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Happiness or joy – which is better?

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Happiness or joy, which is better? Of course we all want to be happy but joy doesn’t get a mention quite so much. Rather like a pleasant tinkling bell, happiness can rise up quickly but can then fade almost as fast, so we have to keep renewing it. Joy is a much deeper affair, like a very large bell whose resonance continues for a long time.

Happiness and joy are both excellent medicines

Happiness is delicious and thoroughly recommended. It is light, tasty and easily digested. It comes in all sorts of flavours and is available right now in your local universe. All we have to do is select it. If we make the choice to be happy now, the delivery is automatic and completely free of charge. We just have to keep our head up and flick our happiness switch. As we smile, the energy channels in the body open more and allow our vital energy, qi, to flow more easily. The more we smile, the more our vitality improves, which is brilliant for health and our sense of wellbeing. The bonus is if another person sees us and smiles in return, their channels open a little too. When we smile with our face and with our heart, the effect can be quite profound.

Appreciation creates joy, and joy heals

Our world is a very beautiful place and if we choose to appreciate what we have and what is around us, we will see that. Even though we are deluged with messages telling us that everything is wrong, we should not rely on news and social media to create a world picture for us.

Balance is essential and each of us has the ability to choose to see what we have in a positive light. Nothing is what it seems and this world has many dimensions, as do we. If we appreciate and are grateful for everything, we will be a friend of the world. We will generate great joy, whose vibration, like the waves from a resounding bell, will travel far and wide. Everything in the universe is energy, and to love, to vibrate joy and happiness are the most wonderful things we can do.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. There are many short articles on this blog and some books available, too. Some guided meditations are still available – they were put together some time ago but they still work!

Related posts:

  1. Motivation: how using Nature’s power can change your life
  2. Something to smile about
  3. Thoughts: Why we need to think less
  4. Healing energy, the Universe and You

Taking refuge can give us what we really want

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When there’s a storm blowing, people and animals take refuge from it and, in a sense, that’s what many of us are doing now. There are plenty who are still working, of course, and others very busy looking after young children or with other responsibilities. But for the majority, it is a form of retreat, or can be. Time to reflect, perhaps, and time to enjoy being oneself. It has certainly caused me to reflect on many things, including a couplet from one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s breathing meditations: “Breathing in, I go back to myself. Breathing out, I take refuge in my own island”.

Taking refuge is finding safety inside as well as out

For many years, I felt slightly uncomfortable with that. It seemed quite at odds with John Donne’s famous phrase, “no man is an island”, with which I was sternly admonished as a teenager, and which thereafter always echoed in my brain. Suddenly, though, in this enforced retreat it makes sense. Staying at home takes care of the physical refuge. It also provides the opportunity to go further than that and bring the mind home, too, closer to its natural state.

Bringing the mind home

A good start is to resist the urge to check news and social media many times a day. We just don’t need so much information. It simply irritates the mind, uses up enormous amounts of energy, and drains our qi. Why shorten life unnecessarily? Taking refuge reverses that process of looking outwards all the time. It allows the mind to come to a more peaceful place, where true creativity lies. Surprisingly quickly, we can be satisfied with less and soon find fullness, here and now. Isn’t that, deep down, what we want? What we really, really want?

Drawn from The Art of Not Doing: How to Achieve Inner Peace and a Clear Mind

Related posts:

  1. Can we let go of needing to know?
  2. Time: why keeping an eye on the clock shortens your life
  3. Stillness and clarity: here’s how they can save your life
  4. Stop the world? You can’t, but you can stop yourself

If home is where the heart is, we must learn to be there

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Just a few days, and for other countries a few weeks. That’s all it has taken for our world to be turned upside down and inside out. While key services are working flat out, most of the rest of us are at home. That can be a challenge. Like many, if not most, I must confess initially to having had a slight dread of being confined for any length of time. But I very quickly learnt that accepting instead of resisting was not only vital but could bring a great sense of peace – Yin soothing Yang.

Too much Yang requires Yin

The world has been fixated on the generation of power and wealth, whether financial or otherwise, for a very long time. This is an expression of Yang – outward movement and growth. Yin – the opposite – is just as necessary. Humanity cannot expand its activities and relentlessly seek to satisfy its desires forever. We know that if we exhaust our own body and don’t rest, we get sick. Humanity has pushed Nature, of which we are an integral part, too far and for too long, making her and us sick.

