BY TARA PATEL

DO YOU know that it takes 21 days to drop a bad habit (which brings us nothing but pain and heartbreak) and replace it with a good one? At least that’s what new age guru and author, Leo D’Mello, told family, friends, well-wishers and media people who turned up for the release of his book “Fuller Life, The Book, A Journey” (published by the Goa-based Academy of Self Actualisation, paperback, Rs.300) at a function held at Leonoras Restaurant at Verna, on August 18, 2009. It was also Mr. D’Mello’s birthday so it was a double celebration - the fructification of a book to guide seekers into understanding how it is the thought patterns of life which make us happy or unhappy.

Leo D’Mello’s key advice is to treat life as a gift and to live with an attitude of gratitude. Here’s another book telling us that humankind is standing on the brink of a moral precipice…it’s a mirror to the times we’re living in. Reiterating that in a world of material plenty we continue to see poverty all around us and much of the material poverty is a creation of impoverished minds - insecure, confused, angry, depressed…constantly at odds with life. What will it take to reap an enduring happiness? Check out the book.

Even the author says don’t read his book if you’re not going to practice it chapter by chapter. This is a book more for doing than merely reading. Achievement is really in the doing at ground level and not just at theoretical level in the mind. Mr. D’Mello takes us travelling into the mysteries of the mind quite a bit. By way of an introduction to the book - based on the “Fuller Life Programme” which is a self-development programme he’s been conducting in Goa and elsewhere in the country, he says that after practical programmes and workshops many participants wanted the programme to be put down in black and white.

So, he decided to put it all down in a book. Life is different for different people, as was his. As a teenager he was always into questions and his “searching years” witnessed how life is fair to some and unfair to some, and arose the crucial question, “Why do some people seem to have a happy life despite being dealt a `bad hand’ and some people are miserable despite being dealt a `good hand’?”

Personally, he confesses, it was his feelings of deprivation which made him check out a Christian spiritual movement which seemed to have all the answers, and “I immediately felt accepted by the warmth and fellowship that people shared. The lack of judgemental attitudes, the warmth of acceptance and new discovery into understanding the Word of God as found in the Bible transformed much of my thinking and belief-structures.” It was an experience which worked for him and then there was no looking back as he successfully planned his professional life as a business consultant, started publishing Voices, a newsletter of the Holy Spirit Church in Goa, as also conducting the “Fuller Life” programmes for institutions and groups interested in ways to turn life around from unhappy confusion to happy enlightenment.

Some say advice is what the fools won’t take and the wise don’t need. But that’s just a general truism and not necessarily true. As the tragedy of our highly developed civilisation unfolds and we progressively replace time honoured values with greed and hypocrisy…ending up with sick bodies and sicker minds…it’s not surprising that there’s a growing band of spiritual gurus and authors offering solutions and conducting programs to guide the hopelessly lost out of a complex maze.

Leo D’Mello’s Fuller Life, The Book, A Journey is worth a read for it brings together a gamut of modern-day ideas and techniques (borrowed from Western and Eastern traditions) to help us focus on the real issues of life and living e.g. there’re chapters detailing the importance of breathing, how the brain works in mysterious ways, how to get to alpha level which is “the bosom of tranquillity and creativity”, re-engineering and re-wiring the mind…replacing negative frameworks of thinking with positive ones, and so on. A lot of quotations, humour and faith-restoring stories and parables to turn around life for the better with the restoration of time honoured virtues and simple remedies.

Here’s an easily read engaging book packed with quite a lot of punch. It comes with a useful complementary CD of the “21 Day Miracle Meditations” based on the Fuller Life Programme.

An Excerpt…

…from ‘Fuller Life, The Book, A Journey’ by Leo D’Mello

“I OFTEN say that brains are a bit stupid just like our humble computers. Feed in rubbish and you get out rubbish. It’s like the making of a sausage. The quality of our sausage depends on what we put in it. Unlike the stomach which is slightly more intelligent than the brain! You put garbage in your stomach, the stomach will cause you to vomit. But not so with the brain. When we feed toxic and poisonous ideas to the brains, limiting beliefs, irrational conclusions, it just processes it and waits to create associations and frames out of it.
“Hence we need to very careful of what `food‘ we give our brains. St. Paul, in his wisdom, says this in the Bible, `Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.’ Philippians 4:8.
“Every time your mind plays the movies of failure, of limitations, of hurt, or anger, just press the stop button and do a reality check. Why play this movie again? Is it building me up or am I just reinforcing the emotion that happened a long time ago?
“It’s time to do a DISK CLEANUP OF YOUR BRAINS just as we do of our computers. And do it every day because junk, toxic poisons and viruses will keep coming to us from everywhere. We need a strong filter for virus protection as well as for removal of viruses that exist deep within the operating system of our brains.”