If you can see beauty everywhere, you can appreciate beauty!

Anything that is natural does not require effort. You bathe in the morning. Do you bathe with a lot of interest? Do you brush your teeth with a lot of interest? No, you don’t. Just because you have to do it, you do it! It’s natural and effortless!

Like when you are smiling naturally, that smile is effortless. But if you are asked to smile then that becomes a difficult task. Doing an action that requires effort is ‘Aasakti.’However, doing work that comes naturally and gives you inner peace is done in ‘Nirasakti’.

If you ask those who prepare food every day, they would be able to prepare it without much effort. However if the same task is handed to a person who never cooks, he will flip through the pages of a recipe book again and again, to prepare the same food. He will keep tasting the food to check the balance of spices. So wherever effort is applied, the job is done with ‘Aasakti’, and this leads to feverishness.

You being feverish about going to, for example, Mysore is ‘Aasakti’; and effortlessly driving your car to Mysore is ‘Nirasakti’.‘Nirasakti’ is not disinterestedness or depression; it is just an effortless attitude. The next effortless thing is meditation. If you put effort into meditation, that is it! You will not be able to do it. Meditation happens effortlessly.

Life is a combination of effort and effortlessness and they are complementary! If you work dynamically, you sleep well. If you have memorised well, you remember automatically. If you are doing service, you are able to love more, because there is satisfaction and your heart is opening up. If you can see beauty everywhere, you can appreciate beauty!

When you can do this, things become effortless; even jobs requiring effort, will not be strenuous. Do you see, when you want to do something, when the heart is in it, when there is an appreciation of beauty, then even effort is not strenuous?

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji