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.
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.
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?
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.
Plant power: The farm that grows salad & life chances
“I’ve seen every sun rise for the last six years. The way I see it, we’re spiritual beings on a human journey. Part of that spirit relies on reconnecting with our roots.” Steve Glover is a man on a mission, and he’s determined to help people who might otherwise find themselves on the fringes of society struggling to find their purpose.
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.
Only nature can save us now
Irreversible species decline, catastrophic climate change, fresh water shortages and global food insecurity – it can be easy to despair when every day brings another slap in the face of a headline. With each new report, hope can disintegrate as surely as the ozone layer. But it doesn’t have to be like this – if we take the time to pause and reflect on the causes of despair, some say there is a chance we can save ourselves.