Jet lag and I have been at it again this week. I had been up most of the night but at 3:30am, I closed my book and decided to go to sleep. Reading always makes me sleepy and The Autobiography of a Yogi is about the spiritual path of Yoginanada through self-realization. The calm, relaxation-inducing [...]
Matters of the Soul, Deep Questions to the Inner and True Self
Welcome to the softest spot on Prolific Living: Matters of the soul!
Here, I share stories that reach deep into your soul and touch your very core, from my immigration from Iran and through Turkey, to self-reflections on my life and lessons on growing up, on the invincible childhood friendships to travels that have changed me forever, and honest opinion on the toughest decisions of life such as whether you should marry or have children, and stay in a lucrative position. Or not. I give you my opinion and ask for yours.
“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.” ~ Oriah I saw these words a few minutes after finding out that Forbes published a story around my recent decision to ditch the corporate life. [...]
The most wonderful relationships can run their course; the greatest love affairs can go sour; the sweetest friendships can meet a bitter end and even the most invincible people may leave each other through death or divorce but I never saw a day that I would fall out of love with a company that was [...]
Someday I will go back to Iran. It will be summertime so the roses will be in full bloom, the air will be full of optimism, tinged with a trace of nostalgia, and the warm Tehran sun can quickly dry my tears to save my lush eye makeup, just in case. My life revolves around [...]
Too many mornings, I chose email over mediation, I chose twitter time over introspection time. Too many nights, I collapsed into deep sleep without taking a moment to quiet the mind and reflect on the day. Too many days in 2010, I chose impulsively rather than consciously. The heart longed to make meditation a ritual, [...]
The incredible response to my last post has seriously thrown off my focus and made it nearly impossible to move on. I have written and re-written several drafts of fresh new posts – highlights from travels to Switzerland and Berlin, visits to authentic tea shops and seeing the breath-taking 3000-year old Nefertiti bust – only [...]
In my life, I have wished for a million things, I have dreamt a thousand dreams; I have pursued hundreds of passions and goals and yet, never for a serious minute in all of my fantastic 30 plus years have I wished to have a child. That’s me. I must be strange. I must be [...]
Living your whole life in cold or hot climates does NOT necessarily make you immune to those extreme temperatures! Seriously, how many times have you heard: “Well, you should be used to the cold, you live in [insert cold city!]!” “Oh but you ought to be able to handle the humidity, living in [insert humid [...]
The elephants in Bali had no business making me feel so utterly grounded, detaching me from my own world and drawing me so instantaneously into their stark contrast version of reality. How could they do that just standing there, these gentle giants, munching on their food and making unsolicited eye contact? How could they mesmerize [...]
“What would the world be like without music?” “Eerily silent. Uninspiring. Slow. Undesirably quiet. Sad, very sad. Unsettling. Lacking balance. Confined. Starving. And lonely.” A conversation in my mind and happily, without any consequence to reality – but can you imagine a world void of the sound of music? So fortunate we are to be [...]
Sometimes, a small action on the part of one can instill a lifetime of pursuit and passion on the part of another. The occasion may come about as ordinarily as is passing of the hours in a day and this transformation of grand measures may be as transparent as shining glass between the two people [...]
Searching the Ripples of my Mind for Childhood Memories “Do you remember the time in school when…” The place is Razi Elementary School in Iran. The time is in the early 1980s. The question is posed by a long lost childhood friend who found me by sheer accident on an otherwise ordinary Monday and has [...]
Reading Anna Karenina has been so overwhelming and gratifying that I chose to walk away from it for a short while. I decided to take time to digest the scope, the breadth, the depth in this masterpiece of a novel. It is of course an overly ambitious task to ever digest it all. This is [...]
Aside from a handful of reading assignments in high school and a few beloved thick classics which slipped through, I turned my back to literature and the classics for the sake of science, engineering, and a career in technology. “How on earth would English Literature or any other classic help me toward excelling in grad [...]
Our experiences are not only made up of what we have lived through. Sometimes, experience stems from that which we did not do. I never had the chance to watch Luciano Pavarotti perform live. I regret that bitterly. The immaculate voice of this opera tenor was a gift to this world and who knows when, [...]
