I got around to uploading the bones of what I’ve started calling “a modularity”, describing the framework that is developing around me for helping others recover from small-t trauma and experience sustainable genuine happiness.
If you’re interested in transcending the inherently limited personal/human ego and experiencing a much-expanded perspective of our true place in and relationship to reality, check it out.
If you value being happy, check it out!
I’m really proud of myself and very excited because I feel I can say I am in recovery from mental illness, which is no small deal.
Trigger warning though:
I have been debilitatingly depressed for months at a time in the last 10 years or so. I have experienced heart-breaking bouts of acute suicidal ideation and a deep sense of alienation from my self and my worth. (This is a trauma response I have learnt about and am able to see for what it is: no more and no less than fight-or-flight, my nervous system trying to protect me from acute and sometimes chronic emotional pain and suffering.) I have been through 2.5 episodes of spiritual emergenc(y) and about .5 episodes of full-blown acute episodic stress-induced psychosis. I have been dependent on drugs and alcohol and various behavioural addictions since my early teens. I am now 39! Apart from a bit of mild binge-eating or a dose of half-mindless entertainment, I am now nearly addiction free. (The final addiction to drop is our attachment to false ideas about reality.)
I no longer get floored by depression ~ I have learnt and am teaching myself how to respond to life in way that doesn’t result in debilitating overwhelm. I am able to see when my nervous system has been triggered and know that any thoughts (say, of worthlessness) are cognitive distortions. Most days I experience micro-mystical states of deep peace and contentedness that are dependent on no external source ~ due to the self-work I am doing, these moments of genuine happiness are the result of being in relationship with my true self and with reality as it is, compared with wishing reality were how I think it should be.
I am reporting this after an exchange with Zane tonight that previously would have totally derailled me. A minor (but vaguely problematic) exchange that remained minor because I saw what was happening: we were triggered = responding half-consciously from dysregulated nervous systems that believed we were in the past, not the now. I saw what was happening, and exited the situation instead of trying to make Zane see reason (read: instead of trying to make reality or Zane behave as I think they should). Earlier in the evening I had self-regulated after Zane had been pushy and rude. Then we had the exchange where we were triggered and I co-regulated with Nikki. And I have been at baseline ever since, whereas a year and a half ago I would have still been fuming.
In fact I now need to regulate joy because I am so excited about other positive things going on!
Previously I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy these positive things because once I was triggered it would sometimes take me days to come back to baseline. I would let triggering situations hijack my happiness and I would feel so trapped in suffering that suicide felt like the only option.
I didn’t know how to respond to or cope with life in a healthier way, but now I do and am learning more all the time.
So I’ve come a long way!
Nikki is doing really well too and we were able to report to our relationship counsellor today that we each feel we are genuinely healthy ~ at least, as healthy as we can expect. (I’ve since re-encountered Gabor Mate’s idea that a lot of our mental and physical symptoms today are the reasonable responses of our whole organism to the toxic culture we are growing in.) Sometimes we are distressed and suffering acutely, but this does not mean we are unwell. It means we are human. It seems really obvious now, but it’s been a huge paradigm shift to feel that.
The cool thing is … the really fucking cool thing: this sense of wellness among suffering has not resulted from some miracle or fluke; it is the result of some 15+ years of (self-) inquiry, application, research, therapy, meditation, a bit more inquiry, some giving up, a lot of starting again, despair, triumphs, bum steers and mistakes and lessons and gradually a very solid deepening of self- and other-love.
It’s been a fucken journey! It still is. I’m finding my way. Makes my heart swell inside to think of it and report this here.
And like all before me who travelled the Path, I carry a torch that lights not just my way but others’ as well, and apart from being excited about my own increasingly consistent wellbeing I am excited about beginning to support others more on the Path.
I’m starting to offer dana-based coaching, so if you’re curious about that, get in touch at that link. I am starting to offer this in in the most ad-hoc fashion, making it up as I go along ~ join me if you’re ready to explore the Path together.
My enrolment at TAFE Qld was finalised today so it’s now official. I am going to study Mental Health (Peer Work) and I feel ready ~ ready to use my lived experience of recovery to help others move toward recovery and health and wholeness as well.
Did you know the word “wealth” is derived from weal, meaning good health? I find that weally intewesting.
I bought Gabor Mate’s book The Myth of Normal to celebrate enrolment, because we got an advance payment from cLink and I bought myself a 5-subject lecture pad as well because hey, nerds like to live a little as well!
