NAVEEN NIVERTHY
AUTHOR, MARKETING & SALES LEADER, LIFE STRATEGIST
Think Better and Thrive. Step by Step.
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Health. Work. Love. Parenting. Spirituality.
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Love of Reading
I have always been fond of books. They open a window to other worlds, minds and perspectives. Back in my school days, I used to save money for the entire year to be able to finally buy a few good books during my summer vacation. In my college days, I was entirely dependent on the…
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Value in Focus: Vairāgyam | Dispassion
I wrote this for a monthly Vedanta newsletter. Reproducing the same article here. There are two main reasons why we need to understand and practice Vairāgyam. First,vairāgyam is one of the six great virtues used to define bhagaḥ, found in equal, absolute and limitless measures only in Bhagavān. They are viz. aiśvaryam – overlordship, vīryam…
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The meaning of finding meaning in life.
Many people drift aimlessly through life or keep changing their goals, running around chasing whatever they choose to call happiness. While some others live the life that their parents or their religion/caste/creed/cult or spouses have in mind for them. One finds ultimate fulfilment in life when one has a deep sense of living meaningfully. Before…
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Is Meat right for Children?
In this post, I express my stand on the topic based on my own experience. My intention here is not to offend meat eaters and meat lovers. Meat is a dietary choice and something that each of us has to reason to ourselves about. Many children are raised consuming meat- parents encourage and serve meat…
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Infuse light into Children’s minds
Children are beings of light. They are embodiments of what is called in Vedanta, jñāna-śaktiḥ, the power of knowledge. They are easily nourished by purity, knowledge, truth, intelligence, and mind. This quality, in Sanskrit, is called sattva and it reflects consciousness and hence endows the person with the capacity for clear knowledge and with the…
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Everything You Believe will be Put to Test
There comes a day when everything you believe and took pride in being will be put on trial, questioned, challenged and put to test. You will be asked to narrate the story of your life and your choices, decisions and responses to situations will be judged. Your claim over your achievements will be challenged. Your…
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Non-violent Ways of Disciplining Children
This post can be treated as a continuation of two previous posts- one on violent discipline and another on rights of children. In this post, I wish to share solutions as we have already discussed the problem enough. I understand that most of the time parents resort to violent discipline tactics simply out of frustration…
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Knowing Children’s Rights
As grownups, adults I am sure most of us are aware of our rights- how we like to be treated, what our basic needs are while operating as individuals in a society. We have been educated enough on the topic by social awareness campaigns and through school education as well. But do we know what…
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It is Wrong to Hit Children. Period.
One of the biggest evils plaguing the lives of the children of the world today is violent discipline practices. Spanking, whooping, beating- it all means hitting, a big, powerful person hitting a smaller, less powerful person. It also goes by the word corporal punishment. In a majority of countries, more than 2 in 3 children…
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Understanding the Practice of Vedanta
Here is an easy understanding of the path to Moksha as laid out in Vedanta tradition. Having said that, I would like to highlight that there is a certain state of mind-body state that is a necessary prerequisite for one to even begin contemplating the possibility of taking the path. This status is called ‘mumukṣutvam’,…
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55 Pearls of Wisdom from ‘The Autobiography of a Yogi’
I took to reading this book again after over two decades. A new friend was instrumental in getting me to re-read it and I opened up to this opportunity to see where it takes me. Quite unexpectedly it felt I have been reading it for the first time and the book, with its elegant prose,…
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Live One Life. Live with Integrity
There are countless ways to live life: some of us believe in living for the day, some want to make the best of the day, some want to live for an afterlife, some want to live many lives in the same one and so on. There is no one to how many schools of life…
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There is no different Spiritual World
Many religions ultimately try to address the problem of happiness & freedom and they do so by getting you to work towards living the life of a lawful, god-fearing member of society so that you can reap the reward of happiness in an after-life, in a supernatural world not accessible to us as humans today.…
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Human Suffering and its Panacea
Time and again, the wise sages and prophets of the lore have reiterated this fact: All of life is suffering. And suffering here doesn’t mean just suffering physical pain. We live in a world where we are fortunate to have painkillers that can dampen the most poignant of physical pains but there is still not…
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To Love is to Value
Love has become the most versatile word in today’s day-to-day lexicon. People ‘love’ to use the word love in the context of absolutely anything one can think of: shopping, food, celebrities, travel, toys, writers, sleep, recreation and the list can go on and on. Love has been commoditised to such an extent that it is…
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Should we live with Infidelity in Marriage?
