From Isha Yoga to Kaiserschmarrn to Welcome Week Leader Training

Tonight I will be writing a longer blog in order to make up for my idleness last night. Yesterday afternoon I followed two of my friends, Vinod and Praveen to a house in uptown Minneapolis to watch an introductory talk about "Inner Engineering", a vital program that aids one's inner transformation of well being, brought by Isha Foundation. I thought it was a little time-inefficient for us to travel one hour to the house just to watch a one-hour video on the lap top. I really found the talk interesting but it would have been better if the video could just be viewed online.

Isha foundation founded by an Indian spiritual, yoga, and meditation master known as Sadhguru, believes in teaching it's member the art of living through yoga and meditation. But before we all can get to that, it is important that we understand how we function "chemically" in a way that causes us to be, feel and think the way we do. I thought this phrase "Our body is a heap of food and our mind is a heap of impressions" very funny yet profound. When our body and mind is external, the only thing that is internal should be nonetheless our being a.k.a. consciousness.


He went on to talk about how we are living in an era of comfort and we aim to engineer anything that we want or desire. He brought forth the question of why we engineer stuffs. The reason is simple. It is because we want things to be the way we want it to be. If we use this analogy and apply it to our feelings and well-being, we can gather that we are not happy because things aren't the way we want it to be. Even if things are in the way we want them to be, we will always want more too. The desire here seems to cause the unhappiness. Thus, we keep searching for the happiness on the outside on and on but we never realize that the happiest moments occur at times when we aren't searching it on the outside. Think of the last time you were very happy. Did you have to have all the external stimulus to make u happy? Hence, the concept of inner engineering. Engineer your inside to transform your inner well-being.

I really enjoyed the talk. It just confirmed that consciousness is the key to eternal well-being and happiness. I felt like if you just filter all major or minor religions and really observe the teachings, you will find that they are teaching us to live conscious of our physical and mental phenomenons and if you could be still and watch and understand how they can affect you, there is no way you can suffer. All this while I've been questioning about religions and God, and I have been attending different religious meetings and learn different approaches to spiritual development to find out what works best for me and it just dawned on me yesterday that living life consciously is the key to spiritual development. Once you are conscious of what you are doing, you will be in full control of your self and surroundings. I guess Confucius was right when he said that we should not swell into death and the unknown when we don't even know much about life. I'll never know about the God, the after life and the mystics and all those stuffs. So, I'll just live life as it is but consciously. And hopefully, the unanswerable answers might just come to me. (P.S. Thanks Vinod for taking me to the talk).

After the talk, I went to Sunny's place for dinner party and Chrisi and the other Austrian girls, Bernie, Lizzie, and Babsi made Kaiserschmarrn, an Austrian version of pancake with raisins. A note to Christina: Hey, if you're reading this, note "the word". Cool isn't it. I can spell it. Wahahaha.... That's all about Sunny's party. I just want to mention the word. =D

As for today, I went to the Welcome Week Leader Training. It was kind of exhausting when we have to queue for half an hour to register this morning. Oh my gosh, it seems that more than 600 people signed up for the program. I am so excited about it. We are going to facilitate 5500 new students in their transition to the university. I was more pumped up when the coordinators told us that we were going to have lots of activities around twin cities e.g. go for free football game, have fun in Mall of America's theme park (they are working on renting the whole park just for U of M's students for a day), and etc. I was impressed with the committee who have been working on this for many years. So many people are working together to design this new and soon to come program. Wow. They are really so passionate about this. I'm so excited! We'll see how successful this program will get.

Ah, done. Good night people.