<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Anne-Grethe loves Nature and art, and is a spiritual seeker. As an artist she works in many media, from photography to collage to sculpture to painting to mural work. She has also been inspiring many children creatively over the years in the Heartfulness Center in the Danish countryside at Vrads Sande, and continues to do so.</h4>

Anne-Grethe Kousgaard.jpeg

Anne-Grethe Kousgaard

<h3 style="text-align:center;">A Workshop for the Young at Heart of All Ages</h3><h4>We all have the wisdom of the universe inside us, so in this activity ANNA-GRETHE KOUSGAARD and her students tap into that wisdom and make beautiful wisdom cards that can then be used for card games, gifts and decorations.&nbsp;</h4><h4>Activity</h4><img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/wisdom_cards_activity_90436a22ff.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-31T09:05:24.476Z" alt="Wisdom cards"><ul><li>Close your eyes and sit quietly for long enough to go inside and listen to your own wisdom.</li><li>Take one card each to start with. If you know what you want to draw and write, start on your own. If not, you can choose some words from the reference library of quotes, or choose words that would comfort you if you were sad, afraid, nervous, or stressed.</li><li>You have five cards each, so use as many of them as you want.</li><li>At the end, make a display of all the cards.</li></ul><hr><h4>Add a variation</h4>Make the wisdom cards in pairs.<img src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/wisdom_cards_variation_b760575955.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-31T09:05:57.281Z" alt="Wisdom cards">Have a small bag containing words on pieces of paper. The list could contain words like earth, friend, sunny, light, possible, great, incredible, jump, courage etc…With your friend, take turns in picking a piece of paper from the bag and reading out the word.First, on your own with your eyes closed, each see what inspires you about the word chosen. Then, together with your friend, find wisdom that you will share with others on your card.<hr><h4 style="text-align:center;">Artwork by SAVI BALA, SNEHITA VALLUMCHETLA,&nbsp; SHRIVEDA REDDY, LAVANYA VIJAYAN</h4><hr>

Wisdom cards

<hr class="vertical-space1" />
 <h4 style="text-align: left">
 ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD
 shares her love of both Nature and art in this series of leaf paintings. As an artist sh works i many
 media, from photography to collage to sculpture to painting to mural
 work. Anne-Grethe has also been inspiring many children with
 creativity over the years in the Heartfulness Center in the Danish
 countryside at Vrads Sande, and continues to do so.
 </h4>
 
 When I create new paintings or sculptures, ‘playing seriously’ is key for
 me. I forget everything about art and simply create those conditions where
 I feel totally free and in tune with Nature. Without ambition, I just have
 fun! In these paintings, dried leaves and different handmade stencils have
 been used in many layers. My background as a textile printer comes out in
 this series.
 
 www.agkousgaard.dk
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 <img
 alt="anne1"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne1_bef7ca4507.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:22:36.294Z"
 />
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 
 <img
 alt="anne2"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne2_aba5355188.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:23:56.279Z"
 />
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 <img
 alt="anne3"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne3_f4493b3412.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:25:11.861Z"
 />
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 <img
 alt="anne4"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne4_84296f7231.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:26:23.150Z"
 />
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 <img
 alt="anne5"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne5_0038eee2b8.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:27:07.310Z"
 />
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 <img
 alt="anne6"
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/anne6_3cedbb5514.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T07:28:45.011Z"
 />
 
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 
 <hr class="vertical-space1" />
 
 
 <hr />
 <h4 style="text-align: center">An art essay by ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
 
 <hr />

Leaf patterns

<div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-12">
 <img
 class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/people_of_the_earth_img1_1090db72f5.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-03T06:03:24.929Z"
 alt="people-of-the-earth-img1"
 />
 
 </div>
 <div class="col-md-12">
 <img
 class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/people_of_the_earth_img2_e45d49b522.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-03T06:03:58.950Z"
 alt="people-of-the-earth-img2"
 />
 </div>
</div>
I am an artist and a spiritual seeker.
My creative drive is a deep longing.

 In art I look for what is behind the outer appearance for what is within
 – a reflection of soul.


 Being born in Marseille into a French and Danish family, I have always
 sought to connect cultural influences in creative expressions.


 Traveling has therefore been a part of my life ever since childhood and
 still is. The meeting with different original cultures, especially in
 India and Greenland, have been landmarks for me. In both places, I have
 felt a strong connection and the feeling of coming home. In my paintings
 and sculptures I aim to reflect an atmosphere of places and how it can
 be experienced.

<div class="row">
 <div class="col-md-12">
 <img
 class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/people_of_the_earth_img3_651bda2c2d.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-03T06:04:41.959Z"
 alt="people-of-the-earth-img3"
 />
 
 </div>
 <div class="col-md-12">
 <img
 class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/people_of_the_earth_img4_ddad548f5d.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-03T06:05:18.123Z"
 alt="people-of-the-earth-img4"
 />
 </div>
</div>

 At one point, I realised that the inner spiritual journey, for me, is
 far more nurturing than the outer, and since then I have been practising
 heart meditation on a regular basis. I here discover another way to
 return home – a state of being – which is now a focal point in my art
 with portraits and landscapes – the reflection of soul.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />
<h4 style="text-align: center">Art essay by ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
<hr />

People of the earth

Next time you are on the beach, in the forest, or by a river, choose some stones to collect to paint with your
 friends or family. Make sure you check that they are not stones with moss, lichen or other living things growing on
 them, as that will disturb the local ecology.
While having each stone in your hand, you can ask yourself:
What kind of stone have I found?
What kind of pattern would be nice on the stone?
Are there some marks on the stone that call for a theme?
Acrylic colours are more permanent than watercolors and Uni-Posca paint marker pens make fine lines very easily.
Enjoy and have fun!

<hr class="vertical-space1">

<h4><a href="//www.heartfulnessmagazine.com/subscribe/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SUBSCRIBE &amp; DOWNLOAD</a></h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1">

<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Article By&nbsp;ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
<hr>

Painting stones

<img decoding="async" alt="dreamcatchers" width="512" height="711"
 class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/dreamcatchers1_img_9435a201cc.jpg">
Dreamcatchers have always been used as charms by Native Americans. They are hung above the bed, to protect sleeping
 children from nightmares and instead give them good dreams. The design is based on a willow hoop, on which is woven
 or attached a loose net or web.
Dreamcatchers are then decorated with sacred items such as feathers and beads.
To make a dreamcatcher is a very meditative activity, due to the round shape, and the choice of colours, beads and
 feathers.
<img decoding="async" alt="dreamcatchers" width="642" height="813"
 class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/dreamcatchers2_img_2115fd10b8.jpg">Here is a list of MATERIALS you can use:
<ul>
 <li>Willow twigs are flexible and easy to shape into a circle that can be bound to hold together.</li>
 <li>Inside the willow circle you make a spiders web with cotton strings in different colours.</li>
 <li>Decorate the dreamcatcher with coloured strings, beads and all kind of materials from Nature, such as feathers,
 seashells, seed pods and pieces of wood.</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Artwork, photos and activity by ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
<hr>

Dreamcatchers

<hr class="vertical-space1">
Is there someone whose face you would love to draw or paint? It can be someone you know or someone you don’t
 know. Either find the person and ask if you can paint them, or use a photo of the person. What matters is that
 the face of the person should attract you in some way, and make you feel something.
<img class="has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/maja_34b157857e.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-31T07:28:13.882Z" />

<hr class="vertical-space1">
Look carefully at the face, how it is composed, including all the smaller details. Also, connect with your heart
 and look at the face with a defocused view. When we have a defocused view, we are able to see the full picture.
 To have a defocused view, have one eye turned outside on what you are doing, and one eye inside in contact with
 your heart. Then start your painting or drawing of the portrait. Do not judge your work; just stay openhearted.

<img class="has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/potrait2_9c62feeaf8.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-31T07:29:04.816Z" />

When your portrait is finished, you can choose to ask your art piece: “If you could talk to me, what would you
 tell me?” There is often a ‘message’ in our artwork. It could be something like, “Listen inside,” or “What are
 your dreams?”
Enjoy!


<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Photos and text by ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD 
 Painted portrait by MAJA BRUUN-SMIDT</h4>


<hr>

Making portraits

<h5>Materials Needed:</h5>
<ul>
 <li>1 large round plate around 120 cm in diameter.</li>
 <li>2 or 3 paper or wooden plates, as large as you can find.</li>
 <li>Blue, white and green acrylic paint and brushes.</li>
 <li>Natural materials of all kinds: small and large stones, gravel, soil, straw, grass, moss, pieces of wood,
 plants, branches, sea shells, bones, clay etc.</li>
</ul>
<div class="row create-a-world-our-blue-planet">
 <div class="col-12 col-md-6">
 <img class="mw-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/create_a_world_our_blue_planet1_1d24c8e398.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-29T10:11:10.195Z"
 alt="create-a-world-our-blue-planet1" />
 </div>
 <div class="col-12 col-md-6">
 <img class="mw-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/create_a_world_our_blue_planet2_c61c0f9140.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-29T10:11:10.102Z"
 alt="create-a-world-our-blue-planet2" />
 </div>
</div>
<h5>Our planet is called the blue planet. Do you know why?</h5>
From space it looks like a blue ball. This is due to the oceans that you find on our planet.
<h5>What else can you see when you look at our blue planet?</h5>
Do you see different continents, cold and warm regions, virgin forests, deserts, mountains, rivers and cities?

Can you also imagine another blue planet: a dream planet that only you know about? Imagine what that world is like.
Now, close your eyes and visualise our mother earth or your dream blue planet. What is the thing that you like most
about it? What would you like to see on your planet?


<div class="row create-a-world-our-blue-planet">
 <div class="col-12 col-md-6">
 <img class="mw-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/create_a_world_our_blue_planet3_0ff346b37b.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-29T10:17:08.378Z"
 alt="create-a-world-our-blue-planet3" />
 </div>
 <div class="col-12 col-md-6">
 <img class="mw-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/create_a_world_our_blue_planet4_0bfbe35858.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-29T10:17:08.418Z"
 alt="create-a-world-our-blue-planet4" />
 </div>
</div>


Choose a friend or two to build your planet. First spend some time sharing what you would each like to build and how you
see the planet.

Start by painting the large plate blue. Then build up a world together on that blue plate.

Put a sacred place in the centre of the world.

Place stones of all size as mountains and hills. They can be decorated with white paint for snow and green for grass.
Place moss, gravel and earth, and trees. The sea can be a blue painted bowl with water in it.

You can make small animals, humans or any kind of creature for your world, and choose where they should be placed.



 <img decoding="async" alt="spiritual-stories-for-children" width="500" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/create_a_world_our_blue_planet5_3e1e2f9af4.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-29T10:19:38.170Z">


<h4>THINK ABOUT:</h4>
How can we take care of our earth?

How would we like our world to be?
<hr />

<h4 style="text-align: center;">Idea &amp; text: ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
<hr />

CREATE A WORLD : Our Blue Planet

Right now it is springtime in the northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern hemisphere. In the south, the leaves
 are changing color and falling from many of the trees, as the days get shorter and the evenings cooler.
So it is the perfect time to collect these beautiful colored leaves and press them in an old book for at least a
 week, so that they are flat and ready to be decorated.
Once the leaves are ready, here is one activity that you can invite your friends to do with you. …
<hr class="vertical-space1">
<img decoding="async" class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/decorative_leaves_2_59a15ad847.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T05:59:50.081Z">

<h5 style="text-align: center;">Maybe you will also be inspired to write a poem or a story on one of your leaves.</h5>
<img decoding="async" width="127" height="32" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/divider_decorative_leaves_2396c1a14e.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-04T06:13:53.466Z">

<h5 style="text-align: center;"></h5>
<hr class="vertical-space1">

<h4>Read the complete article in <a style="color: #bf8f26;"
 href="//www.heartfulnessmagazine.com/category/volume2/volume2issue4/">Volume 2, Issue 4</a> 
 </h4>
<h4><a href="//www.heartfulnessmagazine.com/subscribe/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SUBSCRIBE &amp; DOWNLOAD</a></h4>
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Activity &amp; photos by ANNE-GRETHE KOUSGAARD</h4>
<hr>

Decorative leaves

Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing. She is the author of Origins and The Cult of Personality, and her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is currently a Learning Sciences Exchange Fellow at New America.



Annie-Murphy-Paul.jpg

Annie Murphy Paul

<h4
 id="h-annie-murphy-paul-is-a-journalist-and-author-whose-books-include-origins-how-the-nine-months-before-birth-shape-the-rest-of-our-lives-the-cult-of-personality-testing-and-the-extended-mind-the-power-of-thinking-outside-the-brain-in-part-2-of-this-interview-by-uday-kumar-she-speaks-more-about-interoception-and-self-awareness-and-how-gestures-and-physical-expressions-are-as-important-as-verbal-communication-in-helping-our-children-to-learn">
 ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
 is a journalist and author whose books include
 Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives,
 The Cult of Personality Testing, and The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. In
 part 2 of this interview by
 UDAY KUMAR, she
 speaks more about interoception and self-awareness, and how gestures and
 physical expressions are as important as verbal communication in helping our
 children to learn.
</h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<h3 class="has-text-align-center" id="h-how-to-nurture-your-children-s-inner-strengths-part-2">
 HOW TO NURTURE YOUR CHILDREN’S INNER STRENGTHS – PART 2
</h3>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: As you do research on the extended mind, what do you think
 about the
 role of mirror neurons?



 AMP: I don’t
 refer to mirror neurons. I am not convinced that we know enough about how they
 operate and how central they are to the processes of empathy and
 communication. And I don’t think it is necessary to understand. I say this in
 the book: Humans naturally engage in mimicry, subtle automatic miming of each
 other, when talking face to face. It’s by making those expressions and
 gestures, and by assuming the postures of the other person, that we then read
 off our own bodies what those postures and expressions make us feel. That’s
 how we get access to what another person is feeling and thinking. Research has
 found that people who are more attuned to their own internal signals can be
 more empathetic because they then feel more acutely the signals they read from
 the other person. I am fascinated by processes like this in which humans
 bridge the divide between us, so we are not as separate as we think we are. So
 in my case I didn’t feel the need to draw in the research about mirror
 neurons.



 Q: You also touch upon sensing, labeling and verbalizing of
 emotions. One
 of the core practices of many meditation systems, including Heartfulness, is
 journaling at the end of a meditation sessions.



 AMP: Oh,
 interesting!



 Q: We observe ourselves at the physical, mental, emotional, and
 spiritual
 levels, and train ourselves in the vocabulary of journaling. We develop the
 capacity to have one eye always looking inward while looking at another
 person. We learn to become adept at witnessing through meditation and
 journaling.



 AMP: So, I would
 like to know your thoughts on any research you have come across on journaling
 and how it helps.



 That sounds like a really fruitful exercise, and it makes me think of two
 areas of research I write about in the book. One is around interoception.
 There is a suggestion that the most effective way to use those interoceptive
 sensations is to alternate or oscillate between attending to the outside world
 and attending to the inside world, so that you’re getting a constant infusion
 of information from both places. You don’t get lost in the internal
 sensations, but you are not so focused on the outside that you are not in tune
 to what is going on inside. That is an effective way to gain wisdom from both
 spheres. It sounds like journaling might facilitate that.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The most effective way to use those
 interoceptive sensations is to
 alternate or oscillate between attending to the outside world and attending
 to the inside world, so that you’re getting a constant infusion of information
 from both places.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Second, it is very useful to take the mental contents of the brain and put
 them out into physical space, whether it is on a whiteboard, post-it notes, or
 a field notebook. I have read about how important field notebooks are to
 scientists. Although it may seem that a thought in our head and a thought we
 write down on a page are the same, they really are different – what
 psychologists call different affordances. We can do different things with
 them. Once we put a thought down on paper, we can inspect it with our senses.
 We can look at it, we can read it out loud, we can change it around, we can
 manipulate it in ways that remain inert when it is inside our head. In
 journaling, we externalize our thoughts and feelings so we can look at them in
 the moment, and we can also revisit them later in a way that is difficult to
 deal with if it remains in our head. I think it is a really productive and
 fruitful exercise.



 Q: My teacher says that when you are on a hike, if you look back
 every few
 yards, you won’t know how much ground you’ve covered, but when you come to
 the summit you will see the whole thing. He says it is exactly like that
 when you read your journal from three years ago. You see what thoughts you
 were getting in meditation, and how observant you were of your own inner
 environment. That’s a good way of gauging your own progress, of tracking
 your inner progress and figuring out how it is coming along.



 AMP: It is
 remarkable how difficult that is to do if you don’t write things down. It is
 hard to remember how you were three years ago. And that is a useful difference
 between an external resource like paper and pen or a computer file and our
 brains, which are always transmuting and changing our memory, often in a
 fruitful and productive way, but not in a way that keeps things as they were.
 We need something that is kept as it was so we can push against it or remember
 how things were, which is what the brain is not meant to be. The brain is not
 good at being a fixed and unchanging record of what happened.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div class="block-image">
 <figure>
 <img width="700" alt="nurture_children_strrength_part2" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/nurture_children_strrength_part2_2_700x459_171b902801.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T10:54:55.930Z" />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I am taking a jump here, but the better we are at our own
 interoceptive
 reading, the better we are at reading others, too. Not in terms of getting
 into their minds, but feeling what they are feeling, understanding what they
 are going through, and that’s how we can communicate better with people. It
 starts with “me,” but if we are honest with our own changes, then it
 radiates outward in concentric circles.



 AMP: I think that
 is absolutely true, in a way that if we stayed locked inside our own head we
 wouldn’t be able to make that connection with other people.



 Q: Can you talk a little bit about your research around
 meditators and the
 ultimatum game?



 AMP: I was just
 fascinated by some research I came across that seemed to push against the very
 common and old idea in Western culture that it’s the brain that is rational
 and the body is an unruly, irrational animal-like entity, and the rational
 brain controls this unruly body. What was so fascinating to me about the
 research on the ultimatum game is that the body can be more rational than the
 brain.



 In the experiment, groups of participants were asked to play the ultimatum
 game, where there are partners. One partner has control of the kitty of money,
 and they decide how much to offer their partner. The expectation of the
 partner generally is that growing out of reciprocity the other person will
 fairly divide the kitty in half.



 Often, however, the offering person gave their partner less than half and kept
 more for themselves.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 
 What was so fascinating to me about 
 the research on the ultimatum game is that the body can be more
 rational than the brain.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 The rational thing for a recipient partner to do was to take whatever was
 offered: If they were given one dollar, that was one dollar they would not
 have had otherwise. But because they had a social expectation of reciprocity,
 often the people who were offered less than half, or less than what they
 thought they should get, refused it out of spite, almost to say, “If you are
 not going to give me what I think is fair, I am going to spite myself by not
 accepting that offer at all.” So that’s very irrational in a sense.


The research found that long-time meditators were:

<ol>
 <li>more likely to accept the low offer, to do the rational thing, and</li>
 <li>
 when they made that choice, the part of their brain called the insula, which
 is the interoceptive hub where all the sensations of the body are processed,
 was more active when they were contemplating this offer.
 </li>
</ol>


 And in people who did not meditate it was the prefrontal cortex that was
 active, which is the part of the brain that makes judgments and decides when
 something is fair or not. In other words, those people who were meditators,
 and probably more attuned to their bodies, were making a more rational choice
 in this economic game than people who were using their heads. I found that
 result really fascinating.



 Q: Me too! My interpretation of that study was that as you
 meditate, your
 ego becomes more humble and grounded. If you think of the ego as a spectrum,
 one extreme is humility and the other is arrogance, and you are somewhere in
 the middle. You may not think it’s fair, but you accept and move on.



 AMP: Right! I
 don’t have to put my big ego out in front and let it make all the decisions.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Research now shows that gesture is similarly important for
 building
 vocabulary and later academic success.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div class="block-image">
 <figure>
 <img width="700" alt="nurture-children-strrength" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/nurture_children_strrength_part2_3_700x459_75e2bf7deb.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T10:55:51.651Z" />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I would like to ask you more about gestures, especially for
 children. I
 was familiar with the word gap study by Hart and Risley, and I come from the
 Indian culture where everybody talks to their children all the time. What I
 hadn’t understood, and what you called out, was how important gestures are
 for a child. I still remember my grandmother and her gestures. She was very
 animated, and it did something. Can you talk about gestures and their role
 in our lives?



 AMP: That’s a
 lovely memory. It must have been very engaging to listen to her and watch her.
 You got the full helping at the start of your life!



 What’s interesting is the idea of a gesture gap. In the Hart and Risley study,
 they found that affluent children may hear as many as 30 million more words by
 the time they start school than less affluent children. This word gap has an
 enormous implication on how they perform in school. Research now shows that
 gesture is similarly important for building vocabulary and later academic
 success. We see a similar effect on how much affluent parents gesture with
 their children and how much less affluent parents gesture with their children.
 We can say there is a gesture gap along with a word gap, which may be just as
 significant.



 And the good news here is that with a little bit of training and awareness
 raising, parents from all socio-economic groups can employ more gestures in
 their interactions with their children. For example, when they are reading a
 book with their children, pointing with their finger, or making a cat gesture
 when they are talking about a cat. Those gestures made by parents lead
 children to make more gestures, and later on it shows up in a larger spoken
 vocabulary for the children.



 This is just another example of how we are so focused on verbal language that
 we don’t focus on gesture. Once we know the importance of gesture, however, we
 can bring it onto our parenting practices



 Q: Amazing! I love it because it shines the light of science
 onto something
 we take for granted.



 Thank you, I really appreciate it.



 AMP: Thank you
 for reading the book so carefully, and for having such thoughtful questions. I
 really appreciate it.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h4 class="has-text-align-center">Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL</h4>

<hr />

The importance of gestures in communication

<h4
 id="h-annie-murphy-paul-is-a-journalist-and-author-who-writes-about-the-biological-and-social-sciences-her-books-include-origins-how-the-nine-months-before-birth-shape-the-rest-of-our-lives-the-cult-of-personality-testing-and-the-extended-mind-the-power-of-thinking-outside-the-brain-in-this-interview-by-uday-kumar-she-speaks-about-her-latest-book-and-the-implications-the-extended-mind-has-for-children-s-development-and-how-we-learn"
>
 ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
 is a journalist and author who writes about the biological and social
 sciences. Her books include
 Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives,
 The Cult of Personality Testing, and The Extended Mind: The Power of
 Thinking Outside the Brain. In this interview by
 UDAY KUMAR, she
 speaks about her latest book, and the implications the extended mind has for
 children’s development and how we learn.
</h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I want to congratulate you on The Extended Mind, because this topic is
 not for the faint-hearted. The more I read, the more I feel the pains and
 the tribulations you have gone through to stitch the whole story together
 and make sure it holds. How did you come across this? What gave you the
 signal that this is it?



 AMP: It was a long
 and winding road, as books sometimes are. I started out with the idea of
 writing about the science of learning. I focused on that in my magazine
 journalism for a while. It actually pretty closely followed the contours of my
 own life, because I had done the research and recording for
 Origins when I was pregnant with my second son. Then, when my sons
 were older and went to school, I became very interested in their learning, the
 instructions their teachers were giving them, how that all worked. I knew I
 wanted to write something about the science of learning, but I couldn’t seem
 to find a big idea that would pull it all together. The more I explored the
 science of learning, the more it felt like a collection of techniques and
 methods that were very useful, but there wasn’t a big idea for me as a writer,
 which I need to get excited and pull me through all that hard work.



 So I started widening the range of things I was reading, including venturing
 into philosophy and cognitive science, and that’s how I came across the 1998
 article by Clark and Chelmer on the idea of the “extended mind.” I don’t
 remember it being a lightbulb moment, but it eventually came to be the idea
 that pulled together all the threads. I felt they were in some way related,
 but I really could not put my finger on how. Things like embodied cognition
 and situated cognition, the way the physical place affects the way we think,
 and then socially-distributed cognition, the idea that we think with other
 people. All those things seem to be modelling how thinking happens, as opposed
 to the conventional idea that it all happens in the head.



 But until I encountered the idea of the extended mind, I didn’t have a name
 for what exactly I was talking about. And then from there, I wouldn’t say it
 all fell into place, but it gave the book the spine that I needed to string
 all those different pieces together.



 Q: How long was the project overall?



 AMP: It’s hard to
 say, because the science of learning stuff kind of morphed into what I was
 writing about the extended mind; the science of learning material flowed into
 the extended mind. I would say I was working on the book itself probably for
 five years, but I was writing articles, doing research, and reporting on the
 science of learning for five years before that. That really informed what I
 eventually wrote in The Extended Mind.



 Q: It shows! I am halfway through your book right now, and I am taking my
 time because I am also looking up the research studies that you are
 referring to, and in many ways it has made me a student of the subject. In
 Heartfulness there is the idea of moving from thinking to feeling – the
 journey of consciousness moves from thinking to feeling to being to a state
 of non-being. So I got onto your concept of the extended mind immediately.
 This is brilliant coming from the angle of science. In your book, there is a
 sentence, “The future lies in thinking outside the brain.” Do you want to
 talk a little about that – what you see from that standpoint when you talk
 about the future?



 AMP: Yes. I think
 I wrote that the future lies in thinking outside the brain in the context of
 how very complex our culture has become. As humans, we have created this
 incredibly complex culture and society, which in many ways is beyond the
 capacity of our biological brains to handle. We are interacting with this 21st
 century world, with all these enormous challenges and complexities, but we are
 still using our Stone Age brains, which evolved for very different kinds of
 purposes. Our brains didn’t evolve to deal with abstract concepts so much as
 they evolved to move the body, manipulate physical objects, relate to other
 people, and navigate through space.



 So these are the things the brain does easily, effortlessly and well. The more
 we can leverage those natural human strengths in the service of the things we
 ask the brain to do, at school, at work, and in our daily lives, the better
 those activities will go. But we have this bias – I really think it’s a
 prejudice – against thinking outside the brain. We almost fetishize the brain
 as a sacred organ, when it really has these built-in limits that are just a
 product of its status as a biologically-evolved organ, and they are shared by
 all of us. We are obsessed with individual differences and intelligence, when
 the main thing we should really be focusing on are the limits that are common
 to all of our brains, and thinking about how to transcend those limits,
 because we really do have to meet the challenges of the moment.



 I am thinking about climate change and political polarization. These huge
 challenges we have are so complex, and we need to meet these moments as
 individuals and as a society, and the biological brain is not really up to
 that job. So thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural
 resources, and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural resources,
 and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="492"
 height="752"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_2_a1321980ea.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:22:22.669Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I intuitively get it. I think it is something we have lost over time. It
 comes to us naturally if we are receptive enough, and that’s where you talk
 about the whole idea of interoception, and how the body is actually
 communicating with the brain.



 In your work, as you were looking at and reading some of these things, was
 there any research or idea around the interplay of the heart and the mind? I
 am not talking about the pump, the organ, but the field of operation that we
 keep harmonizing with and with which we achieve a state of flow.



 AMP: Yes. That’s
 how I tried to structure the book. Extending with the body, then space, and
 our relationships with other people, I see it like a set of concentric circles
 that are rippling ever outward.



 Q: As a reader, how do I apply some of these basics as a busy professional
 in consulting, who has billed all the hours and still has work left to do?
 Do you have any tips you want to share with a working person on how to
 extend the mind?



 AMP: Let’s start
 with that one thought you just mentioned – interoception, the capacity for
 sensing the internal signals of our bodies. I think we have this notion in our
 society that to do difficult mental work means to push the body aside, to push
 it out of the picture, just be a brain working at a desk, at a screen. It is a
 mistake to think that that is how the best kind of thinking happens. It’s
 actually cutting out a huge source of human intelligence.



 What I would recommend for that consultant, to help with his busy schedule, is
 rather than powering through and gritting your teeth and ignoring the body,
 take a moment to settle back into your body, and remember you have a body.
 Tune into what your body is telling you. That can be a source of really
 valuable information that you will be missing out on if you are not in touch
 with it.



 In the book, I describe using a meditation exercise, the body scan, to pay
 close, non-judgmental and open-minded attention to all those sensations that
 are arising in the body all the time, but which we often in our busy-ness
 ignore or push away. Pay attention to those signals and, over time, you can
 learn what they are telling you, and how they can guide your behavior.



 It doesn’t have to take long. It’s just a matter of remembering to do that –
 checking in with your body rather than acting as if you are just a head, from
 the neck up.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_3_6e5c6c730d.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:29:24.618Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Experts are the ones who are out there mucking around in the real
 world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new
 things, and figuring out how things work. That is another type
 of thinking outside the brain: where you’re not doing it all in here
 the head, you’re doing it out in the world.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I like that, and the body awareness exercise you share in the book. In
 Heartfulness, we have some of these exercises like guided relaxation that we
 teach to children. I had my kids do this through the pandemic before they
 started school, because they were not used to so much screen time. Also,
 observing which nostril is dominant at any point in time and seeing how it
 switches.



 I also read the part in your book where you talk about expertise – how
 being an expert is not just about mastering those 10,000 hours. Experts are
 actually extending, trying more, tracking more. While we are breaking down
 the holy altars of the brain, can we also break down the concept of
 expertise?



 AMP: I definitely
 see that connection. A word that I really like, which was coined by one of the
 originators of the theory of the extended mind, Andy Clark, is “brain-bound.”
 We have this brain-bound approach to work and school, and also to expertise.
 We think about expertise as an individual putting in those 10,000 hours to
 become an expert, and there’s very little reference to how, for example,
 nobody becomes an input by themselves. It’s quintessentially a social process,
 and that’s something I write in the book: People like physics graduates or
 doctors-in-training become experts by interacting with others and being
 socialized into their fields. It’s true of all of us.



 I mentioned those two because I cite some studies in regard to them
 specifically. We think of experts as doing it all in their heads, we think of
 experts as knowing exactly what to do and doing it, and it is very clean and
 efficient. But actually, experts are the ones who are out there mucking around
 in the real world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new things,
 and figuring out how things work. That is another type of thinking outside the
 brain: where you’re not doing it all in here the head, you’re doing it out in
 the world.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of
 movement, and of social interaction, the more we can pull those into
 academics, and leverage them to make learning more
 effective.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 When you think about an expert designer or architect, they’re often making
 models of the project they’re working on or the problem they’re trying to
 solve, and interacting with that model, moving their body around the model.
 They’re not doing it all in their head. Artists and designers often say that
 their best ideas emerge in the process of sketching, and drawing, and
 iterating their ideas on paper. It’s not as if they have the idea inside their
 head and they just dictate it. It happens in the process of doing the work
 itself. I think we have some mistaken ideas, some brain-bound ideas about what
 expertise is and how it works, and if we want to become experts it would be a
 good idea to revise those.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_4_43967d1e0f.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:30:32.655Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I completely agree. There is also this element of intellectual humility
 that experts have. They’re willing to accept what they don’t know and
 listen. I think it is also a sign of the extended mind, where the mind has
 factored in the humility of “What I know is less than what I don’t know.” I
 think that’s where experts keep growing, while others maybe taper off over
 time.



 Now, extending the idea of expertise, that instead of people thinking
 better they extend their minds better, how do we teach our children these
 skills? Not in terms of a policy, but from what you see, from your research,
 are there any thoughts on how to teach kids, how to design their work
 spaces?



 AMP: I think there
 are so many implications for what we could be doing right now with our kids,
 with our students. You mentioned earlier that you tell your kids about tuning
 into their bodies before school starts. Scientists have found all these
 individual differences in how people are attuned to their internal signals,
 and the reason those individual differences arise is because of differences in
 the kinds of messaging children receive from their caregivers. “Is it okay to
 listen to my body? Is it okay to take those messages seriously, or am I
 supposed to ignore those messages and pretend they don’t exist?”



 So encouraging our kids to tune into their bodies is certainly one thing I
 have taken away from the research, in terms of what I do with my own kids.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<div>
 <figure>
 <img
 width="600"
 height="392"
 alt=""
 class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/how_to_nurture_children_part1_5_22d981aa60.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-12T04:32:15.793Z"
 />
 </figure>
</div>
<hr class="vertical-space1" />

 I’ve also stressed to them the importance of movement and gesture. Again, we
 have this idea that thinking and academic work happens when students are
 sitting quietly at their desks, when really the human brain and body evolved
 to move, and there are so many ways movement can enhance thinking. Likewise,
 being outside, often we can combine those two things: movement and being
 outdoors. Those two things can work together to really replenish depleted
 stores of attention and executive function. It’s a lot to ask kids to sit
 inside hour after hour, focusing on these things that they are not necessarily
 naturally interested in.



 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of movement, and
 of social interaction, the more we can pull those into academics, and leverage
 them to make learning more effective. I talk about thinking with other people,
 and thinking with peers, about teaching others, debating, and storytelling.
 These are all ways we can leverage children’s natural sociability, social
 instincts and interest in the social world in the service of what we want them
 to learn.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

To be continued. 

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h4 class="has-text-align-center">
 Interviewed by UDAY KUMAR Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
</h4>

<hr />

How to nurture your children’s inner strengths – part 1

Annika is the co-host of the podcast, The Woke Desi, and author of the The Rearranged Life and the upcoming book, Love, Chai, and Other Four-Letter Words. With a background in biobehavioral health, neuro-psychology, and early childhood special education, she is passionate about breaking boundaries and having dialogues on both fun and taboo topics to encourage others to grow and evolve.



Annika-Sharma.jpg

Annika Sharma

Living authentically

Anon

A joke

Anonymous

The beauty of the world

Anthony J. D’angelo

The greatest gift

Antoine Denoix is the CEO of AXA Climate, an entity within the AXA Group established five years ago to address climate and environmental adaptation challenges. Antoine is also an accomplished author, with three books published by Dunod.

antoine-denoix.webp

Antoine Denoix

Regenerative business

Arati is an artist and a graphic designer by profession. She has worked in the corporate field and is presently working in the design team for the Heartfulness Magazine. She has also worked on media cover designs and illustrations for children's books.

Arati Shedde.webp

Arati Shedde

Arohi was born and brought up in Mumbai. She is passionate about penning poetry, and writing about things that resonate with her, parenting, and the soul. She currently pursues all forms of creative writing and can always be found enjoying a warm cup of tea.



Arohi-Bhimajiani-.jpg

Arohi Bhimajiani

AROHI BHIMAJIANI writes about fear – how fears that develop at a young age can stay
 with us far into adulthood; and how her fear of dogs helped her to
 understand what helps us overcome fear.
 

 <hr class="vertical-space1" />

 
 Fear. It takes a million forms, doesn’t it? Right from that ghost under
 the bed, to standing at the diving board edge; from being spurned in
 love to not being well to do. Fear is our mind playing games with us,
 making assumptions and predictions. Its roots spread deep within us and
 vertically evolve into dread, anxiety, and panic.
 

 
 It’s fascinating how these little seeds of fear are sown, and how they
 shoot up into the skies. Sometimes they mushroom and take on other
 shapes and forms.
 

 
 More often than not, fear can be traced back to childhood incidents. And
 often they involve the fear of losing love, life, money, status,
 standing, etc.
 

 How to let go of such deep-rooted fears?

 
 Letting go of fear is easier as a child, because our patterns haven’t
 yet become rigid. We are still impressionable. I suffered from fear of
 heights as a kid. I was a good swimmer, but every time I stood on the
 diving board and looked down, I saw hissing snakes and jelly legs! In
 that moment, my natural “good swimmer instinct” would vanish. Yet I
 would jump. And with each jump, the intensity of the fear reduced.
 

 
 Fear envelops every rational or instinctive feeling and replaces it with
 panic-stricken darts, most of which are baseless. As an adult, I find it
 so much harder to recognize fear and deal with it. Over the years, the
 layers of panic-stricken darts have only thickened. And yet I try.
 

 
 I was petrified of dogs ever since I was little. I am unable to trace
 the feeling back to anything concrete, but as soon as a dog drew close,
 my mind and body froze. The very thought of its warm wet nose and mouth
 coming close to my feet or heels had me screaming.
 

 
 For many years, I would not visit friends or family who had dogs unless
 they assured me that the dogs were on a leash. Generally, I preferred to
 meet them outside.
 

 
 Once, I was invited to a friend’s house, and as I entered I was greeted
 by a gorgeous ebony-black Doberman. She was taller than me, with bright
 eyes, sharp and alert. I was about to turn around and go, but something
 about her gaze was positively hypnotic. I attempted to hide behind my
 husband, while my uncle, sensing my fright, held back the frightening
 yet majestic one.
 

 
 I kept an eye on her, feeling paralyzed every time she’d enter the room.
 I was so full of fear that I could barely enjoy the conversations and
 the company. But, after some time, I was used to her walking around and
 started liking it. That’s when I got the fright of my life. She walked
 toward me and sat down on my feet. I froze. I was holding my breath to
 the point of fainting. I let it out, one puff at a time, praying that my
 heart would settle. I closed my eyes and began chanting a prayer until
 my breathing calmed down. As my hand untensed and hung loose, it in
 advertently rested on her abdomen.
 

 
 That’s when I felt shock number two. I was blown away by how she felt.
 Alive, breathing, silky soft, yet muscle-hard; it felt like I had
 touched another being for the first time. My hand moved up and down her
 length like a puppet pulled by strings. Her face was turned away from
 me, and yet I knew she was as present and connected with me in that
 moment as any living being in its purest form could be.
 

 
 Slowly the voices and room came into focus. What must have been a couple
 of seconds felt like a lifetime. I sat there for the rest of the
 evening, feeling both alive and at peace, sharing with this living
 being.
 

 
 I have never feared dogs since – regardless of their shape, size, and
 how loudly they bark. I no longer run screaming in the opposite
 direction. Rather I feel drawn to them and, fascinatingly, them to me.
 

 
 It simply took one pure soul to wrench the hardened ball of fear out of
 my gut. And maybe that is what we all need – a pure, unconditional
 loving relationship or shoulder, to help us transform our fears into a
 sense of love and peace. Or maybe to simply extend a caring hand to our
 scared selves, to hug it tightly and whisper sweet nothings until the
 fear is gone.
 

 Love is and will always be the antidote to fear.

 <hr class="vertical-space1" />

 <hr />

 <h4
 class="has-text-align-center"
 id="h-a-pure-unconditional-loving-relationship-or-shoulder-to-help-us-transform-our-fears-into-a-sense-of-love-and-peace"
 >
 A pure, unconditional loving relationship or shoulder, to help
 us transform our fears into a sense of love and peace.
 </h4>

 <hr />

Letting go of fear

<h4>
 AROHI
 BHIMAJIANI shares her experience of the
 power of prayer, and how it has helped her navigate the difficult periods in her life. She is also
 teaching the practice to her daughter.
</h4>



<hr class="vertical-space1">



Have you ever wondered if our prayers work? Have you ever wondered how they work?



I have witnessed my prayers come to life in the most fascinating ways. And it has simply left me in awe of the
 mechanisms of the universe.



I once experienced a severe falling out with my immediate family. The experience shattered every notion of love and
 unbreakable bonds I held deep within. It had me breaking down numerous times during the day, bringing me to my
 knees, praying tearfully.



I remember going about my days on autopilot with a constant sense of loss, pain, and misery. The world took on a
 permanent gray sheen. My anxiety manifested itself in the form of asthma. As I gasped for breath, I came to the
 conclusion that most physical ailments are rooted in psychological trauma.



There was one thing that kept me alive in those days, that helped me wake up and get through the day: my prayers.



I prayed with every fiber of my being. I prayed with an intensity that must have rocked the heavens. Every word
 crystal clear. I simply begged the universe to set things right. To help me recreate bonds of love stronger than
 before. I prayed with complete surrender and faith.



Slowly and steadily, over time, my relations improved. With equal efforts from all ends, frayed ties were lovingly
 mended. Deeper and firmer connections were established. The world took on its beautiful colors again.



I have attempted the same with my little girl. Every time she is faced with a challenge, or when circumstances look
 woeful, I nudge her to pray. She came to me crying the other day, because some kids were bullying her in school.
 They would mess up her table during the break and not clean up afterward. Complaining to the teacher hadn’t
 helped.



I asked her to pray, to ask the universe for strength to deal with the situation. After she had earnestly done so, I
 guided her to change her tone to being confident instead of complaining, and insist the children clean up.



It helped. The incident never repeated itself. I noticed how praying made her feel like she had gained a superpower
 to deal with an unpleasant situation or person. It transformed her from a meek, complaining child to an
 assertive one.



I have witnessed this miracle occurring innumerable times in the last 30 years of my life. And yet there is so much
 more to the miracle than meets the eye.



I realize that my prayers have manifested when:



<ul>
 <li>I wished with the purest intention, from the deepest recesses of my heart.</li>
 <li>I worked toward making the wish come true even though the odds seemed against me.</li>
 <li>There was no sense of time or shape attached.</li>
 <li>There was complete faith that it would come true.</li>
</ul>



Just praying and sitting back never helped. I had to show the universe that I was utterly serious about my intentions
 – that I worked hard for them, even though it looked like an unsurmountable mountain.



An astonishing discovery was that sometimes these wishes manifested in unexpected forms. Like when heartache leaves
 one desolate and one prays to feel whole again, love walks in with violins and roses from unexpected yet even
 more fulfilling people.



Prayer is one of the most powerful tools to attain stability and confidence. I do it with fervor. I put my entire
 heart into it. And I do it with complete faith that someone is carefully listening to every word I say. It is my
 solace and my happy place. It is a cup of tea, a warm blanket, a tight hug, and a blessing hand, all rolled into
 one. I hope every person out there is bestowed with its benevolence.&nbsp;



May we find the rhythm Of the soul song with the winds. May our prayers reverberate And rise magnificently
 to heaven’s gate.



<hr class="vertical-space1">



<hr>



<h4 class="has-text-align-center">Prayer is one of the most powerful tools to attain stability and
 confidence. I do it with fervor. I put my entire heart into it. And I do it with complete faith
 that someone is carefully listening to every word I say. </h4>



<hr>



<hr class="vertical-space1">

My soul song

Arulkumar Selvaraj is a designer and digital animator. He makes movies, short films and TV series. He loves to read and write poetry, paint, play badminton and draw cartoons. He also loves to spend time with family and close friends, and in Nature. He practises Heartfulness meditation, which he believes will lead him towards infinity, serving the purpose of this life.


arul-kumar-selvaraj-img.jpg

Arul Kumar Selvaraj

Aryaan is a young Indian- American actor, musician, composer, and social media personality, who is known for the legal drama Bull, the musical Bhangin It and the film Deli Boy. He is also the Founder and CEO of The Arora Company, a US-based Public Relations and Marketing Consultancy Firm.

Aryaan-Arora.webp

Aryaan Arora

Become your own influence

Ashwin is a writer in the fiction-thriller genre. He is the author of best-selling novels The Rozabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant, The Krishna Key, The Sialkot Saga and Keepers of the Kalachakra. His books are based on mythological and theological themes. He is one of India's best-selling conspiracy fiction writers and is an author of the new era of retelling Indian history or mythology in a contemporary context. Forbes India has included him in their Celebrity 100 list.


Ashwin-Sanghi.jpg

Ashwin Sanghi

<h4>ASHWIN SANGHI is an Indian author in the intersecting genre of mythology,
 fiction and thriller. Here he is interviewed by RUDY SINGH at Kanha Shanti
 Vanam about his formative influences, what brought him to writing, and the gray area intersecting mythology and
 history. In Part 2, the conversation will also move to his own work and his latest books.</h4>
Q: Welcome to Kanha Shanti Vanam. What are your first impressions of this place?

AS: I&nbsp;am absolutely fascinated by my
 surroundings. Before I arrived here I didn’t know the scale of Kanha Shanti Vanam. It has been an incredible
 experience not just because of the infrastructure, which is obviously still coming up, but even what is there is
 world-class. More importantly, I think what is fascinating is just the amazing environment that you have
 created.
I am told that you have planted over 100,000 trees and plants in this place, which was
 barren land. That the water table is changing because of the number of reservoirs and the rainwater harvesting that
 is being done here. The fact that this place is energy self-sufficient because of the number of solar panels that
 are used. And of course the fact that there have been so many trees that have been translocated, or transplanted,
 here from other road-widening projects etc.
So when you add all of it up, it makes for a fascinating place. And then of course when
 you factor in Daaji and his vibrations, and the vibrations of all those people who happen to be here meditating,
 it’s a magical experience. So to sum up: it’s a magical place.
Q: Ashwin, I read that when you first started writing, you faced almost 40 rejections
 for your work, and then you decided to self-publish. Now most of us have a terrible time handling rejection. How
 did you handle that phase?
AS: Well, I think one of the problems in today’s
 world is that we don’t teach youngsters to cope with failure. And I think failure is a very important learning tool.
 And I think what we need to understand is how do we motivate ourselves to keep plodding on. When a child falls down
 while he is learning to walk, he doesn’t think, “Well, maybe this is not for me.” He just gets up and walks. He
 makes an attempt to walk and finally he learns how to walk. But we don’t do that in later life; we seem to get
 affected every time we fall down.
In front of my desk I had this bulletin board, which had a series of numbers: 12, 18,
 30, 34, 38, so on and so forth. When people would come to my study they would wonder what those numbers were.
Well, 12 was the number of times that the first book in the Harry Potter series
 by J.K. Rowling was rejected by publishers. 18 was the number of times that Jonathan Livingston Seagull was
 rejected. 30 was the number of times that the first novel by Stephen King, Carrie, was rejected. 34 was the
 number of times that Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected. 38 was the number of times that Gone with
 the Wind was rejected.
So I used to psyche myself into believing that I would be a better author than all of
 them because I was getting rejected more. It’s almost a way of psyching yourself to plod on, and I think that is a
 very important skill that we need to be imparting to our youngsters.
<hr>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">I think failure is a very important learning tool. 
 And I think what we need to understand is how 
 do we motivate ourselves to keep plodding on.</h5>
<hr>
Q: That is wonderful. So your first book, The Rozabal Line, is based on the
 hypothesis that Jesus came to India and lived here after he survived the crucifixion. How did that topic come
 up? How did you decide to take that route?
AS: Actually I genuinely have come to believe that
 it’s the other way round. We, as writers or storytellers, think that we are going out searching for a story, but
 really stories come searching for us, because that story wants to be told.
I happened to be in Srinagar sometime around 2002, attending the wedding of a very dear
 friend. This was of course the time of peak militancy in Srinagar, so there were road blocks and military
 check-posts every few yards. I was feeling so completely cooped up in my hotel room and I told my driver, “You have
 to get me out of here and take me to some place.”
He said, “Well, I can take you to a very interesting tomb.”
<h5><img alt="where-history-intersects-with-myth-part-1" 
 class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/history_intersects_myth2_b2586e4d84.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T07:16:42.021Z">
</h5>
So we landed up in the heart of Srinagar, the old part of Srinagar, known as the Khanyar
 district. And in the heart of this district there is a very unassuming structure. Records indicate that some
 structure has stood there ever since 124 AD. So something or other has been there on that spot for the last 2,000
 odd years. And the person buried there is a Muslim Pir, whose name was Nasiruddin. His was an Islamic burial site
 from around the 13th or 14th century, with the head pointing towards Mecca.
But there was another grave, which was of an older provenance, underneath that of
 Nasiruddin. It went back to the origin of the tomb, which was almost 500 years before the advent of Islam. And it
 was an east-west burial, which is the direction in which the ancient Jews buried their dead. Outside the tomb was a
 metallic plate, which showed the carving of human feet, with marks indicating the points at which the nails of a
 crucifixion would have been hammered.
I was completely blown away and fascinated by the story, and I spent the next two years
 researching that story, not because I wanted to write the book, but because I was obsessed with the story. At the
 end of two years, my wife told me, “Listen, it has become painful to have a conversation with you, because this is
 the only thing we talk about. You need to get this out of your system.” And that’s how I got the idea of writing a
 book. It never started out with the idea of writing a book.
Q: Wow. And in your books of course you use a lot of tales that are rooted in
 mythology. How much does that have to do with your upbringing?
AS: I grew up in an environment where we were
 surrounded by stories. I had my Daadi [paternal grandmother], who used to narrate stories to me from the Ramayana
 and Mahabharata. Then there was my Nana [maternal grandfather], who was a terrific storyteller, and he liberally
 would mix fact and fiction when narrating his stories, which made them even more interesting. His elder brother,
 whom we called Majle Nanaji, because he was the middle brother, had the habit of sending me a book every week to
 read. So at a very young age I was exposed to reading. And of course I had to read each book within a certain time
 frame and reply to him with a letter telling him what I’d read, and why I liked it or disliked it.
That entire habit of being surrounded by stories was very much there, as a result of
 which I think at heart I’m not a writer, I’m not a screenplay writer, I’m not a lyricist, I’m not a playwright, I’m
 just a storyteller, and that’s what I love doing. So even when I’m sitting having a conversation, I will find
 something the person will say that will inspire a story. And then I’m very quick to make a note of it, because I
 don’t want the idea to dissolve into thin air.
<hr>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">We, as writers or storytellers, 
 think that we are going out searching for a story, 
 but really stories come searching for us, 
 because that story wants to be told.</h5>
<hr>
And of course while all these meaningful books were coming from my maternal granduncle,
 there was also a set of books coming from my mother, and those were always paperbacks, thrillers – the latest
 Jeffery Archer, the latest Sidney Sheldon, the latest Irving Wallace, the latest Arthur Hailey. On the one hand I
 was getting all this philosophy, mythology, science, religion and theology coming to me from my grandparents, and
 then there was the style of a fast-paced novel coming to me from my mother. So a lot of what you see in my
 storytelling is a combination of those two streams of books.
Q: Do you think this style of writing has brought a new generation of readers to
 literature? A lot of people were disillusioned with the way history was written, and a lot of youngsters would
 find history a very boring subject.
AS: Yes of course. I grew up in a school where
 history was taught in an exceedingly boring fashion. The other part of it is that, to a very great extent, our
 history is just … It was the novelist George Santayana who said, “History is a pack of lies about events that never
 happened, written by people who were never there.” On the other hand, Churchill said, “History is always written by
 the victors.” So it’s a version of events.
<img alt="where-history-intersects-with-myth-part-1" class="lazyload has-img-center"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/history_intersects_myth3_c648c2b9fd.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-06T07:17:44.260Z">

The problem is, when you talk about history as a version of events, it means we should
 also be exposed to alternative versions of those events. For example, in India we learn about the Great Rebellion of
 1857, whereas the average English child learns about the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 – the same event, but very, very
 different perspectives. To a certain extent I have no problem if you want to teach the so-called Aryan Migration
 theory or the Aryan Invasion theory, but also teach the Saraswati Civilization along with it, or the Out-of-India
 theory as an alternative hypothesis, because all of these are at their core precisely that – theories.
So my effort has basically been to correct the narrative, and hopefully as these
 alternative narratives emerge within popular culture, within popular fiction, then eventually researchers, scholars
 and historians will have to update their research and bring them into the academic mainstream.
<hr>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">I believe that there is that wonderful zone, 
 which is the overlap between history and myth.</h5>
<hr>
Q: It’s wonderful that you mention that, because within the Waldorf education system
 they actually start teaching children myths. They teach them the world of mythology and it’s only after Grade 5
 that they start them on history.
AS: And to a very great extent I believe that myths
 are far more honest. It was C.S. Lewis who said that a myth is imagination that reveals the truth. At least a myth
 doesn’t have pretensions of being a factual record. A myth does not attempt to be a statement of fact. And I believe
 that there is that wonderful zone, which is the overlap between history and myth.
To be continued.
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Interview by RUDY SINGH</h4>
<hr>

