Meet Mrs Beena Rao
Over 10,000 taught and counting. When Beena Rao saw that the dropout rates in schools remained
high despite numerous schemes being introduced, she did something about it.
To the forgotten children living in the streets, slums, and poor neighbouhoods
of Surat in Gujarat, Beena Rao is Saraswati(Goddess of Knowledge) personified.
Mindfulness
Step 2
In step 1, we made a conscious effort to cultivate our inherent capacity for altruism,
non-harming, fearlessness, fortitude, gratitude, and devotion;
residents of our Parasympathetic Nervous System.
In step 2, we become acquainted the negative aspect of our psyche associated with our
Fight or Flight reactions, and the Drive for survival and Affiliation.
These are feelings associated with shame, anger, anxiety, fear, aversion, and
the source which fuel them through worry and rumination. These are our attachments and aversions.
Through the practices of self-observation, self-inquiry, and reflection, we can gradually increase
our sense of self-understanding and our knowledge of the mind. First, we become aware of our
powerful preferences and distastes. Then, we become aware of the unconscious processes driving those tendencies.
We look at our upbringing, society, educational systems, corporations, politicians, media,
and even our parents, partners, and associates to analyze how the processes
that manifest trauma and propagate suffering; operate.
In time, the sensitivity of our instinctive, intuitional, and faculties of insight become so finely tuned
that we can perceive actual experiences of the future, and can feel in our mind and body(psyche), how the emotion
will work itself through when that experience arrives. Through this gift, when the foreseen event happens,
one can bring awareness to the situation in a manner that does not escalate an undesirable situation but rather
enlightens it.
This experience also works to maximise our creative potential. For example, we may get an insight
but not recognize it to be an insight because what the information would be useful for is not within the scope
of our awareness. It could be a project, an idea, or a problem that we would be working on in two weeks
from now for which the information received is going to be useful. So the knowledge to facilitate a
creative idea was received before we even got the idea. In the practice of Yoga, these are the rewards
that have us coming back and they shall grace and light our path as long as we tread the path in humility.