Tips to overcome your inner battles and achieve family harmony

Facing and overcoming your inner battles is key to comprehending yourself at the subconscious level as most human beings' minds and hearts are battle grounds of conflicting desires, conflicting values where one part of us wants to make ourselves important while another part of us feels guilty that we might be ignoring the needs of our families or our organizations. One part of us wants to live a peaceful, contented life doing what we love to do while another part of us wants luxury, wants to compete, wants to be number one, wants to be noticed everywhere to be seen.

Our minds are battle grounds and these battles rage on in most people's lives until they die, never resolved. That's why there is a sense of frustration in most people and at the heart of this battle is essentially the divide between one self and the rest.

In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Sri Preethaji, Spiritual Leader and Co-Creator of Ekam, suggested, “The only way these inner battles can end is when your consciousness is awoken to a state of love. When you begin to live with an expanded sense of self. These dichotomies will become quiet. These conflicts will cease. That is when you will know the true meaning of being at ease with oneself.” She highlighted how Buddha, Mahaveer, Adi Sankara and numerous sages have proclaimed to the world that it is possible to live and function from states of enlightened consciousness and that you are way more than your body, your mind, your past since you are in fact, the entire universe.

Healing at the spiritual, mental, emotional and/or physical level

Sri Preethaji shared, “In my travels across the world, I have seen that people in every culture, in every nation need healing because most people are hurt. They're hurt by their parents. They're hurt at school. They're hurt by society. They're emotionally hurt. These emotional hurts, unless they're healed, they will show up in later life as an inability to relate, inability to sustain enduring relationships and a very fragile temperament. Disappointment comes in easily to people who are emotionally hurt. You look at the world and one of the predictions in the world is that by 2025 and 2030, the biggest epidemics in the world will be loneliness and depression.”

Highlighting why that is, she said, “Most people are hurt and they're in need of emotional healing and with the collapse of family structure, there is no place where an individual is able to go to find solace. Many of our programs, we do focus on healing people, healing people's hearts, and of course, when people's hearts are healed, there are many diseases that also become cured in the body. So healing is an important element.”

She advised, “Balance the professional-personal commitments, staying spiritually inclined. Balance is achieved when you figure out what is most important for you. People are of different dispositions and different people value different things. There's no one universal ideal. Some of you may value family the most. Then your profession, your friendships, every other commitment goes around your family. Some of you may value your contribution to the earth, being a transformational agent in society. Then your family, your profession, and everything else goes around it. I would say figure out what is the centrality of your life.”

Asking everyone to ask what does a spiritual inclination mean, she said, “Spirituality is not the same as religion. You may go to a church or a mosque or a temple and not be spiritual at all. Being spiritual means one who is capable of inner inquiry, one who is aware of oneself and aware of the impact one is having on a fellow human being and the world. A spiritual being is someone who's aware of the interconnectedness of the fabric of life. You know you are responsible for the impact you cause with your state of being, with your words, with your actions and only such a being will arrive at balance.”

Talking about handling stress and achieving family harmony, Sri Preethaji said, “I have seen that families that have a culture of meditation and self-awareness have a greater ability to dissolve interpersonal stress and arrive at harmony. Cultivating a meditative mind in families, a spiritual culture of introspection and contemplation and above all an inner state of connection to each other's feelings will be central to achieving family harmony. Today we have big houses but houses become homes only when we can feel what other feels and when we make each other's happiness important. So, that would be the most important thing for any family to experience harmony.”