Meditation is a way to overcome misery.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and ambassador of peace. His vision of a stress-free, violence-free society has united millions of people the world over through service projects and the courses of The Art of Living. Visit http://www.artofliving.org for more information.

Q: Guruji what is the use of Seva? How does it help meditation?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Listen, suppose you are stranded in some place and you need someone to give you a lift in their car or taxi and nobody stops their car to give you a lift, how would you feel?

You are carrying two bags and you have to go to the restroom in a railway station. You can’t leave the bags unattended and you have to go to the restroom, what will you do? You will find some nice elderly person, go to them and keep the bags with them requesting them to take care while you go for five minutes to the restroom. Don’t you need other’s help? If they refuse to help you then how can you survive? You know in this world as human beings we have to help each other and that is what seva is.

Seva means what? ‘Sa’ means ‘him’ which refers to God and ‘Eva’ means ‘like him’; doing things like him.

God does so many things for you but does not expect anything in return from you. Whether you pray to him, thank him or not he will still continue to do. He is not doing you a favor. When you thank God, that is for your own joy, it does not matter to God. In the same way whether people acknowledge your work or not, whether they thank you or not you still do it because you find that it is important to do!

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t.

Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice.”

More: Harvard Gazette

Q: How do I avoid negative thoughts?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Negative thoughts, why do you want to avoid them? Let them come and they go. Avoiding means you are trying to hold on to them. If they come say,'Oh you have come, hi, bye bye', and they go.

Giving too much importance to sensory objects leads to greed; giving too much importance to the senses leads to lust; and giving too much importance to the mind and its desires leads to delusion.

We hold on to the concepts of the mind and want things to happen in a certain way. Thus, the concepts in our mind impede us from perceiving the infinite consciousness that is a part of us.

This is not to say that the senses or the mind are bad. But we must learn to discriminate between things and be aware of what is happening at all times; that is when clarity dawns on us. This is the first step toward the higher state of consciousness.

~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Q: Guruji when I think about death, I feel dispassionate. How can one remain a karma yogi in that situation?

This is the sign of a Yogi. A Yogi does not have to make any effort to fulfil his desire but one has to perform his duties. You know all that you want, your desires, intentions are being fulfilled right, before the desire or intention arises.

So that is why Yogi gets the best of enjoyments because a Yogi’s state of consciousness is such that before the desire arises the fruit is already there. He doesn’t have to struggle too hard. That doesn’t mean you have to be lazy, you have to do your work, not to fulfill your own desires but because you have to do certain things. You should just do it.