Three habits stand out from Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s life: mastering perspective, mastering priorities, and mastering energy. We covered mastering our perspective and our priorities, now comes the third habit: mastering energy.
Everyone gets the same 24 hours. Yet some days feel light and inspired, while others feel heavy and exhausting, even if the calendar looks similar. The difference is usually not time. It is energy.
The key question becomes: How can I bring more life to the hours I already have? Two ideas help a lot here: expanding your “dynamic range,” and choosing light over darkness.
1. Expanding your dynamic range
In technology, “dynamic range” describes how much variation something can handle. A high dynamic range screen can show deep blacks and bright whites at the same time. A microphone with high dynamic range can handle both a whisper and a shout without breaking.
People also have a dynamic range. Some can only handle very comfortable conditions. A little criticism, a delay, a canceled plan, and they collapse. Others can go through difficulty, but still stay steady, and even support others. The second group has greater dynamic range.
Physically, we expand our range through exercise. We accept short-term discomfort so that the body becomes capable of more in the long run. Emotionally and spiritually, something similar happens when we learn to accept situations that are not our preference, without immediately reacting or complaining.
Yogiji Maharaj expressed this beautifully in simple language: learn to make do with whatever comes, whenever it comes, and with whomever it comes. That does not mean we never try to improve things. It means we do not waste huge amounts of energy resisting every small inconvenience. Acceptance saves energy. Constant resistance drains it.
You can start small:
2. Choosing light over darkness
The second way to master energy is to cultivate a positive, constructive mindset. This is not fake positivity. It is a choice to look for meaning, growth, and solutions.
The same event can be described in very different ways. A failed experiment can be “a complete disaster” or “an important lesson.” A setback in a project can be “the end of everything” or “a hard but useful turning point.” The facts are identical, but the inner story is different. A constructive story releases creativity and courage. A negative story drains both.
When the Apollo 13 mission ran into serious trouble, it could easily have been remembered as NASA’s worst failure. Instead, the attitude on the ground became, “This could be our finest hour.” That shift in mindset did not fix the spacecraft by itself, but it energized people to search for solutions with everything they had.
Spiritually, this kind of positivity rests on faith – faith that God is with us, that there is a higher purpose at work, that every situation can somehow be used for growth and service. That faith turns obstacles into opportunities and delays into training.
To begin mastering energy in daily life:
When you put all three habits together – mastering perspective, mastering priorities, and mastering energy – life stops feeling like a desperate balancing act and begins to feel more like a graceful dance. The demands may not decrease, but your clarity, focus, and inner strength increase. That is the kind of mastery that Pramukh Swami Maharaj lived, and it is a path that is open to all of us.
-Chaitanyamurtidas Swami
BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha
