Selvan Srinivasan – Awareness Journey

Where it all began...

I was born in Chennai, India in 1962 and grew up in Mumbai as a multi-lingual, multi-cultural cosmopolitan youth. I grew up in a home that was brimming with entrepreneurial, spiritual, and intellectual energy. From the young age of three I was witness to a household that taught me the spirit of enterprise and creativity, my father quit his promising managerial job at Royal Enfield to found a start-up manufacturing company along with my mother.

My grandparents who raised me were deeply influential to my spiritual and intellectual journey. My grandfather who was deeply spiritual taught me the yogic practices of Yama, Niyama, Pranayama, Asana, and chanting. He was a gold medalist in BA Literature, this influenced us to be a family of voracious readers. I would read any book I could lay hands on, and this included voluminous Ramayana and Mahabharata, other ancient Indian epics, books on Yoga and Pranayama, and children’s books such as Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys. Classic comics and story books such as Amar Chitra Katha, Walt-Disney, Marvel, and DC and Chandamama used to fire my visual imagination.

School education did not engage my excitement much because I used to have an instant grasp on most subjects and would get bored easily. My friends would come to me for help especially with Math and Physics, even in chapters I might have been absent and missed at class. I would never do homework and could get through exams even without much preparation. So much so that I was the school topper in my twelfth board exams. Although I had an avid interest in Engineering and Technology, I lost interest in further continuing with formal education as my father’s business went through a downturn and he had to move our family and his business from the city of Mumbai to Hyderabad to start afresh.

Many beginnings

When my father met with a major road accident and had to stay in bed for several months, I chose to drop out of Engineering college and join him in 1980. I have been an entrepreneur and Industrialist ever since. Probably it was my dad’s strategy to induce a sense of responsibility to the family business that he encouraged me to get married very early. I met Hema in 1983, we got married that year and our first daughter Aarathi was born a year later when I was just 22.

For the next twenty years I graduated as an industrialist under my father until he shut down his business empire due to unexpected losses and write offs incurred in the changed business scenario of the late nineties.

Image Description: Collage to the top left: Selvan (second from the right, seated) as a young person learning the ropes of his fathers business. Image on the top right: Selvan on a trip to Japan as part of his apprenticeship. Bottom left: Wedding day, Selvan with his partner Hema. Image to the bottom right: Selvan as a new father.

Growing into a Leader & Industrialist

I took wing thereafter to set up a start-up from scratch and built it over the next seventeen years. Having established the successful venture, I handed over it’s reins to others qualified to take it further ahead and stepped away to begin a new career as a mentor and healer. In 1994, I got introduced to my first spiritual guru when I went through a course called Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY). I went through the advanced teacher training courses to become an SSY teacher even as I continued working with my dad. My journey inward ran parallel ever since, although now I realize that it was still mostly intellectual and conceptual rather than somatically experiential.

Eventually after a long and pretty illustrious career in manufacturing Industry, I retired, sold off my stakes and moved back to Hyderabad in 2016 to begin my deep Awareness Journey.

Image Description: Images on the top left, top right and bottom left: Selvan in Korea exploring joint venture businesses. Bottom left: Selvan and his spouse next to their brand new BMW..

Meeting my Spiritual Masters

Over the years, all the courses and great masters who influenced me to make this shift apart from my first guru Rishi Prabhakar were:

The Art of Living course by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
Reiki upto 3rd Degree – P D Patel branch.
Duality and Transcendence courses by Jeffery Allen.
Creative Manifestation by Eckart Tolle.
Energy Medicine by Donna Eden.
Mindfulness Teacher at Pause for Perspective.
Deeply influenced by the books of Paramahansa Yogananada, and Ramkrishna Paramahansa. Western authors whose books had a profound impact include Barbara Ann Brennan, Louise Hay, Stephan Covey, James Redfield, to name just a few.

The force that drives me to bring this website to you and offer my healing and mentoring services is the transformational stories of all my course participants who have recovered from seemingly incurable conditions by finding their Happy Place within.

Image Description: On the top left: Selvan leading workshop on energy psychology top right: Talks and programs on energy psychology and bottom left: Selvan celebrating the completion of his first book with a photoshoot for the books! Bottom left: Selvan having learnt energy psychology and using it to go back to running. Here with his children at one of the many 10K’s he inspired them to run along with.

My Awareness journey

Read about my own journey into Awareness here

Throughout the years since 1994, I have had an arduous spiritual practice. I thought that I had a deep understanding of who I am. In 2016 I went through a transformative experiential journey, after which I realised that my past ideas about Awareness had merely been conceptual.

There are two parts to this overall journey, as you will realise when you do the course: The Journey into Awareness, followed by The Journey with Awareness.

As a direct consequence of this experiential journey I am physically fitter and healthier than I was twenty years ago. I am completely free from acidity and acid reflux problems, spondylitis, and lower back problems and also free from sinusitis. These were some of the crippling chronic ailments I had been suffering over three decades but had a coping and managing mechanism going, which, at the time, I thought was perfect, due to which I did not lose too many man days on the sick bed. Only now I realise how sub optimally I had been operating all those years. I could not run beyond 200 meters and if I walked more than 3 kilometres, I needed a strong energy drink or snack to keep me going but even with that, I never went beyond 5 km. Now I regularly participate in 10 kilometre running races! My fitness now seems to be an absolute miracle to me because I never ever imagined it possible even a few years ago.

My sinusitis and spondylitis used to be so severe that apart from several bouts of unbearable migraine every month; I was suffering a mild low-grade headache 24×7 over two decades. I had become so used to this continuous mild headache it became my normal. Only when I was completely free of it in 2017 did I realise that I had gone through years with a headache, my constant companion! What a miracle it seemed to me when I was totally free of it! For the first few weeks without it, I felt light-headed and almost as if I was floating! These are just the physical aspect of my story, my journey with PHYSICAL BODY AWARENESS.

I want to share some before/after stories to highlight what emotional awareness can do for you. One day several years ago, my boss, in an extremely irritated mood gave me severe scolding in the presence of some of my colleagues. His words, my faults he was pointing out and trying to correct and all were not heard by me because I felt extremely irritated and angry and at the same time deeply ashamed. My face was turning red; I started sweating and only wanted to run away. Later that day I developed nagging headache, which kept lingering for the next three days. After three days, with no relief or respite, I went to my grandfather and recounted the whole thing and cried a lot. He patiently heard me and just said a few words exactly pointing out my faults and what I needed to do to improve my output to avoid irritating my boss again. It was so soothing; it went deep into me and helped me change my behaviour so much that my boss started pointing to me as an example for others to follow.

In this story, you can replace the boss with your client, partner, close relatives, anybody. After my emotional awareness journey, my grandfather now sits inside me when I encounter someone who is extremely angry and filters away all the other things and lets me absorb only the final few actionable words. So what took 3 days of sulking and suffering and intervention of a mentor now does not even take 3 seconds.

There is another incident sixteen years ago, when my startup business was just two years old, struggling to find its feet, the Purchasing Chief of my biggest client called me to say that their top management has decided to delist my company from their vendor list due to an internal vendor consolidation program. I went five minutes late for the meeting and he shamed me for being sloppy and then conveyed their management decision. My personal friendship with the purchasing chief went back 15 years but that day he was aloof and seeming heartless. He just dismissed my presentation of how good our products are, how competitive and how much my startup depended on this business to break even and repay debts. It fell on deaf ears, I returned back feeling deeply ashamed, worthless and dejected. I handed charge of running my business to my partner and moved away from Gurgaon to Hyderabad. It took me two years to move back to Gurgaon and another five years after that to put our company back on track. Looking back, I see that at exactly same time we lost our biggest business, another client actually bigger than that was offering us business but we couldn’t grab it due to my emotional response to a huge loss.

Emotional awareness helps me now to deeply feel the sadness and shame, but also use these very same emotions to instantly bring me back to my groundedness and helps me to be aware of how each loss or downfall or problem could actually be an opportunity in disguise.

Emotional awareness is very different from emotional sensitivity. Being emotionally sensitive helps in being social and to bring passion into your work which is effective to motivate others to do your work. I used to be like this all my life, when you get irritated at some person or situation you would loose control and take wrong decisions or utter regrettable words. I always used to be like this. After emotional awareness, I am able to heal my anger, irritation or impatience instead of suppressing them and softly communicate with authority rather than aggression. I would run away or hide or avoid situations that cause shame or fear or sadness for me. If, I do not fulfil on a commitment, I would try my best to avoid meeting the client. If I lose an account I would get away to lick my hurt wounds alone. Now after emotional awareness, each of these events present to me exciting opportunities to strengthen relationships and deepen bonds. It is still amazing for me to see how an impossible adverse situation can be turned around to bring about fulfilment and joy merely with emotional awareness and acting out of that awareness.

Mind awareness is again very different from IQ or a very sharp, clever logical analytic, quick mind. An aware mind can help you switch off the over active logical right brain activity and open up to your own emotions as well as the emotion of others. You might have noticed that highly intelligent people rarely enjoy deep bonding relationships. This is because it is impossible for the mind to slow down and allow the heart to lead when needed. I used to be like this, it would exhaust me and cause sleepless nights because my mind keeps going on and on with thoughts 24/7.

After mind awareness, I am able to slow down or even shut down the incessant logical and analytical thoughts, allow emotions to play a balanced productive role and even open up to the intuitive and creative side of me. I am able to sleep better, be more healthy, balanced and effective now with an aware mind.

The mind is the doer or the executive. It will plan and executive a project to perfect completion. But the mind is not effective in deciding which project to choose for execution, that is in the purview of the intuitive aspect or sprit body. Here by mind, I refer to the logical, analytical mind and by spirit body; I refer to the intuitive, creative mind. When the underlying emotions are unbalanced, the mind cannot work with clarity and it will go around in loops. Let me explain with an example here. When I had to prepare for an important presentation or client meeting, I would get terribly anxious and scared. As a result, my mind will constantly keep replaying the imagined sequence of events of the meeting and this hyperactive mind will prevent sleep and also prevent any other productive activity or interaction until the event. By the time the actual event takes place, I would be totally exhausted and end up making a suboptimal presentation.

With mind awareness now, I can focus on the required planning and preparation for the presentation until it is done to satisfaction and after that simply switch off my mind and go and attend to the unbalanced emotions namely anxiety and then simply rest in a being state. This state would open up my intuitive aspect and I might get some new point or idea that could be added to my presentation to make it much more effective. I would also be rested with uninterrupted sleep and be able to make an effective presentation the next day as planned.

Spiritual awareness simply means to be able to open up your mind to intuitive inputs and creative inputs that are only available to your spirit. You can learn to tap into your full intuitive and creative potential at will. This has helped me to avoid taking hundreds of wrong paths and flawed decisions before zeroing in on the perfect decision or action plan. Intuition paves the short cut for you, helping you select only the best of the opportunity and projects for you. With my unlimited intuitive potential opened up, I am able to dramatically slow down on the action front while simultaneously being several folds more productive and effective than before.

This is made possible because I do not need to opt for trial and error to find which path or plan or project or opportunity is the best for me and what time frame is perfect for that plan or path. There is no back tracking, covering up, correcting or regretting involved when your intuitive mind leads the way and logical mind follows. Experiences of ecstasy, devotion, deep fulfilment, boundless joy and surrenderfulness which translates to unshakeable faith and confidence are only possible with spiritual awareness or Intuitive Mind Awareness.

You might have learnt about most of this and you might possess a good conceptual understanding of it. However this understanding itself may cause a block to actually experience your Awareness mind.