Facing the Global Financial Crisis

The global financial crisis we face today provides a his torically unique opportunity, an opening, to tap into the power of the hidden source within each of us. When you react to crisis, your door to the mysterious source of power, inner strength, and endurance closes down. Learn how to respond, and you will perceive the tremendous potential hidden behind every crisis you face in your life.

If you live in the United States, you already have personal experience of what this crisis means for you. If you are not aware of the global impact, consider the words of Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In an address at the Symposium on The Global Economic Crisis and Challenges for the Asian Economy in a Changing World he states: “Recent evidence suggests that contractionary forces are strong: demand has slumped, production is plunging, job losses are rising and credit markets remain in seizure.”

He goes on to say, “The contagion of the crisis has spread to India through all the channels – the financial channel, the real channel, and importantly, as happens in all financial crises, the confidence channel.” This reference to the confidence channel hints that the very nature of this global crisis comes not from some unnamed external forces, but rather from our individual reaction to changing circumstances.

You are given an unusual capacity to tap into the higher power of your own inner resources when you face hardships such as financial, relationship or health crises. It allows you to go more deeply and explore new and creative approaches to your life than you would under ordinary situations. It creates an opening to break through unconscious, harmful, habitual routines. A life style that costs you not just in terms of your pocketbook, but also your precious health and relationships to those you love.

Crisis is the time to clean up your greed for more, your greed for indulgence. You learn to simply your life. It is an opportunity to get back to basics. The collective, unbridled greed and collective fear and sense of insecurity hidden behind the greed is creating this global financial crisis. The valleys are as deep as the peaks are high; the negative impact of the crisis is directly proportional to the luxury of the financial freedom we have enjoyed. This is the experience of polarity where actions and reactions are equal and opposite. This is a universal law. What some of us face is not a survival issue. Rather, we face the challenge of maintaining luxuries that we have become accustomed to. In an article in the New York Times titled Boats too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines1, the author describes how, “The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats.” In other words, people are beginning to shed luxury items and activities that are not an integral part of their life, while others are truly deprived of their basic sustenance and survival needs.

This is absolutely the best time to reflect on how greed and excessive indulgence in pleasure and power can alter the sense of prosperity into false sense of poverty. It progressively drives our lives farther and farther from the true source of joy and fulfillment. This is the time to readjust and restore balance. If you are seriously affected by economic, relationship or health problems, remember that the season of Fall is an opportunity for Spring to return. Day and night, breathe in and breathe out, birth and death, up and down; these are all natural rhythms of life. Neither Fall nor Spring is permanent. In the polarity through which life manifests, all opposites are complimentary.

Behind the apparent opposites of polarity, of ups and downs, there is a hidden complimentary interactive unity of spirit. When you emotionally react to the failure, you become the victim of your own reaction and spend more time feeling frustrated. However, if you live in response to the problems you face in life, rather than resisting them, your intuitive insights and creativity open new doors. You restore inner harmony by facing the challenges you encounter in your life; then they begin to resolve effortlessly and spontaneously.

Whenever you recognize the underlying unity behind the apparent opposites of polarity you recognize that they are not against each other. On the contrary, Fall provides the passage through which Spring appears. The natural rhythms of life work like a pendulum. When a pendulum appears to move to the right; in reality it is gaining momentum to begin it’s journey toward the left.

If you accept Fall, you recognize it is an invitation to Spring. If, on the other hand, you fear the Fall, you simply prolong it. And, the fear of Fall prevents you from enjoying life when the Spring returns. When you use money as an exclusive source to buy your happiness, you move farther and farther away from the real source of happiness which lies within.

When you face problems in the external world with emotionally charged reaction, you become not only the victim of external condition, but also of your own reaction. If external conditions represent 30% of any problem, your fear-based reactions can make it look like 90%. In other words, what is not a problem becomes one. The most effective way to solve a problem creatively, intuitively, and efficiently is to solve it at the primary source. The primary source of every problem is not outside, not external. It resides in your ability to move beyond your personal reaction so that you can see the light beyond the darkness.

Not surprisingly, every time you face a crisis with your preprogrammed fears and insecurities, you invariably seek support from friends, books, articles, financial reports and television news that validate your own personal fears. It does not take a genius to do this. Any fool can be the victim of his or her own fears. And, what could be a better situation to create widespread fears than a global financial crisis we face today? It provides the perfect situation to justify any fears we have around money and control issues.

When you are in reaction, you attempt to solve a problem that partly exists only in your reaction. The Amrit approach to healthy living, meditation, and life teaches you how to step out of this reactive mode and how to live in a non-reactive, receptive, responsive mode of being. You enter the Zero Stress Zone™. When you do this, you have solved 70% of any crisis.

As each of us learns how to tap into our source we change our own life. In a state of non-reactive, choiceless awareness we begin to rejoice in the multitude of gifts which the universe showers upon us daily. You live every moment of your life fully, consciously. This rapidly flows out to your family, your colleagues – the entire world. You begin to recognize that when you are the witness of the pendulum you are not disturbed regardless of which way it moves.

Yoga is the practice of equanimity. You are not just positive about the positive; but when you are also positive about negative, you are supremely positive. This experience is a unique opportunity to turn the negative into the positive.