Brain Food for Daily Life; Nuggets of Accessible Wisdom.

A simple gateway to help expand access to wisdom, delivered in little nuggets, making BIG IDEAS for daily life more accessible.

The purpose here is simple, provide an accessible gateway to wisdom that expands human consciousness, offering brain food for life from the great minds throughout human history.

The idea is to provide access to BIG IDEAS in the form tasty little nuggets to read, providing practical ideas for daily life with a humorous twist, for people who want to better understand themselves, life, and how to cultivate a fulfilling existence.

THIS WEEKS LITTLE NUGGET

NOTHING SURVIVES WITHOUT FOOD

“To stay in the present moment takes concentration. Worries and anxiety about the future are always there, ready to take us away. We can see them, acknowledge them, and use our concentration to return to the present moment. When we have concentration, we have a lot of energy.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I firmly believe that creating and evolving the ability to stay focused on how to create Good from Bad, and Sugar from Shit, gives us all a more powerful Opportunity Mindset and the ability to create a better self, be more creative, develop better relationships and become more considered in how we approach all three. Ultimately leading to a fulling existence with happiness, joy, mental stability and strength that become common place in our daily lives.

This first week thinking about nuggets of wisdom, then about actual Nuggets, then about our friends below, and the cartoon chicken opposite who is now my mascot for this little creative endeavour (you get the idea), led me to think that our first nugget should be about food.

Food in all it's many forms generally is a subject that most of us enjoy, today however we are going to eat a nugget of a different type, a nugget of Brain Food for the Mind. And how tasty it can be!

Brain Food is the food of life. along with what we actually feed our bodies we need to think a lot more carefully about what goes in our minds, unfortunately today it seems that there is a lot less thought applied to what is allowed to enter our bodies, and even less to our minds.

Life long learning and accessing the great thinkers who have helped change lives throughout human history is a powerful way to feed our minds, creating an opportunity mindset while cultivating strength, stability and peace of mind.

The idea here, starting today with a nugget from THICH NHAT HANH, is to make feeding the mind as easy as feeding the body, and to support creating a more balanced life.

Thich Nhat Hanh knows a bit about our feeding the mind and helping others to do the same. He is a Zen Master and global spiritual leader, poet and peace activist, revered around the world for his pioneering teachings on mindfulness and global ethics. Although he suffered a stroke and passed on, his, and the minds of other great thinkers live on for us all in the written word, books, video and audio of all forms, offering great wisdom and unimaginable value to anyone wanting happiness, joy, and ultimately fulfilment in life. While Simple and Easy are not the same thing, my aim here is to at least make fundamental concepts accessible.

This particular nugget for digestion today comes from the Buddha, a wise old owl, and who was also a human being not a GOD. Buddha (Siddhartha) was the son of a king who started life with everything he could ever need or want in life, yet decided that his path in life would be better to live as a peasant. Actually in the end he found a middle ground, a balanced life.

Siddhartha left his life of riches having grown to dislike the opulent surroundings and the people that came with them, and while seeing all the suffering that existed outside his palace, he felt compelled to live amongst common people committing his life to a middle way, seeking balance, joy, and a more meaningful fulfilled existence. Ultimately enlightenment and becoming a Buddha.

Anyone can become a Buddha, it is a state of mind, not an unattainable state of godliness or becoming a mythical deity. We have enough of those already, and I had an imaginary friend when I was 5 years old, so there is quite enough of all that in our lives already.

I would say that the Buddhist way of life is far more a practical guide to living well than it is a religious doctrine, and this concept here today, being that nothing survives without food, is a very practical BIG IDEA that I believe helpful for us all to keep in mind every day.

To be clear shoving cheeseburgers in our faces and living at the extreme, feeding ourselves as much crap as possible day in day out, food, social media and everything else you can think that goes in the mind and body at volumes, without some form of structured discipline is a quick way to knowing that too much of anything is bad for you. We really need to find a balance, feed the body, and the mind equally. Feed them both a balanced nutrition of sorts.

There is a great saying in life, and if you read about the regrets of the dying it will add a huge weight and power to this idea, very simply in life you have a choice to make, live with the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. Discipline weighs ounces, and if you ask anyone at the end of their natural life, there are lots of books in support of this, REGRET WEIGHS TONS. So live your life, your way, the best way you can and make no apologies for it!

Anyway back to The Buddha and our Golden Nugget of Wisdom this week, that nothing can survive with food. What do we mean by this, and why does it matter to anyone today, in our modern lives?

Firstly, everything needs balance, most of us like a treat, maybe a bit of cake now and again, a bag of twiglets or a pot noodle, a few drinks, some social media and other stuff like that. While all very enjoyable, we ultimately know most of it is not good for us.

Nobody is saying we need to be perfect, that's not balanced, we do however need to know clearly that to survive and flourish, the better the food the less likely we are to have problems, be sick, unhealthy, and suffer in our daily lives physically and mentally.

This we know about food for the body, yet it is just as important for the mind. Ironically, the better we get at feeding the mind, the more effective we get at making better choices for our body, taking in better food, regular exercise, and balancing intakes through knowing what matters to us individually, what positive steps to take, and what we need to remove.

Let me now go to our man Thich Nhat Hanh with an extract from his writing;

Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it.

We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.

So the the principle here I want to think about in our own lives is that food comes in many forms, food for body, but also food for the mind and the soul that feeds our energy systems on a more spiritual level, creating positive thinking, mental strength, a relaxed mind and leading to a happier daily life and generally increased well-being. So let's feed our brains.

It is true that nothing survives with food. It is very important for us all that we know this is not just for the physical existence of living beings, but also for states of mind.

Very simply today we are specifically here talking about feeding the mind in the same way we need to feed our bodies, creating balance, stability and better control of our thoughts.

While we may know nothing survives without actual food, and generally we know it should be good food, healthy, nutritious and balanced. We are actually need to think about a different balance, a balance between actual food, and brain food for the mind.

A big part of this is simply cutting the shit out of our mental menu a bit and reducing our intake of all the media, social media, and negative toxic people who will drive you to be average through their own mental poverty, those who just won't try to learn, and want to push their negative emotions on to you every single day. Simple to read, not easy to do.

The more we can understand the importance of the need to feed our minds, the less our minds will generate the brain farts leading to poor outcomes, and poor choices. I should know, I experienced a lot of this personally and deeply for many years. Practical learning!

So this week, starting today, knowing that yesterday doesn't matter, tomorrow does not yet exist and all that matters is what you decide to do today. Let’s create less of those toxic brain farts swirling around in the brain by feeding the mind, and redirect that same positive mental energy to nourishing the best within us, creating positively transformed energy we can direct towards ourselves, our families and wider communities in pursuit of brighter better futures.

The ultimate goal for me is to fuel my own creativity, learn and develop myself, while cultivating a fulfilling existence. In doping this and removing some of the bullshit that negatively impacts our minds in daily life, I hope to support better brighter futures for everyone on a journey of Positive Transformation, Growth, & Personal Development.

Get in touch with me via the Website, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to share your little nuggets of wisdom and your personal stories of BEING RELENTLESS, BEING YOU, and how you are creating an OPPORTUNITY MINDSET on your own exciting life journey of Change, Positive Transformation, Growth, & Personal Development.