I had the opportunity to speak to the crypto community at the Zo House in Bangalore on Thursday,May 4th on a rainy evening as part of the mental health awareness month. The title of my talk was “Unblur Your Life - A Swiss Army Knife Approach To Bootstrapping Your Inner Journey”. For the benefit of folks who could not make it to the event, I’m sharing some of the notes I had put together to prepare for this talk. This is part 1.

Sometime last year, I took few days off. I did not go anywhere. I did not do anything that fits the classic definition of a vacation.

Swami Ranganathananda in his book “Universal Message Of The Bhagavad Gita” quotes from a book titled “The Science Of Life” by H.G Wells, G.P Wells and Julian Huxley:

“A human being sees himself as a deficient person. His constant, compulsive pursuits make his sense of inadequacy evident.” So begins the book titled “Introduction To Vedanta - Understanding the fundamental problem” by Swami Dayananda. Our constant pursuit of wealth and pleasure almost inevitably ends up in a sense of emptiness - the rock keeps rolling back down like the curse of Sisyphus.

Experiment with silence. Specifically, experiment with pauses. Pausing is powerful. Pausing creates space - it is the sky in-between. It is there that you really connect with others. It is there that you connect with yourself. Silence is the crucible for inner progress. Doesn’t matter if it is righteous indignation or unwarranted anger, pause and ask yourself: