QnA with Sri Sri
Monday, April 20, 2015

 Q: I have a number of businesses and I am also a chairman of four school. I have seen that many students and teachers undergo a lot of stress. How can we help them come out of this stress? 

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: We have special programs for schools, and it has worked magic. I want to quote one incident in Chicago, USA. One district school had 260 incidents of violence in a year, after the program, it came down to 62. And in the second year, it came down further to 20. So it is very important for children to learn the value of non-violence, non-aggression, friendliness and co-operation. And we have programs designed just for this. We are very happy to share this with you. Such programs are held for thousands of children everywhere because it is important for them to learn how to handle negativity.

 Neither at school nor at home does anyone teach us how to handle our negative emotion. Getting angry, jealous, frustrated is natural. When these negative feelings come up, who teaches us how to handle our mind? When we don't know how to handle these emotions, the pressure builds up and builds up and then shows itself as violence. Sometimes people become so disruptive that they turn schizophrenic.

 Children who are brilliant, by the age of 17-18 years, they get bipolar and schizophrenic diseases. So we need to educate them on how to handle their negative emotions, how to handle their own mind and be friendly with everybody.

 In a classroom if you ask a child, how many friends do you have, they say three, or four, or five. I ask them a question. In a school of 5000 children, if you are not being friendly with 50 kids, then how are you going to be friendly with 7 billion people in the world? So we have not taught children the value of friendliness; how to be friendly with everyone around. We have some programs where we tell them to make one new friend every day.

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