Smart young girl stood infront of a blackboard
For the last 4 months, I have been soaking in the more subtle dimensions of the first Cosmic Principle – Integrity as a teacher for the children in Nithyananda Bala Vidyalaya ( a weekend programme for children) as well as for the adults in my current yoga classes. My master, Paramahamsa Nithyananda once said that you can learn 75% of a great truth from reading scriptures, learning from master and doing practice, but the remaining 25% will be complete unless we start teaching the truth to others. This is absolutely true!
Integrity is a spiritual value which is beyond morality and ethics. Morality and ethics can vary from era, country, society but integrity is absolute which remains unchanged forever. Integrity is the very foundation on which our lives are built. The structure of our lives is nothing but the words we give to ourselves and to others. Do you know that our words create our destiny? They are the life force that fuels us. Integrity forms part of our very life energy, the very air we breathe.
According to him, he defines “Integrity means honouring every word you utter to yourself and others and experiencing a state of completion (poornatva) with yourself and with life.”
Here are the 9 subtle yet practical tips to live life with integrity which I’ve discovered:
- Everything begins with self. You need to understand that any commitment you make to others is ‘word’ and any commitment to make to yourself is ‘thought’. Society constantly reminds us to have honesty with others but it forgets to teach us to have integrity with our self. Commitment given to yourself is equally important, if not more important because it is about the relationship with yourself. Integrity with yourself is the first principle of the Cosmos. The best relationship starts from you having great relationship with yourself. Fundamentally, the flow of life, the contentment and fulfilment you feel in your life depends on the words you utter and honour to yourself.
- Integrity means completion. If you are not able to honour your words, you need to complete with yourself. Not completing with yourself means that you are carrying the incomplete part of you inside you. When it comes to commitment to others, you don’t have to commit to a promise which you can’t fulfil. But if you do commit, it is not an option, you have to make sure you give your life to fulfil it sincerely. Whenever you are not able to fulfil the words you gave earlier to others, you should complete very clearly with the other party so that he/she can move on and you restore your integrity. Integrity means completion with self and others.
- Integrity switches off your mind. Living on your word means living without the mind. When integrity happens, the number of thoughts you have will come down drastically because you have to be aware of every thought and decide if this is something you want to entertain or drop it. You also stop worrying about what you may have said before and what excuses you need to create. Hence, living with integrity is living in a space of conscious thinking, being in conscious thinking and living it 24/7.
- Integrity removes negativity and impossibility. I also experienced that whenever we are working without integrity, the first quality we will feel is that “Everything is impossible”. We associate the concept of failure from our past memories. The truth is we may have failed in the past due to lack of integrity; that does not mean we are a failure in life. If we complete with the past memory of failure, it will clear our destiny for a clean future of boundless possibilities. If you don’t complete with your dead past, your present will be filled with the future where the past is sitting on it. The hangover you carry about the past is the disease, unless completion with the past is done consciously, no transformation is possible. Everything is possible if we don’t carry the load of the past. The power of integrity will teach us how to diagnose the self-fulfilling negative prophecies or weeds of negativity and hence making whatever we think as impossible into a possibility.
- Integrity brings power to your words. Each word you utter and honour integrates and strengthens you. Each time you don’t respect or honour your word you are weakened. Each time you honour the word you give to others, their confidence in you grows. Each time you honour the words you give to yourself, your confidence in yourself grows. Words are energy, so the words we utter consciously carry the power to manifest the reality. The more integrated one becomes, the more he/she will acquire the voice of wisdom which speaks only the truth. This power is called Vaak Siddhi (an extraordinary power in the organ called Vaak within the yogic physiology which is between the body-mind).
- Integrity makes visualisation becomes reality. One fascinating click for me is discovering how fantasy of root chakra is linked with integrity. Here’s the science, catch it! Integrity is the chemical which can purify the Mooladara chakra (the root energy center at the base of our spine). When you have integrity in your Mooladhara i.e. living in reality instead of fantasy, you will have visualisation capacity not just verbalisation. With visualisation, learning verbalisation becomes a breeze because visualisation is the base material for verbalisation. Without integrity, your verbalisation is nothing but just fantasy, much like blowing of hot air! Fantasy is a lack of integrity! The manifestation of your verbalisation becoming visualisation and then in reality only happens when you live with integrity. It is integrity that brings basic intelligence to our bio-memory and makes our cognition into a reality. Another thing you should know is children below 7 years old live in the mode of visualisation. In the Vedic tradition, the first 14 years of a child’s life is crucial in his or her development. Till the age of seven, a child is like a sponge. Anything that the child is exposed to, the child absorbs. His/her mind and body grows at an amazing rate. In this phase, the child is in the visualization phase. Whatever the child sees is imprinted and embedded into its unconscious. The embedded memories start replaying as the child grows into an adult. These embedded memories drive many of the adult decisions. If they are constantly reminded of the great truth about integrity, they will start expressing enormous power through their power of words, just like the Vedic child prodigy, Pradhlada. Parents need to be aware of the importance of putting the child in a spiritual community where such great truths are taught, practiced and lived.
- Integrity leads you to take responsibility. The beauty of living with integrity is that it will lead you to take responsibility to fulfil others’ expectation about you without bothering whether others fulfil your expectation. With responsibility comes trust. When you become conscious about the commitments you make to others, you naturally will have enough time, energy and space to fulfil those commitments. There is no question of missing time or having tiredness or boredom.
- Success is your natural flow of life. As integrity is our innate nature as a spiritual being, naturally we are programmed to achieve success. Thinking and living with integrity makes us become aware and align of the 3 basic questions of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we stand for’ and ‘what we want to do in life’, then success becomes the natural flow of life. Success is all about you having confidence in yourself and others having confidence in you. It is the mutual confidence and integrity that bring success. When you drop the load of the past in your inner space, you experience more inner space and powerfulness inside that everything you do will be a success. Success or failure is decided first from within you i.e. your inner space and then it is expressed outside of you. So start from inside out, not outside in.
- Integrity puts you in the space of positivity. The new space of positivity opens up only when you complete with yourself. Through completion with self, you will be able to experience the space of inner peace, restful awareness or self-remembrance. This is the greatest wealth you can acquire while in the body because that is a source of wealth that will naturally attract the right persons and success in your life. Without integrity, you will not know what you really want in life and you will be wasting your life. All your broken relationships and conflicts which you have created in the past can be healed through the power of integrity. Healing the damages you caused to yourself and others starts the real relationship. Every individual with whom you have an integrated relationship, there will be no conflict. Here is equation – life minus conflicts brings success and fulfilment, you will experience life energy starts oozing in you. An integrated person is one who knows how to convert anything he/she comes across in life into auspiciousness.
In essence, your life is nothing but the totality of honouring the words you give to you and to others i.e. the respect you carry for you and the respect others carry for you, these two combine together is your life. So constantly bring yourself back to the peak of integrity. Only when integrity becomes your very life breath, the quality of authenticity starts blossoming in you.
The above tips are what I have internalised so far, the next layer of deeper truth will be revealed when the right time comes. One thing for sure, I shall be back with more insights on this subject. Stay tuned! Namaste 🙂