WATCH LIVE INTERVIEW
Swami Mukundanand shares Golden Rules for Living Your best life! EXCLUSIVE Interview with MYPENCILDOTCOM Magazine.
Exclusive Interview with Swami Mukundanand:
Mypencildotcom:- Today in edition 59, we have a very interesting guest, who definitely doesn’t need any introduction. Team mypencildotcom is fortunate to have Swami Mukundanandaji live with us today. Swamiji, thanks a lot for accepting our request.
Swamiji:- Oh it is my pleasure to join you on this show and I am really looking forward to our conversation today.
Mypencildotcom:- Swamiji, I have prepared a brief introduction for the followers and the readers of Mypencildotcom Magazine. I will just go through the brief introduction for them.
Swamiji is a well-renowned teacher of spirituality, yoga and meditation. He has pioneered a holistic system of yoga that caters to the Mind, Body, and Soul known as Jagadguru Kripaluji Yog. As an international authority of Mind management and a best-selling author, Swamiji has been a guiding light for millions worldwide on the path of everlasting happiness and fulfilment.
In the ‘Get Inspired Interview Series’ of various professionals, where we interview authors, politicians, IAS officers, engineers, doctors, models, creators, entrepreneurs, scientists, paranormal researchers, and many more, we welcome Swamiji to our show.
Watch Full Interview with Swami Mukundanand with Mypencildotcom magazine.
Swamiji:- It’s my pleasure. I am so happy to learn how well your platform mypencildotcom is doing and it’s a pleasure to participate.
Mypencildotcom:- Thank you so much Swamiji. I have received this book of yours, “Golden Rules for Living Your Best Life”. I took a lot of time to go through this and read it twice. This is an interesting book and today, we shall be talking about this book only, written by you. So, allow me to ask you a couple of questions, Sir.
Swamiji:- Yes, please do.
Mypencildotcom:- Swamiji, when I was reading this book prior to that, I googled and realized there are so many books available out there, like, how to live your life, make your life successful and there are so many other similar books. But honestly speaking, this book is very different. When I went through this, each lesson and each chapter was very inspiring. So, what was your inspiration behind writing this book for it to stand very different for the readers?
Swamiji:- I conceived of this book as a manual for life itself. Just like when we purchase a complex electronic gadget, it comes with the user’s guide, that is our one-Stop resource for procedures on how to operate it and what to do in case of any trouble. Now with life itself, we don’t have a ready reference user’s manual and the problem is compounded because difficulties come first and lessons later. It is like being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool and being told “now you will learn how to swim!” Or suppose, you got your first computer without a user’s guide, and no knowledge on how it is to be operated – imagine, how long that learning curve would be.
So, the idea behind this book was to provide wisdom to individuals, families, organizations, communities, who approach me on how to solve their problems in life. And I hope this will be a treasure chest of wisdom that will enable them to upgrade the quality of their living and to effectively deal with problems in all areas of their life.
Mypencildotcom:- Rightly said, Swamiji. So, when I go through the sections of this book, I see that you have very nicely illustrated wisdom across five important aspects of life. Like different kinds of nutrition that every living being requires. I see you have divided it into spiritual and emotional wellness, good health and well-being, harmony in relationships, professional fulfilment and financial abundance. So, each section is illustrated very nicely but my question to you is from where you bring all these appropriate examples so that it directly hits the mind of the audience and it explains it so well?
Swamiji:- There is a Pareto Principle that is very famous in management – It says that 20 percent of the customers of an organization are responsible for 80 percent of the revenues. 20 percent of the products that you produce are responsible for 80 percent of the revenues, while 80 percent of your products are responsible for 20 percent of the revenues. Likewise, in all the areas of your life, 20 percent of aspects will contribute to 80 percent value and 80 percent of areas will contribute only to 20 value. So, if we can focus on these key critical areas, it takes care of other aspects of your lives. And that is why I chose to address these areas: your finances, your profession, your health, your spiritual and emotional wellness and relationships.
Now my writing style is that I like to present the wisdom, then illustrate it with worldly examples, and then endorse it with some scriptural quotations, and spice it up with a little humor, and then show its relevance to your own life. So, the benefits of this is that the reader gets a variety of rasas and remains engaged with the topic. And the second benefit is when we understand something through all these means, the intellect becomes convinced and then we are able to actually implement that knowledge in our lives. Hence, I have chosen this style of writing.