Infidelity is the breaking of a promise to remain faithful to a romantic partner, whether that promise was a part of marriage vows, a privately uttered agreement between lovers, or an unspoken assumption. As unthinkable as the notion of breaking such promises may be at the time they are made, infidelity is common. I have…
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How we have become a Global Organism
In the science fiction of the 1920s, it was imagined that the humans of the future grow bigger and bigger brains to process more and more information and take more and more complex decisions and problem-solving. What actually happened was quite unforeseen. Instead of growing our brains, we started building a gigantic digital nervous system…
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The light of Thich Nhat Hanh
The great teacher Thich Nhat Hanh passed away yesterday at the ripe age of 95 at the Từ Hiếu Temple in Huế, Vietnam. Although I am a student of Vedanta, I have learnt a lot from this great master. Today, I am especially reminded of his book ‘The Art of Living’, which came to me…
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There are no different paths to Moksha
In this post, I would like to clarify the most common misconceptions about Moksha viz. that there are different paths to mokṣaḥ, and every spiritual seeker chooses one own path to it. I also want to clarify what Mokṣaḥ really means because if one doesn’t understand Mokṣaḥ, one can never truly aim for it. One…
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Consummate Love: The Pinnacle of Romantic Love
Robert Sternberg developed the triangular theory of love to describe Consummate Love– a state of perfection in love. He says it is made up of three building blocks- an intimacy component, a passion component, and a decision/commitment component. Passion is the sheer physical and emotional attraction felt towards a romantic partner. All love stories begin…
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Life: The Journey of Letting go
Everyone knows we don’t live forever and that life, this life is short. The things we hold most dear to our hearts- the people we love, our achievements, our wealth and possessions, even our own lives – we simply need to leave behind when we die. In this journey of life, we seem to lose…
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Ashtanga Yoga: The Eight Steps on the Ladder of Yoga
Sage Patañjali constituted the Aṣṭāṅga Yogaḥ system to help prepare for Meditation and reap the benefits thereof. Patañjali’s Aṣṭāṅga Yogaḥ is an important, preparatory, eight-fold discipline, but not an end in itself as, without the teaching of Vedāntaḥ, one does not gain mokṣaḥ. It consists of:• yamaḥ, (five) prohibitions• niyamaḥ, (five) injunctions• āsanam, posture• prāṇāyāmaḥ,…
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Epicurus’s Happiness Hack
I think Epicurus is the most misunderstood of all philosophers. The pleasure principle propounded by him is largely misinterpreted and the wrong ideas have fuelled an entire generation of ‘Carpe Diem’ and ‘Wine, Dine & Be Merry- for there is no tomorrow’ generation. I want to make this post super simple and so I am…
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Relationship check: Watch how one treats his/ her worst enemy
Before getting into a relationship with a person, it makes sense to run this simple check: Just watch how the person treats their worst enemy. This will tell you how you will be treated if by chance you are to be tagged as an enemy one day. You will get to feel that behaviour. Compassion…
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Love is hard
It’s easy to simply confess to someone ‘I love you. ‘Doing’ love is the hard bit. For most practical purposes ‘to love’ is taken to mean ‘to enjoy’ another person and lets ourselves ‘be enjoyed’ by them. Even the Oxford dictionary agrees with this practical definition: a strong feeling that you have when you like…
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The Surefire Way to Health and Longevity: Intermittent Fasting
As Millennials, we have a lot of challenges in the sphere of spirituality, physical and mental health. But if one has to give one prescription that can provide relief to many of our physical, mental, and spiritual ailments, it is Intermittent Fasting In simple words, Intermittent Fasting is the practice of alternating periods of eating…
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Instant Messaging’s war on Marriage
The title may sound like an exaggeration. It is not. Some people may argue in favour of social media usage for sustaining friendships but when it comes to marriages it’s a sure destroyer. Let’s just say the average couple will find it exceedingly difficult to sustain a healthy relationship while leading independent social media lives.…
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Life: The Journey of Letting go
Everyone knows we don’t live forever and that life, this life is short. The things we hold most dear to our hearts- the people we love, our achievements, our wealth and possessions, even our own lives – we simply need to leave behind when we die. In this journey of life, we seem to lose…
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Mahatma Gandhi’s Love for Bhagavad Gita
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Our Weekend Poster Project
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Trade-offs in Life: We can’t have it all
It seems many of us wish to have it all in life. Each of us has a live, ever-updating and growing list of needs, wants and desires. And we want them by making no compromises and having no regrets. We learn quite late in life that there is a tradeoff for everything in life. Most…
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Seeing Family Life as a Life Cycle
Everything that lives follows a lifecycle. I learnt recently how even our family lives trace a lifecycle. A family life cycle is the set of predictable steps and patterns families experience over time. It is a set of emotional and intellectual experiences that one has to go through in a family from childhood to old…
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Getting the marriage to work
I wrote a post on Love Vs Marriage, mainly for those who are not yet married. Here is something I found useful and others who may be married also may. Romantic marriage is everyone’s ideal. Romantic reasons for marriage include So, it is quite possible that one may develop love after marriage too. So romantic…
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Marriage Vs Love
One day my daughter will find herself at the crossroads where she has to choose to take the step toward marriage. I may or may not be around to guide her or I am not sure she will even seek my counsel. So, I thought of putting it down for her, anyway, hoping she may…
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What it means to Understand
What do we mean when we say ‘I understand’ – in a relationship, in business, in academics, in the study of Vedanta? In their book, Understanding by Design (1998), Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe discuss “Six Facets of Understanding.” They came up with these six facets of understanding to help instructional designers to check if…
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