positive thought Archives – Page 3 of 3

Life: sometimes we can forget why we’re here

October 1, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Sometimes life is good and, when all in our little world is going easily, we may be tempted to think we have got everything right. Perhaps we have. At the other end of the scale, when everything is going pear-shaped, we may wonder what we have done to deserve it. We all have better times and the not so good, but nothing stays the same. Life is like that.

Life is accepting the present moment wholeheartedly

Years ago, I belonged to a group that used to meet in a restaurant. It was a mediocre establishment that served as a handy venue to network, socialise and discuss various projects over lunch. The food wasn’t brilliant, being reminiscent of 1950s school dinners. A monotonously intoned grace at the beginning of the meal didn’t help. Some members would pull faces at the offerings set before them, and I confess sometimes I did, too. Then one day, the penny dropped. My attitude, though fairly normal, was wrong. Instead, I could choose to accept the food wholeheartedly, with a genuine rather than dutiful sense of gratitude, and then everything seemed to change. Later I learned that the same applies to anything in life – mediocrity is simply a value judgment that affects our perception. The lunches didn’t improve much but I did, and both the meals and life tasted better for it.

Embrace the clarity – is this life’s purpose?

In those moments of acceptance, there will be times when we experience clarity. Everything then is good. Everything will work out. Fear dissolves; discontent evaporates.

We all like to think we have a purpose in life but maybe this is it. Nothing grand, no heroic saving of the planet, just being ourselves and living fully and completely. Enjoy and embrace the great peace that comes and let it spread. It sounds like a plan. Maybe it is.

Too much to do? Not enough time? Mind like a chatterbox? The Art of Not Doing: How to Achieve Inner Peace and a Clear Mind can help.

Mirror, mirror in my head – the biggest liar of them all?

June 3, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

The magic mirror in the tale of Snow White knew a thing or two. “Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who is the fairest of them all?” is not a question that is asked in our house. Our mirrors are not magic at all. In fact, as far as possible, we avoid them unless absolutely necessary. They don’t hide anything. They just throw back a reflection of “how it is”. But what about our internal mirror?

The mirror of consciousness

It is virtually impossible to describe consciousness in words, so the old teachers often used analogies. Consciousness is like a mirror, they would say, because it simply reflects what appears to it. A more modern analogy is that of a cinema or television screen. The screen does nothing. It is just the medium on which images appear.

So where do hate, love, anger and kindness come from?

There is far more kindness in the world than there is cruelty. But the message we keep seeing and hearing is that the whole planet is a disaster zone. Instead of seeing things as they are, we are influenced by what other people tell us or have told us in the past.

Our mirror is tainted. Smudges and scratches on the glass distort what we see. Not only do we see a narrow, partial picture rather than the whole, we become excited or upset at what we think we see.

Placing a judgment on everything is pretty exhausting. No wonder so many people become depressed. We need to work on it.

Start polishing

How do we clean the internal mirror, the one in our head? After all, if everything we see is wrong, surely it is just going to get worse?

Okay, it will take quite a while to have a highly polished reflector. But we can start the process right now. The immediate thing is not to add to the distortion and dirty marks that are already there. We simply interrupt the cycle of making judgments. (That may also necessitate changing our newspaper!) We stop shouting “hooray” or “yah boo” at everything we see or read about.

A mirror of peace

Eventually the liar will give up – because no-one’s listening. Accepting things as they are, and importantly not necessarily condoning them, we begin to develop a mirror of peace. And surely that can only be a good thing.

Thanks for reading this. If you liked it, you may enjoy my book The Art of Not Doing

Evening workshop 5th June 2017 in Staffordshire “Pacifying the Mind”. Details here.

Pollution: why the real danger is in our own minds

April 23, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Pollution is always high on the agenda, and quite rightly so. The planet as we know it is in great danger. But the source of the pollution isn’t in the physical. It lies in the mind or the collective consciousness of humanity. As a race, we have allowed it to happen. We all know this but so far have failed to generate sufficient willpower to reverse it. The problem of pollution, and its solution, lies in the mind. That’s even closer to home than your own wheelie bin.

Like pollution, there is more to the mind than you think

If we ever try to examine the nature of our mind, we will probably find that there is no single thing we can actually identify as mind. Instead, there is a collection of interacting and interdependent faculties or components.

The mindstream

The most apparent and obvious aspect is the chattering of thoughts that we experience almost incessantly. One thought yields another and it is difficult to say when one thought ends and another begins. A better description might be that we have streams of thinking and a rather apt term used in some Eastern teachings is mindstream. As we shall see, this is susceptible to pollution.

We don’t change our minds – the mind is constantly changing

Our mindstreams are constantly changing, being influenced by the mindstreams of others. If we are influenced by something we read or hear, it is an effect of the mindstream of the writer or speaker. In turn, he or she will have been influenced. If we look deeply enough, we will find that there is no beginning and no end to these thought processes. At every stage, too, there is the possibility of pollution.

Choice and responsibility

Just as a stream of water collects minerals, debris and pollutants on its journey, our mindstreams also pick up thoughts, ideas and beliefs as we go through life. Unlike water, we have some choice in what we expose ourselves to, and how much.

The amount of information that is available these days is frightening. We need to be choosy and, the less rubbish in our minds, the better we will feel about ourselves and others. We will be less likely to pollute the mindstreams of others with our own detritus and, who knows, may even inspire with our positivity!

Adapted extract from the book The Art of Not Doing

Light lies ahead – we just have to see it

January 9, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Light is a real tonic, isn’t it, especially as now when the days are short and often dark? The world of humanity seems to be in something of a dark place at the moment. We need some light, some joy and something to look forward to.

Light up an ostrich today!

Ostriches are extraordinary birds. They are reputed (wrongly) to hide their heads in the sand when trouble approaches.

I know a number of people, and you probably do, too, who refuse to read newspapers or watch or listen to news on television or radio. There is merit in that because what we are served up as a picture of reality in the media largely focuses on what is wrong. Apart from being negative in nature, there is the added factor of news manipulation, so we don’t even know if it is correct anyway.

So we can probably agree that news bulletins are generally neither very bright nor uplifting. But if we only want good news or none, and choose to ignore the existence of human suffering, maybe we too have become an ostrich.

We become what we digest – in the mind as well as the body

The old adage is “we are what we eat”. We know that what we take in as food and drink affects the body. It’s not just what we swallow, either. What we breathe affects us, as statistics on poor air quality and health clearly show.

But in many respects, the mind is more important than the body because it dictates everything we say or do. It is responsible for everything we think and all that we make of our world. The mind largely governs our feelings and our moods – it controls our life. It needs light.

The media is an aspect of our environment

Environment is much more than our physical surroundings. Our mental environment is just as important. If we keep taking in information that is predominantly negative, there is a danger that we could become gloomy, too. At the very least, it will sap our energy.

Positive people carriers of light?

Positive people tend to uplift us. They create a light environment. They may be a pain at times, too, but usually only because their lightness and cheerfulness accentuate our shadows.

Everyone has light within them. The difference between a positive person and a negative one is how that light manifests. The former carries light and passes it on. The latter chooses not to.

There is more light than dark

The world is not Trump, Putin, Brexit, the NHS or anything else. The world is as we are – as we perceive it. If we look around, there is far more goodness being done by ordinary people than there is bad. By making a habit of seeing that, we create a positive mental environment for ourselves which affects those around us. Our words and behaviour reflect increasing amounts of light. Isn’t that why we are here? Happy new year!

More on social responsibility and the need for love in society can be found in Awakening Heart: The Blissful Path to Self-Realisation. If you fancy a long read, I recommend Matthieu Ricard’s Altruism.

Abundance grows from positive seeds

March 13, 2016 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Abundance is largely a state of mind. It can come simply from appreciation of others and of what we have, appreciating beauty, giving selflessly, being given a lovely smile. These are the sort of things that can give rise to joyful moments in everyday life, and when they occur it is because there is a sufficient degree of positivity in our mental make-up. Positive seeds have been sown and have sprouted.

Positive and negative seeds

To create the experience of joy and happiness more, we need to create more positive seeds than negative ones. Eventually we should aim to sow no negative seeds at all but we are human and it is inevitable that there will be moments when we think, speak and behave less than perfectly. But the more positive seeds we sow, the more abundance we will feel and the weaker the negative ones will become.

So what are these seeds? Each time we are selfless, we create a positive seed and each time we are selfish, we create a negative one. Sometimes, too, we can neutralise a positive act by feeling unhappy about it. If, for example, we give to a charity out of kindness or compassion, that will give rise to a positive effect. There will be a tickle of joy in the heart. But if we give to avoid being pestered or because we don’t want to feel guilty, or even so that we look better in the eyes of others, that act of giving does not carry the same positive effect. The giving might be the same, outwardly at least, but it is our attitude at the time that determines whether it has a positive, neutral or negative on our mind.

Creating abundance with the mind

It is possible to create an abundant mind. Although joy is more often experienced and understood as a feeling, it is also a mental state. The mind is where we sow seeds or causes that will result in joy. The secret is to make positivity a habit.

There is a lovely story of a businessman approaching the Buddha for advice. The businessman said that he understood much of what the Buddha was teaching about becoming a better human being but felt he was unable to do so because of his own avarice. On his own admission, he was extremely mean and couldn’t let go of anything. The Buddha had the man put something into his left hand and then practise giving it to the right hand. Silly though this might sound to us, it was the first time the man had practised giving in any way at all. That was how it started and, because he was determined to overcome his own miserliness, he gradually expanded the practice until he was able to give small things to members of his family and later became a most generous man indeed.

The technique of giving with the mind is a very powerful one and this following exercise is wonderful for increasing a sense of abundance in us:

A simple visualisation for abundance

Sit comfortably and totally relaxed. Create an image in your mind of being very rich. You are a controller of great wealth, of abundance of all sorts.
Now visualise passing all that wealth onto others and, at the same time, others still are passing great abundance to you. Feel, if you can, a great circulation of energy which is passing freely to you and from you. Wonderful!

Energy must circulate

This is what life is like – a great circulation of energy. If we circulate physical resources, we will gain physical wealth and enjoy physical abundance. If we circulate joyous resources, we will gain joy, joyous abundance. Whatever we circulate, we gain. This is a natural law.

Thanks for reading – there is much more in The Great Little Book of Happiness from which this is adapted.

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Life: sometimes we can forget why we’re here

Life is accepting the present moment wholeheartedly

Embrace the clarity – is this life’s purpose?

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