How to Live a Meaningful Life?

Q: How would you define a meaningful life? How can one make his life more fulfilling?

Guru: Everything that we do is in some way contributing to someone’s life. If you see how to make this a conscious process of contributing to everyone’s life through your work, then your life will be very different. Contributing does not mean that you will not make money in your business. If you constantly see how to give your best to everyone around you, then profit will happen – you do not have to worry about it.

guru: We usually think of “success” in terms of what we could do and where we will stand in the world. What I see is, generally successful people are far more stressed and are suffering a lot more than the not-so-successful people. Success means essentially, you are sitting on a good perch. So if someone sits on a perch which they are not equipped to sit on, success kills them. If people are successful because of social trends, educational qualifications or family backgrounds which carry them to certain places, then they suffer constantly. If you want to enjoy your perch, it is very important that before you engineer situations for success, you first engineer yourself.

Essentially, people’s stress and suffering have nothing to do with success or failure. Stress is not happening to you because of the work that you are doing but because you have not learned how to handle the basic faculties of your body and mind. Every human experience has a chemical basis to it. You may call it stress, anxiety, bliss, or ecstasy, but everything has a chemical basis to it. As there is a science for external wellbeing, there is a whole science as to how to create your inner chemistry. Yoga has many methods through which you can create the right kind of chemistry where being peaceful and joyous comes naturally to you.