Walking Through Transitions – Page 66 – Understanding your sensitive self

Is there a right prayer?

August 5, 2015 By: Ritu Kaushalcomment

Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha Deva
Maata Jaaki Parvati, Pita Mahadeva

Day before yesterday was my second Diwali here in California. Diwali, for those of you who don’t know, is a festival that celebrates the triumph of good over evil and which is as significant to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians. In the evening pooja (prayer), my husband and I sang the Ganesha aarti. The prayer had been floating in my consciousness for days before. Well, not the prayer exactly, which praises Lord Ganesha, but rather a specific line in it that has been getting under my skin. […]

Show Yourself

August 5, 2015 By: Ritu Kaushalcomment

In the Milpitas library, I meet Jennifer every Thursday and Friday and we go through our English lessons. I have been teaching her for more than a year now as part of the library’s volunteer tutor program. This time, we’ve picked up a book on inter-cultural communication and the chapter talks about the importance of self-disclosure when you talk to a person of a different culture.That strikes me as important. Here, in the Bay area, cultures collide and sometimes interact in wonderful ways. Talking directly about what you think and revealing who you are becomes important because people can have preconceived notions based on your ethnic identity. […]

If you don’t get paid for it, is it not work?

August 5, 2015 By: Ritu Kaushalcomment

In her insightful book When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore – Women, Work and Identity, Elizabeth Perle McKenna talks about how we, as women, don’t assign the same value to “free” time as we do to “waged” time – hours traded for money. “Wendy felt bad about asking her husband to take her son for a few hours on Saturday mornings after she’d been home all week so she could go to exercise class. “He works all week. I feel guilty about doing something for myself.” I ask her if she hired a baby-sitter, would that person be working? “Yes,” she replied. “Then aren’t you working too?” I wondered. “I never thought of it that way,” she replied. “It doesn’t feel like work because I’m not getting paid.” […]

Understanding Hope

August 5, 2015 By: Ritu Kaushalcomment

Haven’t you always thought of hope as a feeling, a glorious response that rises from deep within? As something that you either have or don’t in a given situation. I had thought so too, and turns out it is another thing about which I was wrong. Research has shown that, shockingly, hope is not an emotion at all. Instead, it’s a cognitive process, a way of thinking. […]

Group Dynamics for Introverts and HSPs

August 5, 2015 By: Ritu Kaushalcomment

As an introvert, I like interacting with people one on one, am not very good at making small talk and tend to be on the quieter side when I am in a new group of people. Since I am also an HSP, I tend to get over-stimulated easily – so if I’m already stimulated beyond my comfort level, and then have to interact with new people, I tend to get even quieter than usual. But this, as I realized while reading Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person, is not a good idea at all. […]