Beating the Boredom Blues

Sadhguru, Isha Foundation

Sadhguru: Boredom is not an existential thing but a psychological thing. If lousy things are happening in your head, you will be bored. But if you sit here and think of wonderful things, you will be invigorated. Whatever is happening in your head is your drama. If you are getting bored with your drama, can you imagine the plight of others who are stuck with you?

Earlier there were distractions of various kinds. We called them work, shopping, and social responsibilities. Now, because of the virus, you are stuck with your drama and you cannot stop it. But at least like television channels, which have frequent commercial breaks, you should stop your drama every few minutes. Every ten minutes, take a two-minute break from your drama. But how? Do not do anything. Doing nothing does not mean tying your hands and sitting in one place. Doing nothing means just this that you are not engaged in what is happening around you. You withdraw your involvement from what is happening around you, including your physiological and psychological activity because both your physiology and psychology are also gathered from outside.

Body, mind and world – I call this BMW. You must get out of your BMW and pay attention to it. Your heart is beating, your breath is going in and out. These are not simple things; these are called vital signs. This is how a doctor finds out whether you are alive or dead. How can you ignore such things? You should not ignore them; you must pay attention but remain withdrawn. Be very alert, but not involved. The same goes for your thought process and your emotion.

Let your body and your mind say what they want; simply sit without getting involved, not trying to avoid something that you think is bad or trying to put this time to good use by thinking about work. Simply sit, not running after a specific thought that you think is good. You cannot think up a new possibility, I want you to know this. You can only think up an improvement of what is already there. All you are doing is recycling old data. So how do you seek something new that you do not know? New possibilities are always there but they are not visible right now. If you are not mired in your own psychological process, new possibilities become visible to you. The idea of Yoga is to put this body and this mental-mechanism aside, and use them as platforms to look at the larger possibilities of life. If you do this much, you will see wonders will happen. You will blossom as a being, which is the aspiration of every life.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, India’s highest annual civilian award, by the Government of India in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.