3 min readNew DelhiAug 19, 2020 07:00 AM IST
First published on: Aug 19, 2020 at 07:00 AM IST
“Let’s take this cup of water… the weight of the cup actually doesn’t really matter too much, because how heavy it’s going to feel to me depends on how long I hold it up,” explains Sadia Badiei, who has a YouTube channel called Pick Up Limes. “And so a similar thing can be said as well for any difficulties, fears and worries that we experience in life. Just like the cup, if we hold on to these thoughts and feelings for a moment, it might not do too much. But if you hold on to them for longer still, they might start to weigh on us and overwhelm us. So, what we need to remember to do is to put the cup down,” she says.
In a video titled ‘Living lightly in a distracted world’, lifestyle influencer Sadia reveals the lessons about being aware of when and how we distract ourselves from “putting the cup down.” Through the teachings from a book by Pema Chödron, she says it is the “three lords of materialism” that make it so easy to distract ourselves. “So the first lord of materialism is the lord of form and this is where we tend to attach ourselves to some physical thing that is outside of us in order to distract from what’s really going on inside,” she says. The second lord of materials is the lord of speech. “While there’s nothing wrong with a belief in itself, it’s when we take refuge in lord of speech that we tend to create this feeling this sense of self and other,” Sadia says, adding: “and so we might not address certain insecurities that we feel: jealousy, maybe anger or frustration with ourselves, and this other person, or these other groups. Because instead of reflecting inward we tend to project outward.” Lastly, she says, “The third lord of materialism is the lord of mind and this one kind of comes about anytime we try to achieve a heightened state of mind in order to overcome the uneasiness of life.”
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“I don’t think it’s something that we master at any particular point. I do think it’s a lifelong practice. But, what we want to try to do is to become aware of when and how we distract,” she says. “How we really do that is to learn to stay and sit with those feelings and those emotions, as difficult as that might seem. And when we sit with those feelings, we have the opportunity to decrease how much it weighs on us and we do that by looking for middle ground.”
'What we want to try to do is to become aware of when and how we distract'. (Source: Getty/Thinkstock) 
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