A New Year of Positive Transformation

In the last few months, I started writing to provide a simple gateway to help expand access to wisdom, delivered in little nuggets, making BIG IDEAS for daily life more accessible. I certainly enjoy the process and am looking forward to doing a lot more in 2023, while brining a few new dimensions to this experiment in exploring my own creativity.

Aside from just doing things I enjoy that make me better, like writing, 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 of tasty nuggets of brain food to read, that offer 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. It's a gift you give to yourself everyday.

As with all things I do, writing about my personal views and insights into the fundamentals of The Art of Transforming Suffering with No Mud, No Lotus has been a really interesting experiment in October/November and I look forward to continuing with other great minds in the new year, delving into a much wider range of incredible thinkers and wisdom, all of whom can add so much to the development of the mind and who are available to use in our daily lives. As we near the end of 2022 I wanted to wrap up this initial phase of my creative experiment and close the loop on our man THICH NHAT HANH for the moment at least, summarising a few of the BIG IDEAS I really like from this great man and his extraordinarily insightful mind.

The entire concept of the book The Art of Transforming Suffering with No Mud, No Lotus is dedicated to helping everyone cultivate joy and meaningful happy existence through living in fulfilment, surely something for us all to really think about as we move into 2023.

As a quick recap, my position has been that if like me and so many others, you really want to live with a more peaceful approach to life and have the ability to live beyond the increasing negativity playing out every day in the news, on social media, and in the frantic minds of those people around you, then a great place to start is with better access to wisdom from great thinkers far beyond the noise of today demonstrating how to look inward at ourselves, our minds, and our own lives.

Taking more time to look inward is something completely overlooked by many people, and yet it is ultimately our own thought processes that are the cause of suffering. Learning to stop reacting to external situations with negative mental fluctuations, while also getting really good at breathing, being calm, and cultivating the mind into a peaceful place to relax is the goal. This is no quick fix, it is a lifelong process of learning, practice and continual practical implementation, teaching ourselves every day to suffer better, and therefore feel better.

In taking on this process of learning, growth, and development every day, regardless of the noise and drama playing out externally, we find ourselves surrounded by a greater sense of calm and new more positive thought structure aligned to things that give us a sense of joy and happiness, rather than constantly living in the past, or catastrophizing about the future.

These concepts that I am sharing here, I hope will be as helpful to you as they are to me and so many others. I do however thoroughly recommend reading the book in full. It is actually quite a short book. If however, you don't do that, the little nuggets of insightful wisdom to follow will give you the headlines.

CLOSING NUGGETS OF 2022

FUNDAMENTAL BIG IDEAS TO CREATE A BETTER SELF

SUFFERING GOES HAND IN HAND WITH HAPPINESS

“When we suffer, we tend to think that suffering is all there is at the moment, and happiness belongs to some other time or place. People often ask, ‘Why do I have to suffer?’ Thinking we should be able to have a life without any suffering is as deluded as thinking we should be able to have a left side without a right side. The same is true of thinking we can have a life in which no happiness whatsoever is to be found. If the left says, ‘Right, you have to go away. I don’t want you. I only want the left’—that’s nonsense, because then the left would have to stop existing as well. If there’s no right, then there’s no left. Where there is no suffering, there can be no happiness either, and vice versa.”

“If, however, we are preoccupied with the fear and despair in us, we can’t help remove the suffering of others. There is an art of suffering well. If we know how to take care of our suffering, we not only suffer much, much less, we also create more happiness around us and in the world.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

YOU CAN'T GROW LOTUS FLOWERS IN MARBLE

“In each of our Plum Village practice centers around the world, we have a lotus pond. Everyone knows we need to have mud for lotuses to grow. The mud doesn’t smell so good, but the lotus flower smells very good. If you don’t have the mud, the lotus won’t manifest. You can’t grow lotus flowers in marble. Without mud, there can be no lotus. If you know how to make good use of the mud, you can grow beautiful lotuses. If you know how to make good use of suffering, you can produce happiness. We do need some suffering to make happiness possible. And most of us have enough suffering inside and around us to be able to do that. We don’t need to create more.”