Mypencildotcom:- Swamiji, I am sure your style of writing is very much enjoyed by the readers but while you write, I’m sure there was a journey you enjoyed in your way. So my question to you Swamiji is, how much time it took to complete this book and how was your journey while writing this book?
Swamiji:- Yes, this was a product of the covid nights. It was the third book I wrote during the lockdown period. The first two books took me one month each. The “Seven Divine laws To Awaken Your Best Self” book and “The Power of Thoughts” book. On this book, I took full six months and the reason was that it had such a wide spectrum of wisdom. And for every piece of knowledge that I was sharing, I wanted to actually verify that it was accurate and it was the best. So, all that research took a lot of time. And then I also worked with an artist to illustrate this wisdom and that artist took another six months to do his work. There was great learning involved in this journey – when we contemplate on such profound wisdom it helps us deepen our own understanding of the subject.
And there is another beautiful law of the universe – When you give in charity, it never impoverishes you. The universe fills you up so you can give even more and the same has been my lifelong experience with knowledge. The more I share, the more I receive, so that I can share even more. And that is the experience of this book also.
Mypencildotcom:- I’m sure this was a very joyful journey for you and we congratulate you for writing this. When I opened the book and I went through the chapter one, I literally got goosebumps when I was going through the content. Because the first chapter itself was about how to make friends with discomfort. Not everyone can manage to be friends with discomfort. Please let us know why human nature is very reactive the moment they experience any discomfort. Please give some insight to it.
Swamiji:- The gist of the book is to help people progress but the obstacle in progress is precisely that everybody loves to remain comfortable. And as the saying goes, that all progress happens at the end of your comfort zone. So, if we wish to improve, we have to make friends with discomfort. Now, this goes against our human nature from childhood. Whenever we had a little expression of discomfort on our faces, our parents rushed to alleviate it and since then we have always strived for the same – remove all pain from our life right away, without realizing that such a mindset becomes an impediment in our journey.
I was once speaking to a psychologist who said that “every week I counsel people afflicted by obesity and their basic problem is they are unable to tolerate the pangs of hunger. The moment hunger appears they immediately rush to subdue it. They have even forgotten what it means to be truly hungry.”
Now these patients were removing the pain of hunger but setting themselves up for a lifelong pain of obesity. If instead we can develop the mindset, “I will tolerate the good kind of pain right now and it will lead to a pleasurable and joyous existence in future”. So, I have put it as the first chapter of my book, that this wisdom will only work for you if you are willing to bear the pain required, and hope for learning new insights. If the mindset is ‘no discomfort’, then please close the book and go back to watching Netflix.
Mypencildotcom:- Yeah, so that’s the humour that you have added which you were mentioning a while ago. So Swamiji, if you ask, any normal person, who is not very much concerned about the healthy living or healthy lifestyle, about what you want to achieve in your life, probably he would end up saying that they want more and more money. They will never say that they want good health. So section B of this book talks about good health and well-being. However busy lifestyles doesn’t allow most of us to take care of ourselves. So, why is health so significant to be taken care of? Can you give more insight to it?
Swamiji:- Definitely. There are some key critical areas of our lives and if any of them become bad it affects quality of our whole existence. Amongst these, health is very often a limiting factor. We all have had this experience where due to some affliction, we had to spend the day in bed and our work suffered as a consequence. So, that is why the ancient poet Mahakavi Kalidas said,
“śharīra mādhyama khalu dharma sādhanam”.
If your body is the vehicle for your life, you will need to take care of it. In the hustle and bustle of everyday existence, this particular area of health often gets side-lined and the consequences we have to bear later on when middle age comes and later old age comes and variety of illnesses start rearing their head.
But instead of that, if we could decide that health is also one of the wealth that we possess and then we will prioritize a little bit of time for it.
The American Medical Association they stated that if you can just do a half an hour of walking every day it will reduce your chances for premature death by about 50 percent. That is the benefit of investing a little bit in health. Developing some healthy habits, we will be in able to enjoy well-being throughout our lives.
Mypencildotcom:- Wonderful to know this! I think after reading this book most of the people who were not giving so much importance to health they might understand its value. While life is do-it-yourself project, Swamiji, are you suggesting that this book can be a tool that can help everyone to be 100 percent successful in life?
