NAVEEN NIVERTHY


AUTHOR, MARKETING & SALES LEADER, LIFE STRATEGIST

Think Better and Thrive. Step by Step.

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Health. Work. Love. Parenting. Spirituality.

  • Need for Companionship after 40

    Need for Companionship after 40

    And as ridiculous as it may sound, sometimes all any of us needs in life is for someone to hold our hand and walk next to us. James Frey As we age, our social needs and priorities may shift. While we may have had a strong focus on building a career or raising a family…

  • Love can be Pathological

    Love can be Pathological

    Pathological forms of love refer to types of love that are considered abnormal or unhealthy. These can take many different forms and are often associated with personality disorders or other mental health conditions. Some examples of pathological forms of love include: These forms of love can be harmful to both the person experiencing them and…

  • What is Advaita Vedanta?

    Advaita Vedanta is a philosophical and spiritual tradition that originated in ancient India and is widely regarded as one of the most influential and profound philosophical systems in the world. Advaita Vedanta is often referred to simply as “Advaita,” which means “non-dual” in Sanskrit, and it emphasizes the unity and oneness of all things. At…

  • Love as an experience of shared being

    The idea of love as an experience of shared being suggests that when we love someone deeply, we feel a sense of oneness or unity with that person. This feeling of oneness is not just a mental or emotional state, but an experiential one, in which we feel a sense of connection and intimacy that…

  • Fitness for Women after 40

    Fitness for Women after 40

    Staying fit after 40 requires some extra effort and attention to specific areas of health and wellness. Here are some tips for women to stay fit after 40: By incorporating these healthy habits into your daily routine, you can stay fit and healthy well into your 40s and beyond.

  • How to tell whether a person has no psychological disorders?

    It is important to note that only a trained mental health professional can diagnose psychological disorders. However, there are certain signs and behaviors that can indicate whether a person may not have a psychological disorder: It is important to note that even if a person displays these characteristics, they may still have underlying psychological issues…

  • What is the difference between emotion, mood and feelings?

    Emotions, moods, and feelings are related to each other but are distinct concepts. Here’s a brief explanation of the differences: In summary, emotions are specific responses to a particular stimulus, moods are more general states of mind or feeling, and feelings are subjective experiences that can be triggered by emotions or moods.

  • Thumb rules for Financial Wellbeing

    Thumb rules for Financial Wellbeing

    Pay yourself first: As you get paid, put money into savings. Automating it is the best. Build an emergency fund: Save for emergencies an equivalent of six months of your living costs. Use the 50/30/20 rule for Budgeting: Allocate 50% to needs, 30% of your monthly income to wants and 20% towards investments or savings…

  • Fitness: An Essential Shared Value in Relationships

    Fitness: An Essential Shared Value in Relationships

    If you have been reading my blog enough, you know by now that having shared values and interests is critical to the long-term success of relationships. Of several essential shared values like trust, responsibility, loyalty and so on, I believe Physical Fitness is one of the most important because it can make or break a…

  • Eating Right

    I love mental models and I use them wherever possible. They are not always perfect but they are sufficient to help you make better choices. There are five components to fitness viz. cardio vascular endurance, Muscular strenth, muscular endurance, flexibility and body composition. The formula to achieve the right body composition that supports the other…

  • How parents can prioritize their time

    How parents can prioritize their time

    As parents, we want to take up the responsibility of raising our children entirely. But many of us think this means we try to do everything we can to contribute to parenting. Juggling between work and home, if not done right, can get stressful and ultimately affect both work and home. Being hard-pressed for time…

  • Demystifying  Ātmā

    Demystifying Ātmā

    What is Ātmā? Ātmā is not Soul or Individual or an Atomic entity: we need to dissociate these words and unlearn this. Let’s start afresh. Follow me here, slowly, sentence by sentence. Do not rush. After every paragraph, pause and reflect and then move forward. All objective experience is known. We are aware of our…

  • Questions to uncover your Personal Well-being Recipe

    Questions to uncover your Personal Well-being Recipe

    What is human flourishing and what enables it? Dr. Seligman’s PERMA™ theory of well-being is an attempt to answer these fundamental questions. There are five building blocks that enable flourishing – Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (hence PERMA™) – and there are techniques to increase each. Different people will derive well-being from each…

  • Emotional needs of children as they grow

    Emotional needs of children as they grow

    Statistics show that 50% of mental health problems are established by age 14 and 75% by age 24. It is easy for us to identify a child’s physical needs: nutritious food, warm, clean clothes, a roof over their heads, routine bedtimes, and medical care when needed. However, a child’s mental and emotional needs may not…

  • Be a Lamp unto Yourself

    Be a Lamp unto Yourself

    You come to this life alone and leave alone. There is nothing to hold on to in this world except your own being. At least once a day, drop everything on your mind- your worries, projects, tasks, aspirations for some time and just be – be yourself. . Relish that pure joy of being and…

  • On Living: Bertrand Russell, in his words

    On Living: Bertrand Russell, in his words

    This page forms the Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography and is titled ‘What I have lived for. Bertrand Russel is my hero and I have loved him, been influenced by him and been inspired by him since my college days. Today, I can relate better to him as a person and the way he conducted…

  • Questions to discuss with your partner before you say ‘yes’ to marriage

    Questions to discuss with your partner before you say ‘yes’ to marriage

    For all those considering marrying – be it the first time or another time – it always makes sense to understand fully what you’re signing up for when you say ‘yes’ to marrying someone. This applies to both love marriages as well as arranged marriages. Most couples learn this the hard way and it need…

  • The Five Vows for Happiness

    The Five Vows for Happiness

    A Vrata, simply put, is a vow. There is no religion that doesn’t prescribe or include different kinds of vows. Vows are prescribed either as means to attain greater self-control or expiate sins or recondition the mind to make it more sensitive or receptive or simply to please God or Ishwara or become worthy of…

  • Thumb Rules for Financial Planning

    Thumb Rules for Financial Planning

    1. Calculating your risk appetite for asset allocation. Mutual Funds are one the of the most popular instruments of investing. They spread the risk across companies in their portfolio and can in the long term stable returns. But how much to invest in equity and how much in debt instruments? This is the most common…

  • Launching your Child

    Launching your Child

    I had given an overview of a family lifecycle in a blog post previously. On this post I diving deeper into the 2nd last stage of this lifecycle viz. the launching of your child into the big wide world. In the launching stage of the family life cycle, the children have reached the age where…

  • Tracking Moral Development of Children

    Tracking Moral Development of Children

    Moral development is the process through which children develop proper attitudes and behaviours toward other people in society, based on social and cultural norms, rules, and laws. All of us want our children to grow up to be morally strong citizens of society. But how do we know how they are developing, where they stand…

  • SCARF model for working effectively with others

    SCARF model for working effectively with others

    Being effective in any kind of collaboration, be it with children, students, friends, associates, co-workers or even loved ones is a skill. The few people who can do this well can lead themselves and others well. Developing this essential leadership skill requires a deliberate focus on the dynamics at play in any social setting and…

  • Paul Brunton on Marrying on the Spiritual Path

    I look up to Paul Brunton as one of many spiritual teachers that influenced and taught me. Paul Brunton was a British philosopher, researcher, mystic, and adventurer. He left a journalistic career to live among yogis, mystics, and holy men and studied a wide variety of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. With his entire life…

  • Value Parenting a Child’s Mind

    The Oxford dictionary defines parenting as the process of caring for your child or children. Parenting is usually seen as the responsibility of providing a child with nourishing food, security, care, shelter, discipline and education. In the light of dharma, parenting goes deeper and aims to build, shape and fine-tune the antaḥ-karaṇam, the inner instrument…

  • Outgrowing the Parenting Instinct

    Outgrowing the Parenting Instinct

    One of human life’s greatest joys is to become a parent. The sheer happiness of holding your child first time in your hand is magical and indescribable. Anyone who has experienced this will vouch for me on this. Even the mere sight of watching a parent with a child brings so many emotions. A parent…

  • Parenting on the Spiritual Path

    Parenting on the Spiritual Path

    Becoming a parent is one of the most rewarding experiences that life can offer and also one of the most fulfilling ones. I consider myself fortunate to be a father to a beautiful daughter for the last 11 years and I have savoured every moment of it. On my blog, I share my parenting journey…

  • Five things you must know before you start studying the Bhagavad Gita

    Five things you must know before you start studying the Bhagavad Gita

    Most of us who study the Bhagavad Gita consider it a Hindu text and relate to its teachings in the context of Hindu religious beliefs and practices. This can lead to several misunderstandings and misinterpretations at a very foundation level and we end up missing its universal purport and application. To avoid these pitfalls we…

  • The Four Human Motivations

    The Four Human Motivations

    Most of us are familiar with only one model of human motivation: Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I have been researching some models besides this one trying to sieve new perspectives. One such model is Steven Reiss’s 16 Desires, which I plan to discuss in a separate blog post. This time, I was especially looking…

  • The Recipe for a Great Partnership

    The Recipe for a Great Partnership

    I have at times challenged the institution of marriage, even criticised it at times for how it has morphed into a legal, gender-biased, religious and political institution and believed that it requires some reinvention or at least needs to be reviewed. But when I look at marriage as a partnership, or perhaps the greatest partnership…

  • The Religion of the Bhagavad Gita

    The Religion of the Bhagavad Gita

    It’s vacation season in many places in the western world. As travel has opened up after the pandemic, tourist destinations have been thronged by millions of people in India too. Most of us have experienced the difference between hiring a tour agency to plan our itinerary and the effort it takes to plan a travel…

  • Life without Work is Impossible

    Life without Work is Impossible

    When I had just entered secondary school, I visited a book exhibition with my father in my hometown. I remember the English books section was not the biggest in this regional books-focused event. I picked the usual suspects on science, universe and environment, which I used to love as a school kid. My dad, however,…

  • Learning the skill of happiness

    Learning the skill of happiness

    Fortunately today there is a lot of good research available on the topic of happiness. By relying on philosophers’ careful thinking and using the methods of science, we can have better answers to questions that have vexed humanity for millennia and these answers only get more accurate and precise over time. One such enlightening reasearch…

  • Hormones of Happiness

    Hormones of Happiness

    If there is one aspiration that unites all humans, it is happiness. Every person, irrespective of their gender, race, religion, education, standard of living, status, nationality – wants to be happy. And happiness is the sum total of how one feels about oneself, others and world in general. Since happiness is felt, it rides on…

  • Understanding Samsara

    Understanding Samsara

    A samsari is similar to a person trying to be debt-free by paying a credit card bill using another credit card.

  • Listen to the Universe

    Listen to the Universe

    There are these times…. extraordinary times, when you tune into life, with just the right equipment and orientation, to listen closely to what it is trying to tell you. It is as if you are trying to tune into a radio station on an old transistor radio without exactly knowing the frequency or the right…