Shunya

haha😅

ऐसी बातें एक कान से सुनो और दूसरे से निकल दो 🤪

"This is me coming home from an audition for King Kong where I was told I was too 'ugly' for the role. It was a momentous moment for me.

That ill-intentioned opinion could have shattered my dreams of becoming an actress or forced me to pull myself together and believe in myself.

I took a breath and said, 'I'm sorry you think I'm too ugly for your movie but yours is just an opinion out of thousands.' "To this day, I have 18 Oscar nominations."

- Meryl Streep

Water has mysterious ways. You store it in one place and it comes out in another. That's what I noticed when I visited Tarun Bharat Sangh villages in Rajasthan in November 2019.

One year hence that one visit has resulted in diverse people from many different organisations coming together from India, Sweden and Kenya. Today, we are a cross- organisation team from my company Four Rooms and an international organisation Initiatives of Change who are advisors to the UN. We run a Certificate Water Warrior Course teaching Water Conservation and Water Shed Management. We are also working online with a community in Kenya and helping them revive a river.

So, in life too, we can make efforts in one place, and if we are in FLOW, it can come out in so many places. You can read the whole story here. https://www.iofc.org/language-water

And if you want to learn how to be in FLOW like WATER, you can attend the upcoming Shunya Spaces training program NEER NADI NARI on the 3rd of December.

Reserve your seats soon by sending me a message through messenger. Look forward to your participation. See you soon :)

The language of water | IofC International Thursday, 29. October 2020 by Sunita Raut and Alan Channer Habaswein, in northeastern Kenya, is arid and its inhabitants are poor. There is little water for anything to grow. Mukhtar Ogle is a son of this land. He is also a Senior Advisor to the President of Kenya. Far away in India, the organizatio...

Happy Durga Puja..... as the outside celebrations are restricted this year... we can use this opportunity to go inwards and find our own Demons and also our own Durga within.

The battle inside is what always transforms us.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
- Ernest Hemingway

Sometimes we struggle in life and in those moments we may lose our confidence which is natural. But in those very moments it’s good to remind oneself that is is only the brave who struggle as it is only the brave who take risks.

Change starts by changing how we look at ourselves.

Shunya Spaces is an Online School teaching Change Navigation.

Here you will find posts, events, discussions etc. that you can use to discover topics of Change for yourself or for the world around you. You can like posts, share them, join discussions and also participate in events of your choice.

All the content here is open source. It is free. My teachers— mostly life, people I met specially women, moon, nature, insects didn’t charge anything😊

My Gurus— Sukhvinder Sircar, Dr. Rajendra Singh, Yoga Acharya Arun Pandala never traded their knowledge for money either.

So, Shunya Space, is my humble attempt to walk on their footsteps🙏🏽

COVID 19 has taught us so much about what works and what dosen't. There are so many people going into the recesses of depression, but there are as many who are finding an incredible renewal in their lives and relationships. For most of us it is a combination of both I believe.

What creates the difference is the way one is in one's Shunya Space.

Shunya Space is the place where one comes when what has worked no longer works. But we also do not know what will work. Our anxiety drives us to be restless. However, if we manage to be still, silent and restful here, we will find the wisdom that lies in the Shunya Space.

That wisdom can lead us to what will work and what we need to do.

Shunya believes that the wisdom lies within us.

2018 was the year in my life where I truly saw the deep meaning and relevance of this belief unfolding. I had not imagined that what I would learn about myself in one year would change the course of my life. What helped was to stay in a Shunya space, so I also learnt a lot about what a Shunya space looks like and how to create it....but more about that another time. For now I want to share what I discovered this year. Perhaps you may be sitting at the edge of the same discovery. Who knows :)

-----------------------------------------------------THE FIRST DISCOVERY
I have know myself to be a temperamental person with strong opinions. While I won a lot of debates with this attitude, I'm not sure about how many hearts I won at the same time. I must say that I was never peaceful when I noticed that I have shut down a person. There was always a restlessness, a certain stress that I was familiar with but however much I tried it wouldn't go away. It was the same chronic restlessness that became a trigger to start a conflict and have the insatiable desire to win at all cost.

In 2018 I got a watershed insight into my early childhood events. I was able to connect this restlessness, this desire to always show-up as a winner to something we went through as a family. What a relief if was. Without this knowledge, I was always behaving as if people are messing up with me and therefore I was also blaming them. With this knowledge, I was able to differentiate between what was happening around me and what was happening in parallel inside me. As I got an access to the real reason of my temper, I could also let go of the irritation I felt with people around. Of course, this led to relationships that are loving and vibrant now and I am so thankful for that.

THE SECOND DISCOVERY
Temperament was not the only effect of my childhood event. It also impacted my decision making, my memory, my ability to handle stress, my empathy levels, my focus, etc. etc. etc. The list is so long that if I listed it all up it will be overwhelming. As I read about painful childhood events and their impact, I realised that what I went through was nothing unusual. Such early experiences tend to have an impact on our thoughts, emotions, health, stress response and even cognitive functions like memory, concentration and focus. Shockingly, they were what is called epigenetic i.e. it gets transferred through our genes to our children. The enormity of this stunned me and it took many months to even start absorbing what I was discovering let alone accept it.

THE THIRD DISCOVERY
The subsequent natural inquiry was to look at the life choices I made and I further discovered that many of them were to run away from this inner stress and therefore were also such they were about running away from myself. So, I have spent half my years to build a life that didn't work for me. I'm surprised I did not have a cardiac arrest as this literally meant starting life from scratch at a time that my peers are all settled and harvesting the fruits of their labour.

A friend says, "when you hit rock bottom, you know that
you are finally standing on firm ground." That's the optimism I firmly held on to, to get the energy and enthusiasm needed to rebuild a life that would work for me and one that was anchored in an authentic knowledge of self.

Just like it is unimaginable that a beautiful flower can bloom from inside the thorns, it is unimaginable that staying with that which is thorny in our lives can lead to life itself blooming forth in all its glory and splendour.
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Shunya is a training and development company and all this did translate into very meaningful work that was done in 2018 with leadership at a school level as well as personal leadership. From this authentic place, a wonderful partnership has emerged between Shunya and The Four Rooms of Change Group. Just like us they also believe in ZeroPoint as an important space to inhabit to get wisdom and insights to lead a fulfilling life. In Septenmer 2018, we presented all of this in Stockholm to an enthusiastic audience. It was truly a humbling experience.

What lies ahead-- well since our belief is reinforced by the experiences of this year so we will continue to explore Shunya and how we can use it to be strong leaders, cohesive teams, and vibrant organisations.

Finally a quote that evolved with the work last year---- "If you believe it does not exist, then you can be sure it does." Mysterious? For sure!!

Inviting you to explore this mystery with us.