Swamiji:- We need to lead our life ourselves but wisdom makes a huge difference. We all know that one health tip from a wellness practitioner can make a paradigm shift in our health; One piece of advice from our professional mentor can Leapfrog our career and one advice from our Guru on how to meditate properly can help us achieve the state of dhyan. So, that is the power of knowledge.
Now, some people make economics the basis of their study, some people study psychology, for me it’s been philosophy. Life itself has been the subject of my study. And I have loved to understand wisdom that will help us upgrade the quality of our existence. For that, I have read literally from various religious traditions of the world and gained knowledge from all the wise philosophers. I hope this book will work as a treasure chest for people, as a One-Stop resource to provide them the wisdom they need for living a wonderful life.
Mypencildotcom:- This certainly will be a One-Stop resource!
In the later part of this book, you also talk about saving money, for all age groups. It turned out to be very interesting and equally important, as money is desired throughout life ideally. So, Swamiji, please share your insight on what is the significance of saving money early in the life.
Swamiji:- In today’s consumer society, everything is available on EMI, equated monthly installments, from Cars to houses to clothes. The Temptation is tremendous, to purchase something now and then start paying later. This goes well when career is going fine but when the inevitable downturns happen in life, either somebody loses a job or there’s a health crisis or there’s a family problem and you cannot pay the monthly instalment, then it starts adding up and that has the potential to completely upset one’s journey of life.
Instead of that, a little bit of wisdom is extremely beneficial. Develop the saving habit from youth itself. We all know the power of compounding interest – A little saving that we start in our youth will help us in our old age. And the benefits are when you are young, let’s say in your 20s or your 30s, you can take risks with your investments as well. So, go for a diverse portfolio. Definitely, you should invest in investment funds. You can even go for shares which are little risky but they give higher dividends and you can invest in government schemes etc. So, a little bit of risk-taking is possible in the youth and that saving habit leads to prosperity later on in life.
Mypencildotcom:- Swamiji, you have mentioned about the tough times in life. So, recently we have seen covid, we have seen wars, we are even probably expecting a recession soon. So, when do you suggest your followers to prepare themselves to face the good times and worst times, what would be the key mantra to it?
Swamiji:- We should be prepared for difficult times. They are inevitable in life. Just like the changing seasons we experience in life, happiness will come and it will be followed by distress. There will be pleasure and also pain. Success and also failure. So, when difficult times come, at that time we need to develop such a mindset that we are resilient from inside. We are not willing to give up and instead we utilize those challenging times for our own inner growth.
If our values say my material comfort is the only important thing in life, then those adversities seem like extremely awful thing, because they are snatching away our comforts.
Instead, if we change our values and say my inner growth is also very important, then we will find in those difficulties, opportunities to become better people. When there are dilemmas, we are forced to grow in spiritual and moral wisdom. When our career is in jeopardy, we are forced to exert and bring out our best skills or learn new ones.
In this way, difficulties provide us with opportunities for growth. Look at them from that perspective, take them in your stride, and remember difficult times will never last but strong people will definitely last.
Mypencildotcom:- Great message, Swamiji. One last question while we come to the end of our interview – please share with us one message that you want to give to your followers and readers of Mypencildotcom Magazine.
Swamiji:- There are two branches of knowledge that we must cultivate in our life, one is material knowledge and the other is spiritual knowledge. Very often materialists condemn spirituality as unnecessary and a waste of time and spiritualists feel materialism is completely incorrect and wrong.
However, the Vedas tell us both have their place in your life. You need Material Science to understand the external world and harness its forces for your bodily comforts. And you need spiritual science to understand your inner mind and intellect to purify them and manifest the Divinity of your soul. So, rather than contradicting either of these, you reconcile both of them and utilize them both in your life to successfully reap your goals.
Mypencildotcom:- Thank you Swamiji for this wonderful message. I am sure the readers and followers shall surely get inspired with this wonderful message with the series of ‘Get Inspired’ by the various professionals of India.
We are coming to an end for the episode 59. I thank Swamiji for accepting our request and sharing so much valuable information. Thanks a lot Swamiji for joining us today.
Swamiji:- Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to join you on Mypencildotcom. I wish you all the best in your efforts to inspire people and fill them with enthusiasm in their lives. Namaste.