Where history intersects with myth - part 1

<h4>ASHWIN SANGHI is an Indian author in the intersecting genre of mythology,
 fiction and thriller. In this second part of his interview with RUDY SINGH, he
 speaks about mythology, history, his approach to writing and his upcoming books. Ashwin continues the conversation
 from where he left off.</h4>
<hr class="vertical-space1">
AS:&nbsp;In India we always called our epics
 itihas [history]. The Ramayana and Mahabharata are itihas. It’s only since Max Müller that we were
 taught: Hey listen, this is myth, this is not historical narrative. I’m not willing to accept that. Take the
 Mahabharata. It started off with less than 25,000 verses of a work called Jaya, which morphed into a work of roughly
 50,000 verses called the Bharat, which then morphed into the 100,000 verses of the Mahabharat. We attribute all of
 this to one single writer, the Rishi Vyasa. I believe that’s almost like a nom de plume, a pseudonym, for
 multiple writers who wrote through the generations. But do you think multiple generations would have spent their
 time narrating that story if there wasn’t a kernel of truth to the events that happened?
We have 300 versions of the Ramayana, and each version is remarkably different. You have
 the Valmiki Ramayana, in which Ram is simply a human being, a mortal. You have the Tulsi Ramayana, in which he is
 elevated to the status of a God. You have versions like the Adbhuta Ramayana, in which it isn’t Ram who kills
 Ravana, but Sita who manifests as Durga. You have the Jain Ramayana, in which Lakshman kills Ravana. You have
 versions like the Muslim Ramayana, in which Ram is a Sultan, or the Lao Ramayana, in which Ram is a Bodhisattva. But
 at the core there are elements of the story that remain common throughout. And why would there be 300 versions of a
 story that never happened? So I believe what we need to do is to find that enticing, exciting overlap zone where
 history intersects with myth. And there is a lot we can gain by examining it closely. The problem is that mainstream
 academia has shied away from looking at these things. I have always believed that the reason why people like reading
 these stories, and the reason why this new generation is reading them, is because if you take these two words – myth
 and history – and put them into a particle collider and bring them charging at superfast speed towards one another,
 they fuse into a new word, which is myth + history = mystery. That’s typically what I try to do.
Q: Wow, that’s wonderful. As you mentioned, there are many, many local myths and
 different variations of myths. Every 200 kilometers you have a new myth; every district has their narrative. Do
 you think we are at a stage where there is a danger of the homogenous narrative subsuming all these? For
 example, the overarching Mahabharata is pan India, and the overarching Ramayana is pan India.
AS:&nbsp;The way I see it is that mythology has
 been in a constant state of flux. The packaging and repackaging of mythology has been happening over generations. We
 spoke about 300 versions of the Ramayana, and there are probably more than a 1,000 versions of the Mahabharata. And
 even if we look at today’s narratives, we are finding that actually the narratives do not depend on the popular
 mainstream.
If you take someone like Anand Neelakantan, for example, he is actually giving you a
 perspective of these epics from the angle of the so-called villains of the story, because he feels that injustice
 has been done to the villains. So why can’t we narrate the Mahabharata from the point of view of Duryodhana? Or why
 can’t we narrate the Ramayana from the point of view of Ravana?
You take someone like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Chitra’s books narrate the stories
 from the angle of the female leads within those epics. What would the Ramayana look like from Sita’s perspective? Or
 what would the Mahabharata look like from Draupadi’s perspective?
So I think we are opening up new vistas in our narratives, which is wonderful because a
 myth should not be compartmentalized. The whole idea of myth is that you have multiple versions, and this has been
 the great thing about our country, that we’ve said that, “No, we don’t have one version of the truth; we can have
 three hundred versions. And the fact that I have one version of the truth doesn’t make your version any less. It’s
 still the truth.” And I think that is where we need to be going. And I think that that is already happening. So in
 fact we’ll see more narratives, we’ll see more dimensions. We’ll see this exploration increasing.
<img alt="" class="has-img-center lazyload"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/history_myth_part2_2_9c1f110377.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-07T07:32:27.259Z">

Q: You’ve recently started writing a series of self-help books. How did the motivation
 for that come about?
AS:&nbsp;Well, I had just started writing. I was at
 the point where my first book was not getting published.&nbsp;There was a family friend of ours, who used to come
 home on the weekends and enjoy having a drink along with my father. One day, he saw I was very upset. 
 He saw me depressed and said, “What’s the matter?” 
 I said, “Well, 47 publishers have declined my book.” 
 Between publishers and literary agents it had become 47. 
 “What is the problem? Apply to a few more.” 
 And I said, “There’s no one left on the list. The universe has been targeted already.” 
 So he said, “Beta, remember one thing: in life 99% is about good luck.” 
 So I asked him, “But Uncle, what about the one percent? That must be hard work, talent, efficiency, networking,
 resources, management, so many things.” 
 He laughed at me. He said, “99% is about good luck, and one percent is about bloody good luck.” 
 And I came out of that meeting and I was wondering, “What is he talking about?”
Later on in life, once I had already become a bestselling author, someone asked me, “To
 what do you attribute your success?” and I said, “Luck!” And that was not the answer they were expecting. My
 publisher was standing next to me, and he started laughing. He said, “I think you need to write a book about it, to
 explain what is meant by luck. Demystify this topic.” And that resulted in the first book: 13 Steps to Bloody
 Good Luck.
At that time, it was not meant to be a series. It was meant to me a “one-off” book, the
 ramblings of Ashwin Sanghi about what makes lucky people lucky. As it turned out, then I started receiving e-mails
 from people saying, “If we can demystify luck, then why can’t we demystify something else?” So one of my school
 friends, who is also a venture capitalist, said, “People don’t know how to manage their money, so why don’t we write
 a book on wealth?” So we wrote 13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth.
Then a teacher got in touch with me, who was an expert in coaching kids. And he said,
 “Why can’t we write 13 Steps to Bloody Good Marks, so that people can study better?” And then Dr. Batra got
 in touch saying, “Why can’t we write on health – 13 Steps to Bloody Good Health?” And we then had a book by
 a blogging mom, Kiran Manral, who wrote 13 Steps to Bloody Good Parenting. We now have someone who has been
 in the sales profession for 20 odd years writing a book on sales. Someone else is writing on communication. So there
 are so many things which look like rocket science, but they actually translate into some rather simple fundamentals.
 And that is what we’re attempting to present in a very easy to read format.
Q: I really liked the way you said “demystifying good luck,” because one of the
 objectives of the book, The Heartfulness Way, is to demystify meditation.
AS:&nbsp;Absolutely.
<img alt="where-history-intersects-with-myth-part-2" class="has-img-center lazyload "
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/history_myth_part2_3_3c0ee1213e.jpg?updated_at=2023-04-07T07:33:19.698Z">

Q: You have now been a part of two Heartfulness sessions. Do you think there’s a
 certain resonance with that also?
AS:&nbsp;Absolutely. I think one of the main
 attractions of the Heartfulness Way is the utter simplicity. I have been through several meditation sessions prior
 to this where the instructor is focused on how you sit, what mudras you do, your breathing and your
 concentration, the fact that you should not move, and the fact that you should develop an ability to deal with
 pleasure and pain, even though you’ve been sitting in that position for several hours.
In comparison, the Heartfulness Way is almost childlike: focus on your heart and
 feel rather than think. That is where true meditation comes from. I’m still to get there, but I love the
 utter childlike simplicity of what is explained in The Heartfulness Way.
<hr>
<h5 style="text-align: center;">The Heartfulness Way is almost childlike: 
 focus on your heart and feel rather than think. 
 That is where true meditation comes from. 
 I’m still to get there, but I love the utter childlike simplicity 
 of what is explained in The Heartfulness Way.
</h5>
<hr>
Q: Finally, what next for Ashwin Sanghi?
AS:&nbsp;Well, currently I’m working on a number of
 projects. In the 13 Steps series there are several books in the pipeline, and they will happen at the
 frequency of two or three titles per year. In addition to that, currently I’m working on the sixth book in the
 Bharat series.
The first book in the series was The Rozabal Line, followed by Chanakya’s
 Chant, then The Krishna Key, The Sialkot Saga, and Keepers of the Kalachakra. The sixth
 one turns its attention down South and talks about the Pallava kingdom. I hope to complete it soon, so that it is
 released in December or January. That is one of the main projects I am working on. In addition to that, I am also
 working on an original web series, as well as an adaptation of one of my books for the web. So at any given point of
 time I have multiple projects going on, and that’s one of the reasons why I need a technique to keep me a little
 more focused. I am hoping that Heartfulness can help me, because I have to keep switching tracks. On a particular
 day I’ll be working in the space of history and mythology; on another day I’m working on a crime thriller; on the
 third day I’m working on a self-help book. So in order to be able to change gears and still come back and focus on
 what I am required to focus on that particular day, that’s a critical element of what I do.
Q: Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful having you here.
AS:&nbsp;It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank
 you very much for having me here. What a delightful experience this has been. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

<a href="https://www.heartfulnessmagazine.com/where-history-intersects-with-myth-part-1/">Read Part 1 of the interview&gt;&gt;</a>
<hr>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Interview by RUDY SINGH</h4>
<hr>

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