On that note (book), go well and godspeed 🙂
👆🏽 This on the back of the following report that I may be the world’s newest card-carrying member of the mad pride movement. I am proud that I “went mad” at least 2.5 times and came back from the brink alive and well, bearing insights for the village.
And I repeat:
like all before me who travel the Path, I carry a torch that lights not just my way but others’ as well, and apart from being excited about my own increasingly consistent wellbeing I am excited about beginning to support others more on the Path.
I am starting to offer dana-based coaching so if you’re curious about that, get in touch at that link and we’ll arrange a time to catch up.
I am very pleased to announce that I have been awarded a scholarship to complete a Cert IV in Mental Health (Peer Work)!
Round of applause! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Thank you! *bows*
I am at TAFE now, checking out the campus and enjoying the very quiet Level 3 of the library 
I found the scholarship program a couple of months ago when I was talking to a friend about wanting to help others heal and grow and transform from mental illness. Because “a healthy world arises out of healthy minds”. My own and my family’s mental health has been patchy lately, so I’m proud of myself for making and finding and stealing the time to complete the application, network with some of the people administering the program, and land myself a scholarship!
From the course description, the Cert IV will
allow you to support people in their journey of recovery from mental illness, working in mental health services roles that support consumer peers or carer peers. Workers are employed in the mental health sector in government, public, private or community managed services.
For obvious reasons, I’m not mad-keen on the jargon in general, and in particular, the idea of referring to people as ‘consumers’. A lot of our mental-health concerns are the direct result of our consumerist society. But I’m excited about participating in the community to find ways of referring to these experiences in ways that are constructive and healthy. And I’m excited about getting involved in the lives of people who are actively working to recover through their mental-health challenges.
A lot of us are living with mental illness in a silent way, understanding that our challenges are a reflection of problems embedded in our culture, and we want to find ways of being that are more aligned with wholesome and holistic values. That’s where I would like to come in, helping others to recognise that each of our actions are what make up culture, and therefore it’s worthwhile making the effort to be the change we want to see in the world.
The scholarship was awarded by the Queensland Alliance for Mental Health (QAMH) and they have one of the shorter acronyms I have noted already in the sector. It’s going to be strange working in something called a ‘sector’, using sector jargon and trying to navigate the unwieldy institutions I have encountered already. But I’m hoping I can find a nice and chilled place to work where people understand that the symptoms of mental-illness nuances of humanity cannot be squared into a box, neatly labelled and promptly disregarded as abnormal or pathological because their presentation doesn’t match the checklist of the biopsychosocial model.
I am very much interested in representing the spiritual dimension of the holistic approach to mental-health treatment, especially since I experienced my own acute spiritual crisis in 2017. In fact, since that experience (despite a few tangents) I have been trying to find ways to help in this area, and I feel like it is now starting to come together.
When I look back even further, I remember that in my late 20s when I was moving away from my publishing career, a big part of the motivation for that shift was the desire to help make change in our society and culture in a way that was more direct than publishing alternative ideas. I loved working in publishing and I still cherish the value of literature to help move society in a more wholesome direction. However, at the time (and still now) I felt that the urgency of the need for change was such that I couldn’t rely on the ideas percolating through into action fast enough.
I had also discovered Buddhism in my mid-20s and what I saw there was already motivating me to find a way I could work in the world that leveraged and served the deep metaphysical curiosity that was goaded by my research and practice in Buddhism.
I am in my late 30s now, and a lot of the time in between has been spent travelling and/or haphazardly searching for a way of being that is alternative to the mainstream offering. On that journey I have experienced periods of debilitating depression, various manifestations of addiction and a deep sense of alienation from my self and the truth, and I believe that similar unmet curiosities are leading others into similar conditions, which is why I would like to help.
The mental-health conditions resulting from these blocked metaphysical curiosities are an opportunity to explore new territories of existence and consciousness, and it’s coming to the time when it’s no longer appropriate to just slap on a pathology label and throw away the key.
It’s time to start mixing metaphors!
It’s time to start unlocking the root causes of these conditions and to help others see how the crisis is the solution.
That’s a permaculture idea, the problem is the solution, and it applies well here to life and health, as many permaculture ideas do. I believe the epidemic of mental illness that we are experiencing as a global community is the result of a collective spiritual crisis. Since God is dead and his throne has been filled by bankers and CEOs, the rest of us are left wondering WTF is going on.
