanjali the father of Yoga listed the eight parts of yoga in his founding text on Yoga, the first thing he mentioned that a human needs to do after rejecting his animal and inhumane tendencies such as violence (yama) is cleanliness. He described the five rules or Niyams required for evolution after giving up animal characteristics like violence, stealing etc. These five rules were – cleanliness, contentment i.e. giving up on greed, tap i.e. order and discipline, self assessment to weed out weaknesses and finally trust in the Lord. When this author interpreted Yoga from a modern point of view he had coined the term Entropy Yoga described in an earlier post and cleanliness is the first step here too.   Civilization in the Indian subcontinent appears to have begun in the Indus valley and this civilization as evident from its ruins was a highly clean civilization. The people of this civilization invented the sewerage system and covered drains. However