Meditation, mindfulness and more

Finding your true calling in your professional life is something a lot of us experience. But answering that call is what makes the difference. When Nithya Shanti decided to give up his high-paying MBA-driven corporate job to become a Buddhist monk in Thailand, he knew he wouldn’t regret it. In the city to deliver a Manthan talk on Saturday, Nithya tells us that his journey to become the spiritual teacher he is today began when he went to boarding school in Dehradun.

Reading self-help books such as The Silva Mind Control Method, Nithay began dabbling with meditation to help ease his doubts of identity and existence. “It led to good ideas about life, but there was still a gap between my life and those ideas. I knew that I shouldn’t allow people to trigger me... why should other people’s actions affect me? But I found it very hard to practise. I did compare myself to others, and felt inadequate,” he says. But attending a meditation course at the age of 16 helped him realise its benefits, and how focussing on yourself — through breathing — helps.

And after his second course, Nithya learned to let go of things that made him resentful of others. “I noticed that I was letting go of some of the resentment I was carrying against some of my own family members. I was carrying a lot of anger against my mother for three or four years, and poof! It dissolved,” he says. Nithya then earned an MBA and entered the corporate world, but realised he wasn’t satisfied. A chance meeting with a friend in Bengaluru helped him realise his ambition. “He played a movie for me, called Dead Poets Society, which is about the importance of being true to yourself,” explains Nithya.

Nithya then spent the next five years in Thailand and Sri Lanka practising to be a Buddhist monk, where he learned about meditation. Nithya says, “Meditation teaches us the art of intention, focussing on what is right and what can be made right in our lives. It focuses on the ‘now’, to live and experience the moment.” Giving up his robes in 2008, Nithya now preaches across the globe. “I would love to touch people’s lives, but I would love more for them to realise that the guru they’re looking for is already in them. The purpose of the outer guru is to introduce you to the inner guru.”

About the “industrialisation” of teaching in his field, he says the message of the teacher needs to be more important than money. “It’s alright to have people like Deepak Chopra, who make CDs, webinars, podcasts... and charge for it,” he says, and adds, “What’s wrong in being abundant? There are many spiritual gurus giving free talks, waiting to see how many donations come. And people wonder how much to donate. It’s better to keep it simple.”

As for his own plans, Nithya says, “I asked myself: Is my priority to touch the lives of millions of people? Or is to be true? Very clearly the answer was, to be true. Whether it’s one person or a hundred, or a million people, I would rather be doing something that feels true. So I would say that I just hope I remain true.”