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

THE FIRST THING TO DO

“To take one mindful breath requires the presence of our mind, our body, and our intention. With our conscious breath, we reunite our body and mind and arrive in the present moment. Just breathing in mindfully already brings us a surprising amount of freedom. With each breath, we generate mindful energy, bringing mind and body together in the present moment to receive this caring acknowledgment of our suffering. In just two or three deep breaths taken with your full attention, you may notice that regret and sorrow about the past have paused, as well as uncertainty, fear, and worries about the future.”

“When suffering arises, the first thing to do is to stop, follow your breathing, and acknowledge it. Don’t try to deny uncomfortable emotions or push them down. Breathing in, I know suffering is there. Breathing out, I say hello to my suffering.

If you want to experience what the end of suffering will feel like, it is in the here and now with this breath. If you want nirvana, it’s right here. Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I smile.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

BILLIONS OF FUNERALS AND BIRTHDAY PARTIES EVERY DAY

“There are cells inside your body that are dying as you read these words. Fifty to seventy billion cells die each day in the average human adult. You are too busy to organize funerals for all of them!

At the very same time, new cells are being born, and you don’t have the time to sing Happy Birthday to them. If old cells don’t die, there’s no chance for new cells to be born. So death is a very good thing. It’s very crucial for birth. You are undergoing birth and death at this very moment.”

“Deep looking can dismantle these kinds of notions. There is no birth and death; everything dies and renews itself all the time. When you get that kind of insight, you no longer tire yourself with anxiety and aversion.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

THE TWO ARROWS

“There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says that if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.

The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our story line, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering.

The second arrow may take the form of judgment (‘how could I have been so stupid?’) fear (‘what if the pain doesn’t go away?’), or anger (‘I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!’).

We can quickly conjure up a realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.”

“Every life has its trials and tribulations. We can navigate them more skilfully when we don’t waste time and energy shooting ourselves with a second arrow—such as dwelling on how much greener the grass in our neighbour's yards looks, compared to ours.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

WHY THE BUDDHA KEPT MEDITATING

“When I was a young monk, I wondered why the Buddha kept practicing mindfulness and meditation even after he had already become a Buddha. Now I find the answer is plain enough to see.

Happiness is impermanent, like everything else. In order for happiness to be extended and renewed, you have to learn how to feed your happiness. Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it.

If you cut a flower but you don’t put it in some water, the flower will wilt in a few hours. Even if happiness is already manifesting, we have to continue to nourish it. This is sometimes called conditioning, and it’s very important. We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.”

“It is mindfulness that makes the present moment into a wonderful moment, into a happy moment. The practitioner is an artist; she knows how to bring happiness into the here and now, with her practice.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

So as we move into 2023 and while it's bloody cold outside, too cold for gardening, let's have a go at weeding the GARDEN OF THE MIND instead. This is the practice of being aware of our own awareness, seeing thoughts for what they are, just thoughts, and knowing they bare no relation to reality, now or in the future.

Ultimately this process means getting into ourselves with some Inner Engineering and out of all the shit that is getting spoon-fed to us daily by the media, other people, and worst of all by ourselves. This is a process of developing greater mental agility through better access to wisdom. Just like any other garden, working to grow beautiful mental flowers involves pulling up the weeds. Obviously here, we are talking about weeds in our minds that create suffering, not actual weeds in the local park.

The need to grow mentally and our need for life to flower into a fulfilled meaningful existence of growth requires a willingness to "metaphorically" get on our knees in our own minds, take the gloves off, put our hands in the smelly stuff (bad thoughts and poor thinking) and cultivate the gardens of our mind, feeding the flowers of right ways of thinking while developing mental frameworks that bring us peace in all situations. Hopefully joy, happiness and fulfilment also.

To do this we need to understand that in reality, we are all trying to find fulfilment, unfortunately finding that seems to be an ever more distant nirvana, but first, we need first to decide what makes us happy, and what matters. Importantly realise unless you are prepared to go through some shit, there will be no flower!

Once we understand what we believe matters to us personally, we can create the mental frameworks to really focus on the steps we need to take toward those things. While this may sound obvious, creating balance in our minds, and in life, experiencing a bit of everything in moderation, including moderation, is quite interestingly challenging. You may choose to live at one end of the spectrum or the other which is fine, never drink, or never go to the gym, but I would argue life without balance isn't truly living.

No matter how balanced a person you think you might be, simply try just sitting in a chair for 30 minutes, no inputs, no touching devices, no DOING anything, no phone, no cup of tea, and no email. JUST SIT and be aware of your own awareness, what the mind is doing, and how the inner chimp is reacting to just sitting quietly in chair. I could only demonstrate how my mind felt the first time many years ago with the picture here of a mad cow. It went crazy! It MOOOOED and complained!

Frankly, anyone being honest knows that the mind can be a war zone, taking 30 minutes to be aware of your own awareness, thought processes, and subconscious programming can be quite intense. However, cultivating this practice and fine tuning brain chemistry with calmness, coupled with access to greater wisdom are the weapons we need to win back the tactical advantage daily for improved well-being and mental health.

It is the simple practices of sitting, being still, finding quiet, breathing, walking alone that enable us to help ourselves find inner peace and support those people we really care about to do the same. Not more technology, more apps, more this more that, simple ancient wisdom and removing other bullshit quick fixes that are just perpetuating a mental health pandemic of anxiety.

Ultimately and in summary, we can create whatever we like in our minds, terrible horror movies, or beautiful flowers, one makes us feel a lot better minute to minute, but neither has any bearing on reality. So you choose. Horror or flowers?

TO FINISH, A PERSONAL DEMONSTRATION IN MY OWN LIFE

These BIG IDEAS have already had a dramatic impact on so many people for thousands of years, and by sharing these with everyone in a way that I hope is accessible, helpful, interesting, personal, and with some fun, my goal in my own small way is to expand the scope of human consciousness. In doing so, I hope in a small way to improve our daily lives, and positively transform the way we see ourselves, our communities and how we touch the minds of others around the world to create more peaceful mind gardens to relax in.

This one is dedicated to my partner Yasmin and her wonderful children. To have the support of a wonderful partner and amazing children who have added so much to my life is something I never imagined I would experience.

In the continuing quest to positively transform my own life, I have waded through some shit in my time, as we all have. However, taking on these principles and others that I will share from great minds and big thinkers in future really helped me to know that on the other side of suffering is a great joy, no matter how bad it seems, how long it takes, or what I have to endure to win and grow as a human being. There is no growth in a life of constant comfort. Living without anxiety, stress, and tension only leads to weakness of mind and mental health challenges. Growing through anxiety, stress and tension is what creates mental wellbeing, a strong mind, human growth and all personal development.

I continue to be an unimaginable optimist and believe that in order to do more and BE MORE every day, I must find more shit to transform into sugar, be open to greater suffering in order to feel greater joy, and to never quit the process of living a meaningful existence, and a life that is true to the ideals that matter to me.

Through trial and many errors, and while also refusing to settle for what I know in my heart was just not right, I have been blessed by such an incredibly positive force within me, that now extends itself into the lives of others around me.

Life for me is never about not having problems, I just want to find more interesting problems to develop myself. I have no wish for life to be easier, I just want to be better, stronger, fitter and faster.

On a deeply personal level, meeting Yasmin to experience such a powerful partnership is such a blessing, and so much fun, even while moving through some incredibly challenging times. To be blessed at this stage in my life journey with such a uniquely supportive and understanding partner to move through life's challenges with, gives me great joy and happiness.

At this stage of Positive Transformation and with a 50 year plan ahead of me, I feel like a very lucky human who is incredibly grateful to find such a perfect and wonderful partner. To me, this is a true demonstration in my own life, that the most beautiful flower in every respect, can only be found after wading through shit. No shit, No Flower my dear.

Have a wonderful holiday period and new year, and as we start into 2023, never stop striving for everything you want, never quit, and never back down in pursuit of your ideals.

The ultimate goal for me is to fuel my own creativity, learn and develop myself while cultivating a fulfilling existence. In doing 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. Including me!

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.