Restrictions are Yin

Some people think that Yang is strength whilst Yin is weak. Not so. Our very roots into the Earth are Yin. Foundations are the source of strength. (Try pushing over a good taiji player who is rooted.) Restrictions on our movement and social gathering are like medicine. Though we would rather not have them, we know they are necessary. Being confined to our homes for a while is like a compassionate lesson from Mother Earth – learning to be at home on the planet responsibly. It’s time for her children to grow up.

Keeping healthy with Shibashi

Qigong can help keep the body in balance and a good set of Qigong movements is Shibashi. It reinvigorates and strengthens the body, supporting the immune system and very good for the lungs. Here is a free video originally prepared for our tai chi class but that can be followed fairly easily by anyone.

Can’t settle? Take a look at The Art of Not Doing .

Take care and stay safe.

Related posts:

  1. Something to smile about
  2. Chaos? Yes, but there is a way out of this
  3. Clarity: why it’s a vital antidote to this mad world
  4. World peace is fragile – it’s no joke but we can all help

Habits – when and how to manage them

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Forming habits, now there’s a thing. Someone told me once that it takes three weeks to form or break a habit. I’m not sure where that came from or whether there is any evidence to support it. Nevertheless, the turn of each new year has features editors of newspapers and magazines publishing articles on the new habits we urgently need to acquire or lose. Is that a habit of theirs they could safely shed, I wonder?

Habits don’t like awareness

We all know that new year resolutions generally fail before the end of January. Except the one not to make any, which I find works well and lasts all year! Old habits die hard, so the adage runs, and in any event it would be silly to suggest that we should have no habits all. Many are very useful, like washing our hands after we have been to the bathroom. If only everyone did. The problem comes when our repetitive thinking and behaviour (which is what habits are) have a negative impact on ourselves and on others. Then there is something we can, and should, do.

Just observe and break the chain

The key to change for the better is not self-flagellation, dieting, running up mountains or taking ice baths, interesting and challenging though such activities may be. Rather it is to become aware of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Simple awareness can work wonders because it is the portal for our innate intelligence. Try it sometimes; better still, often. Before doing anything, pause and observe. Break the chain of one automatic response after another. Starve the habit of oxygen. Those few moments of comparative silence allow something rather good to happen. What it is, though, you must discover for yourself.

Do less to accomplish more – read my book The Art of Not Doing – How to Achieve Inner Peace and a Clear Mind

Free guided meditations

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  1. Motivation: how using Nature’s power can change your life
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  4. Taste with your ears? It makes sense

Motivation: how using Nature’s power can change your life

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Motivation Motivation? We just can’t do without it. It is the driving force of change, whether for good or bad. The current chaos in society is caused by conflicting pressures from those with vested interests, political or otherwise. The one thing they all have in common is motivation. As individuals, we become driven by pressure, too – when we feel strongly that something in us needs to change.

Motivation for good

Some people are very good at self-motivation. Others, like me, need to work at it. However, the best type of motivation is not something we should need to think about very much. Rather, it comes from within. Most of the things that drive us to action are desires for the pleasures and necessities of life. At one level or another, we seek satisfaction. Once we have found it, we soon look elsewhere for fulfilment. But if we let the mind become calm and open, the fripperies of life lose their attraction. Then all motivation for action comes from inside, from what some call the soul or inner spirit. What term we use doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we start to reconnect with our true nature and, in turn, Nature’s power grid.

Motivation nature power

The source of boundless energy and intelligence

When we become still, through relaxation and meditation, we become more open. Our natural state is one of openness, where intuition rather than calculation has its home. Instead of thinking, “I want to be like this,” or “I ought to do that,” we simply know the right thing to do. As a result, we stop wasting energy on things that don’t matter and have plenty for those that do. Nature provides us with the energy we need and our boundless field of intelligence, consciousness, gives us all necessary motivation. It really is a life-changer. And all we have to do is stop – just stop and be still.

Releasing the things that hold us back is the subject of our next evening workshop, Letting Go, on the 11th March 2019. More details and booking.

My third book, The Art of Not Doing shows how we can re-train our minds to find clarity and inner peace.

Related posts:

  1. Habits – when and how to manage them
  2. Stop the world? You can’t, but you can stop yourself
  3. Taste with your ears? It makes sense
  4. Life: sometimes we can forget why we’re here