Zen: The Art of Nothing

Fire can be highly destructive – and yet when used rightly, it nourishes and brings life. Absolutely everything, including negativity, has its place, and in its rightful place, it nourishes, it fosters growth and life.

This year my wish for you is that you can see through the judgments of everything you perceive as negative, and allow it to become manure, nourishing and nurturing you. 

When the emptiness becomes overwhelming, meditate on it and let it bring more spaciousness into your life. When there’s too much internal or external noise, step back and let yourself witness and transcend the chaos, and allow the energy to fuel the right activities. When fire is too extreme – when there is too much anger and hatred, allow that fire to burn your expectations and your idealistic view of life, instead of spewing it out and demanding that others change. When emotions overwhelm you, dance with them instead of suppressing them, and allow your heart to embrace all that you feel. And when you find yourself incapable of changing with the times, allow that rigidity to transform into stability and strength. Just step back, witness and open up to the idea of the transformation. Magic often happens when you least expect it. 

May this be a magical 2019 on all levels for you 

<3
Happy New Year!

Recently I discovered some stories about dear ones standing by their principles, risking their careers almost as soon as it began, refusing to give in to the fears of ‘losing it all’. I am so, so proud.

It happened years ago though. Today I look around and it looks quite different. We do a lot of things in the ‘name’ of principles, but basically I think we’ve just found more intellectual reasons to justify hurting people. 

Publicly defaming others is becoming more and more common, and the reviewing system, trolling, the all-too-addictive moral high-ground, etc., is normalizing it, isn’t it? But even if we haven’t done all that, we routinely hurt others when we believe we are right. Now, hurting others by mistake is different, but things start to change when you think you are right in hurting someone else. Or maybe that you are being ‘honest’ and not hurtful. That’s, well, just plain delusional. 

Think you’ve never done it? Ever used sarcasm when angry? Or deliberately said something to hurt someone? Ever left a negative review with a ‘little’ exaggeration? Ever gossiped about someone’s personal issues? Said nasty things about someone you didn’t like, to other people? 

Wars happen because people on both sides think they are right, and they think that their being on the ‘right’ side justifies a violation of ethics and principles. It may be a different situation if you are actively under attack – then offence might be the best defense, but that is rarely the case, isn’t it? If you believe that your being right justifies a violation of basic human decency, compassion and courtesy, how different are you, in principle, to the people who kill in the name of God? 

The next time you say or do that mean thing, just stop for a second and ask yourself, is this the only way to put my point across? Am I using my pain as an excuse to hurt another person? Is offence the only option I have left? Can I maybe, be kind anyway?

‘Let go’ is probably one of the most useless phrases ever. Even more so in therapy. If people could let go, they would already have, they don’t need you to tell them that, they’re smart enough to already know.

Why is it painful to let go? Because what we hold on to, defines us. Often something that hurts us leaves us weaker or less capable of functioning than those around us. It makes us feel inferior, so we try to borrow superiority on the shoulders of our pain/ trauma. So we need that shitty experience to feel good about ourselves, even though that sounds paradoxical – that’s just how the mind works.

Unfortunately, this is where the law of attraction kicks in. It says, ah so trauma makes you feel better about yourself? Here, take some more. So this inability to let go sends a person down a horrible spiral of continuous painful experiences.

Another aspect is, whatever you resist, persists. The more you fight it, the more it stays. If you surrender to the pain and allow yourself to feel it in all its intensity, you’ll find that it dissolves and disappears.

How do we really learn to let go? By not trying to let go at all. It is not possible to let go, because you did feel what you feel and you are forever changed by that unpleasant experience, no matter how trivial. Allow it to hurt. Allow yourself to feel the pain. You know how when a person is drowning, if they stopped resisting they’d float to the surface? Same thing. When you surrender to the pain, it lifts you to the surface. So you can be in the middle of it, but you’ll still be floating on the surface and able to breathe.

Rational thinking is based on a simple premise – that you base your ideas on facts. With the media today deliberately messing with our minds in order to increase their click rates, most people seem to have lost the distinction between fact and fiction. And this is highly dangerous. Not only does it mean we get attached to our opinions, but also that our opinions could be complete distortions of the truth. As a spiritual seeker this is even more alarming, because the path requires that we learn to move beyond the illusion. But this journey tricks us into the exact opposite direction.

So, what’s going on? It is important to understand the mind before we begin. The mind seeks validation and it needs to feel good about itself. The mind also absolutely loves negative emotions because they are way more powerful than positive emotions. So understand this – if you have the slightest opportunity to hate or despise someone for the (seemingly) right reasons, it is an irresistible temptation for your mind. This is exactly what the media feeds on – it supplies you a list of things to hate. And what’s worse, this has today seeped into our daily conversations and attitude too. We love to hate, it makes us feel good. Once we realise this, we can make an attempt to bypass the natural inclination of the mind and take a rational approach.

Fact? Opinion?

Fact is something that is irrefutable. It is something that definitely happened, something that you can be certain of. Opinion is subjective, and will differ from person to person. Let’s take a few examples. You see someone beating someone up. One person is beating another, that is a fact. To say or think that one person was doing it very viciously, or that the victim was in a lot of pain, is an opinion. To imagine that the person doing the beating is a bad person and the person receiving it is a helpless victim is an opinion – it is very possible that the man is beating the other because he saw him trying to rob or molest someone else.

Fact is what you can clearly see, and takes into account that you almost definitely don’t know everything, because we only know what our perspectives allow us – when you are talking about facts, you are open to the idea that the opinion you have formed based on what you saw/ witnessed/ experienced could be completely wrong.

Opinion is an idea formulated in your mind based on incomplete information. There is nothing wrong with having an opinion, it is the nature of the mind to opine. But to imagine that your opinion is accurate is nothing short of stupidity. And what’s worse, to imagine that others who don’t share your opinion are stupid, regressive or backward, there’s nothing more stupid, regressive and backward than this itself.

There’s a lot we can do to separate fact from fiction.

1. Think about the topics you feel strongly about, things you seem to have clashes with people about. Are you talking about fact or opinion? How much proof have you seen regarding your facts? Is it proof enough to convince you alone, or will it convince others too?
2. If you are attached to your ideas and it is difficult for you to hear opposing views or arguments without losing your cool, you are attached to your opinion, and it has nothing to do with facts.
3. When it comes to news about people you know, stop when you hear gossip and ask for proof – if you really do want to engage in the discussion at all. Who saw whom? What are the chances of this information being exaggerated or distorted? Are you commenting on exact incidents or are you commenting on imagined intentions and desires?
4. When it comes to news and national debates, remember that you only know what you’re fed. Unless you are directly involved, you have absolutely no idea about the truth, and it is very possible that what you are fighting for might in reality be completely against your core principles.
5. I find it fascinating how now a days people have an opinion about everything without having any credentials whatsoever. And somehow they are comfortable with this – it doesn’t unsettle them at all, and they can argue with someone who does have credentials and data, without any qualms. When you have an opinion about something, it is important to ask yourself, ‘who am I to have this opinion, do I have any credentials or a solid foundation to base this opinion upon?’ and even if the answer is yes, it is important to remember that it is still ultimately, just an opinion – it is based on incomplete data and may be wrong.For example you might have cured jaundice by eating cinnamon (just a totally random example, please don’t ask jaundiced people to eat cinnamon!) Now this is great, and you might tell a doctor that you ate cinnamon and your jaundice healed – that is a fact, a relative fact. If you say that cinnamon cures jaundice, then that is an opinion. Even your fact could be wrong, maybe the doctor investigates and realises that it wasn’t jaundice in the first place, or maybe you ate the right medicine by mistake at some other point and that is what actually led to the cure, not the cinnamon at all – so it is still a relative fact and may not be entirely accurate.

So your experience is largely fact – it is a relative truth. But to imagine that everyone else experiences the same thing in the same way is not only an opinion, it is also delusional. We live in a world with close to eight billion people. Everyone has a different set of experiences, different perspectives, different cultures, upbringing, circumstances, IQ, EQ and temperament. No two people are going to agree on everything. If we cannot learn to respect and honor the differences among each other, we’re not going to get very far in terms of co-existence. And that is a (relative) fact, isn’t it?

We teach our girls and women to not take any shit, but we’re not yet teaching them not to give any, and this is a problem. When exposed to abuse for a long time, abuse becomes normalised. Which means we abuse the ones we love without realising what we’re doing. So if you want to co-exist peacefully with kind, loving people, here are a few ideas that might help.

1) If you don’t want to be told what to do and how to live your life, DO NOT tell others how to live theirs. Which means not telling your family members (or anyone else) what they should or should not be doing, who they should or should not be meeting, etc.