It’s just over a year since the passing of my teacher, friend and Buddhist nun Kelsang Gen Demo. For a decade she not only taught me how to meditate but many more valuable life lessons. This was further cemented in my mind whilst spending time in France at Thích Nhất Hạnhs Plum Village, visiting Bhutan, the kingdom famous for gross national happiness in place of GDP and teaching English to Buddhist monks in northern Thailand.
I’ve never been religious but I am a life long learner and believe we can learn so much from others. I’m curious and open and I remember Demo telling me on one of my first classes. Take what works for you and the bits that don’t resonate just leave them to one side.
There’s so much we can learn from ancient traditions that translates into our modern lives and these lessons have been the cornerstone of me living a healthy, happy life so I thought this was a perfect time to share a few.
Equanimity – A calm mind. One of my biggest aha moments came when I learned how important our minds are and how we can train them. I’d spent many years on diets, gym classes and pursuing physical health goals but I’d never considered to do the same for my mind. Yet it’s so important. Everything starts in the mind. What we think becomes how we feel and that becomes how we act. If we have an unpeaceful mind we will have an unpeaceful life it’s that simple. You know when you get out of bed on the wrong side and everything and everyone irritates you – that’s the mind doing that! If our minds are busy, stressed and tired of course life is going to be harder. Stilling the mind has been without doubt the biggest change in my life.
In a world when I was encouraged to multitask, the busier I was the more successful I’d become and sleep was for the weak this is a full 360 in terms of my beliefs! I used to think that down time was a waste of time and pressed myself to be doing something ’productive’ with every second of the day. I now know that being productive also means resting, stilling the mind and taking a break. Pressing pause in our busy days is as important as anything else on our to do list because it makes us more effective, it’s critical in helping us to everything else that’s on that to do list.
So check in on your mind? How busy is it, are the thoughts positive or negative? What impact is it having on your life. A great analogy Demo taught me was imagine a megaphone above your head playing your thoughts out loud as you went about your day – you probably wouldn’t have a job by the end of it, fewer friends and maybe a strained marriage! Given we know the impact of our thoughts on our mental health we should be more mindful of what thoughts we’re allowing to occupy space in our brain.
Sitting still for 10 minutes a day focusing on my breathing is my number one wellness tool. It calms my mind, helps me think more clearly, makes me more productive and creative and I’ve become so much more self-aware. It helps open up space between my thoughts, feelings and reactions. Do I still have a busy brain, god yes. Do I still have negative thoughts – of course I’m human. The difference is that now I notice them and have small pauses to chose to respond rather than react. My meditation practice helps me calm these thoughts and allow them to pass through rather than becoming attached or carried away by them.
Being able to focus on the breath and watch the mind also helps us be more present and that leads to our next lesson. Happiness is now! So often we’re worrying about the past or planning for the future that we are not in the present. We miss life because our minds are always somewhere else. The happiest people are those that are present and when we focus on the now it stops us worrying about the future or regretting the past – a source of our anxiety and overwhelm so often. Happiness is not in some far off place we dream off – when the kids have left home, when I retire or when I win lotto. It’s now, we just have to learn to be with it. We wait all week for the weekend, all year for summer and all life for happiness if we’re not careful.
This training of my mind has also allowed me to gain so much Perspective – I’ve learned that its not what happens to us but how we react to it and that we have a choice. This has been instrumental in changing the way I react to challenges. So much of what happens we can’t control and this can leave us feeling helpless like victims. When we focus on what we can control we become empowered and this is where we get to chose. The analogy Demo used I refer to now as the second arrow. If you get shot in the arm by an arrow it hurts, you’ve got a problem and it probably wasn’t your fault. Your reaction though is often like being shot in the arm by a second arrow in the same place, now you’ve got two problems, double the pain. The difference is you shot that second arrow yourself. You’ve got in the car to go to work, you’re running late and it won’t start (that’s your first arrow, it’s a problem that’s causing you to suffer). You can chose to get angry, kick the tyres and complain about being late. Or you can ring the road side assist and postpone your first meeting or check when the next bus leaves (this is your second arrow and this is where the choice comes in).
Of course sometimes the first arrow is so big and the pain so great there’s not much we can do about it and this is when we come to our next lesson Acceptance.
As humans we spend so much time trying to avoid suffering and chase after the good feelings. We want life to be good all the time and are uncomfortable sitting with sadness and suffering. It’s why addiction is so prevalent, we attempt to numb the suffering and replace it with a ‘high’ whether that’s from food, drugs, alcohol, shopping or something else.
We chase after the highs in our life (the perfect job, house, partner) and then when we get it we cling on to it and hope it never leaves. Likewise when we feel sad we desperately want it to pass and to feel happy again. Whoever we are there will be a mixture of good and bad in our life. We all have challenges, the good news is they don’t last. These feelings we want to avoid don’t last – but nor do the good ones. Everything comes and goes, this is the nature of life.
“if we have a problem there’s always two options either 1) there’s a solution in which case great, there’s no need to worry about it. Or 2) there’s not a solution, in which case there’s no point worrying about it.”
This valuable lesson taught me that suffering is inevitable, misery is not. If we can accept the things we can’t change it allows us to make peace and move on. Good and bad will always come and go, sit with what is and accept what we can’t change.
This segways nicely to another important lesson Impermanence. Everything will come and go whether we like it or not. None of us will live forever, everything we have we can lose. It’s why attachment in Buddhist teaching is the root of suffering.
You see one thing we all know for sure is that we will die, there’s no greater certainty, yet we live like we’ll live forever and it’s an utter surprise to us when we lose someone we love, we’re completely unprepared.
Demo likened it to staying in a posh hotel. We know we’re only there for short time, we make the most of the fine white sheets, the fluffy bath robe and free shampoos. We enjoy it, appreciate it but we don’t believe we’ll take any of it with us or cry when we leave because we knew right from the start that we’d be checking out.
It doesn’t diminish the pain this kind of suffering causes though and that brings me to my next point.
Suffering is hard, even if we can accept it. We don’t like to suffer, but it can also be where our biggest lessons come from. During my time at plum village Thích Nhất Hạnh’s place in France I read his famous book ‘No mud no lotus’ In fact I now have a lotus tattooed on my foot as a result of this very important lesson. The lotus is a beautiful flower that grows from the mud. We too grow from our challenges to bloom into the beautiful humans we are. It’s because of the mud that we become a lotus and without the mud we wouldn’t bloom. Suffering is part of the human condition and it’s ok not to be ok. If we get sick or lose someone we love of course we’ll suffer but sitting in the mud is often how we get through those times and over time the lotus starts to bloom. So often it’s our deepest scars that can lead to our biggest gifts.
Dharma is a Buddhist term for purpose, your gift to the world, your work. It’s how we serve. For many of us in the western world work is now all about money and we’ve lost tough with our sense of purpose that we get from the work we do. It gives us a reason to get out of bed in the morning and that feeling of making a difference in the world. It’s usually related to helping others too because as Buddhist’s tell us “all the happiness there is in the world arises from wishing others to be happy” kindness and compassion makes us feel good and have been under rated for too long in our survival of the fitness, me first mentality. But back to purpose. This was a big learning for me and resulted in me walking away from my corporate job, six figure income, company car, and ‘successful’ career. It shifted my thoughts from money and status (that did not bring me joy) to how I could use my skills to make a positive impact around me. I realised it’s not what you do but why you do it, your gift and how it impacts the world. This is now my dharma, writing books and delivering talks and coaching to help people be their best and align to their purpose. Of course this still earns me money and quite frankly it needs to otherwise I’m not able to do this work if I can’t afford my food and bills that power this work.
Simplicity This was a revelation to me as a corporate high flyer always wanting more, buying my way to happiness, hung up on ego and status. None of this made me happy and yet when I lost it all (voluntarily) I’d never been happier. It was a feeling of freedom, an opportunity to rediscover what matters. It taught me to love what I have rather than constantly chase after more. We tend to think in our modern world that more is better and this pursuit is like a bottomless bucket, a constant craving because of course there’s always more to have/do. We think that to be happy we have to have things when in fact the opposite is true. Having less has shown me the path to enjoying more.
The more we have, the harder we have to work to pay for it and the more worry we have over losing it! Life is more simple these days and I’m much happier as a result. It’s not about getting what you want but loving what you have and knowing that in the developed world most of us already have everything we need.
At some point in our lives we are forced to reduce the amount we have, whether it’s financial reasons, divorce, sickness, natural disaster or eventually death. Guess what we won’t take with us when the inevitable happens, everything. Having less stuff does not mean less quality of life and this is clear to me now. It opens more space in our life for the fun stuff, the things that really matter, there’s less to clean, insure and pack each time you move. Spending time living the simple life I realised how little we actually do need and by not having it, how much more room we have for things in our life that really matter.