What matters most? What's the most important thing right now, right here, that you can do, that will shape how you are, with yourself and with others? Knowing that everything matters, in the sense of the unavoidable chain of cause and consequence, the truth of actions and reactions, what's the most important thing ?
On doing hard things & feeling our feelings
I love second hand books. I love all books in fact. But there's something uniquely special about a book that's been leafed through, pondered over and passed along. A sense of which, if you're lucky, comes through from the marginalia and love notes within the folds.
These are the words on the inside cover of my pre-loved copy of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche's The Joy of Living: "Dear Zach, If it's hard....do it! All the best, Wyan". My 11-year-old niece and I were sat reading our separate books in the garden recently when she asked me what my book was about. She noticed the inscription, which sparked a conversation about doing things that challenge us, and how navigating life's undulations does indeed, like the subtitle suggests, unlock the secret and science of happiness.
Are you sure that what you're telling yourself is really true?
Whenever we get carried away with our inner monologue, whether out of dreaded or hopeful anticipation, or the constant replay of conversations or events already gone by, we can veer towards a version of reality that is more draining on our mind and nervous system than it needs to be. The late great Zen master, poet, activist and writer Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged practitioners to ask ourselves in any moment like this, "are you sure?". In other words, check, are you sure this is true, might you be minimising or maximising the story, is the storyline you're telling helpful or necessary? Might there be something else going on? What is really happening and how can you face it mindfully?
What's the rush?
"Ahsta, ahsta!" Punjabi for "slowly, slowly!". Words my parents used to, and still, say to me. When I drop something because I've not quite quelled the habit of needless haste. When I forget there's a cup of tea by my feet as I practically sprint to attention and leap out of the moment to head and do whatever else. When I bump into something and hit my elbow, head, knee, because my wavering mind is half elsewhere. “What's the rush?" They'll ask. What indeed.
On silence and wonder
A good friend and yoga teacher alerted me to this wonderful book before leading me through a powerful pranayama practice involving The Pause, essentially allowing a natural break at the end of the exhale and the inhale, without strain, without effort.*
It was one of the most calming and elevating experiences that my ordinarily chaotic mind, so resistant to rest, has had the joy to experience. Moments of clear wonder.
What to do when feeling blue
There are some books that I turn to regularly, mostly when I wake, as I did this morning, inexplicably a tad grumpy, maybe owing to interrupted sleep, compounded by the windy nature of the season and my likewise prone to mood-shifting inner state (Vata-inclined in Ayervedic parlance). Here are my tips, via the practices shared by the eighth century Dharma master and student Shantideva, on how to pivot your mind and your mood.
Are you becoming the person you want to be?
Weathering: Racism and the slow erosion of self
Weathering - the impact of constant and relentless racism leading to premature biological ageing, via the gradual erosion of a person's physiological and psychological being. As evidenced by the disproportionate deaths among Black, Brown and too many other people marginalised and minoritised by systems that ought to protect life but instead devalue it, selectively.
The enriching nature of mind weeds
Meditation is tough. Sitting patiently with our selves, with our messy minds, is not an easy task. That's why we do it. Not for self-flagellation or ego-pumping determination. But to cultivate acceptance, discipline and calm.
The discomfort, the mess, the challenge, is part of the process. Intellectually that makes sense. Feeling it though, when you're sat there doing battle with your internal narrator (i.e. your little, vulnerable, weak and shouty self), it's enough to make you give up. Don't. Persist. This is where the lessons lie.
On dis-ease
A beautiful state of emergency, or a a scabrous state of foreboding?
To be diseased is to be ill at ease. Set apart from ourselves, hovering on the brink, unbalanced, neither fully right, nor fully wrong, a little out of tune, out of focus, fuzzed on the periphery.
A mind out of synch (disordered), a body out of touch (disharmony), a state of bewilderment (disarray), feeling lost (disorientation), hopeless (disbelief), and helpless (distrust).
My three words for 2018
Methods in madness. Or, when cleaning the fridge counts as a good day.
Day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour. Measures of worth and progress plotted on the artificial construct of human time known as the clock, where every moment that passes in which you don’t succumb to the compulsion to self-sabotage your wise intentions is a small, significant victory for sanity
What's the root of our suffering and is it possible to escape the carousel of despair?
Pushed to the limits of our being
The political theorist Thomas Hobbes wrote that “we are all matter in motion”. Every element of our being, from the thoughts in our mind, to the cells in our bodies, is in a constant state of migration.
We move location, change the pace of our thoughts, adjust our ideas in response to those of others, shift the parameters and limitations in all that we do, expand and extend, bond and break, knocking against each other, causing a ripple of chain reactions we don’t always fully appreciate.
Are we doomed to lose our minds? After Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces.
Is madness the price we pay for consciousness? And how much has our comprehension moved on since the 19th century, when psychiatry was in its infancy and “lunatics” were locked away in prison-like asylums?
Those are the questions posed by Sebastian Faulks’ novel Human Traces, which charts how two men seek to unravel “the metaphysical enigma” of the mind over a 50-year period between the 1870s and the 1920s.
Words to live by when you're struggling to find your own
For days when you feel torn or dissatisfied, when you wake up and all the toughness of determination seems to be weakened for no apparent reason, the words of others can save you.
They can fill the spaces between moments of clarity or confusion with meaning.
Where you stumble to understand let alone express yourself, and where you understand but can’t do the feeling or the knowledge justice, it can be useful to delegate the task of communication.
The power of words in an age of anxiety
“The magic of escapist fiction is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and, in the process of escaping, it can furnish you with armour, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better. It’s a real escape — and when you come back, you come back better armed than when you left.” - Neil Gaiman.
The challenges and urgency of articulating depression
What is happiness?
What does happiness mean, how can we achieve it, what will it take to fulfill our quest in life, if we even know what that is? Happiness preoccupies far too many of us for too much of the time. Madness too, although not so many of us contemplate it to an equal degree. And yet the two are so often inextricably linked, unresolved conflicts tangling us up in knots. A new book published by Penguin with the mental health charity, Mind, offers some invaluable insights.
Humans: A 21st century existential crisis
What were the writers of Humans thinking when they penned Channel 4’s latest sci-fi thriller? And what kind of thoughts were they hoping to trigger in viewers? Not since Utopia has an imagined story been so disturbingly close to a plausible reality where you’re left contemplating everything from human rights to the limits of our compassion.