I’m reluctant to get too new-agey here, but as we move into the Age of Aquarius, one of the things changing is that we no longer need priests and gurus and other middlemen to mediate our phone calls to God. We no longer need to suffer alienation from the source of creation ~ we can take our spiritual practice and alchemical transformation into our own hands. We don’t need the approval of a church or the authority of any external source.
🤣 maybe we just need more holistic peer workers enabling individuals to step into their agency and map the path of recovery from alienation on their own terms
Here’s to that, and to new beginnings!
Becoming a peer worker means I will have the formal training and qualification to work in roles supporting those in our community who are experiencing difficulties maintaining their mental health. These are non-clinical roles, where the value is in the peer worker’s lived experience of recovery from mental illness.
I do have plans to study psychology in the future and perhaps move in to clinical and research roles, but for now it’s looking like I’ll be studying 3 days a week at TAFE Qld South Bank for the next 12 months or so.
The Cert IV requires students to complete 80 hours of work placement, and due to the skills shortage in this area it is common for work placements to become paid employment after the Cert IV is completed.
So it’s going to be an interesting part of the journey to helping others through transpersonal crises, which is my longterm goal.
As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about this. If you’re curious about peer work or have some experiences to share, please drop a comment below or otherwise get in touch, I would love to hear from you.
I’m taking a Mental Health Day today because I started to notice my window of tolerance was narrowing – I was becoming easily irritable, easily triggered and generally just unhappy and stressed. A lot of shit’s been going down lately, and we can’t seem to get a break lately, so I decided to take one. I’m starting a small business, and part of the reason for doing this was so I could keep my own hours – what’s the sense of starting that and then doing 40 hours weeks because my conditioning says so!?
I have a vision for our culture where taking such Mental Health Days is normal and encouraged, more important than the days we are being productive at work. What’s the point of being productive if we’re fucking hating ourselves for it!? This is something like GNH instead of GDP but I don’t want to unpack that now.
A lot of sadness was near the surface for me yesterday and I figured something must be going on or coming through and I want to stop and be present for that.
Also, I need to fill my cup.
As I mentioned the other day, we are living with complex trauma and expecting ourselves to be “on” all the time is a bit silly – we need downtime, time to rejuvenate. By “we” I mean “Nikki and I” but also pretty much everyone in our whole culture, considering everyone is living complex trauma due to the nature of our society, which is pretty fucked up when you think about it, but that’s how it is and we need to see that in the face.
I can’t remember what triggered the sadness orginally, but I know it had something to do with Zane. I had it affirmed by a Blue Knot counsellor that as parents we are often triggered easily during the time our children are the age we were when we were traumatised.
I know it is this because of the emotions that came up when Zane came out while I was drafting this and said good morning, asked how my sleep was. I told him not good and he apologised, knowing that the sleeplessness was partly due to our concern around catching him smoking bongs in his room last night. I was doing the same thing at his age, and the subsequent heavy pot habit left me with a lot of unprocessed emotional pain. I told him (in not quite these words) I just want him to look after his brain, and it’s upsetting to watch him go down the path of self-harm but I have to trust that he’ll learn for himself.
He looked remorseful and/but said thank you, and it’s a weird thing because maybe his unexpected gratitude made me sad because trust is all I needed at his age (instead of the weird manipulative controlly things Mum used to say), or maybe it’s because she did say things like “I trust you” and going through this now as a parent is just too close to home.
I want him to avoid the future pain I know is on the path of self-medication he’s on.
But I’m not so naive that I believe I can actually prevent this for him – and when I really think about it, I wouldn’t want to deny him the opportunity to learn from his own karma.
But that’s not even the guts of it.
The guts of it is, I think, I’m sad because I don’t know which of the above I’m sad about, if any – I’m sad because I don’t remember those years of my life at all and that means I’ve lost something, a big part of myself and my history and that continuity of self we depend on for having a safe sense of being.
Something like that.
There’s a break in the narrative I use to understand and connect with my self.
Seems I repressed a lot of my adolescence – or I went somewhere else during that time because the pain was too much.
I still do this, living in my head because being present in the body is too … unsatisfactory? Too much dukkha, not enough skill for coping with the suffering of samsara, much less the readily accessible capacity to transmute that suffering into joy.
That sort of alchemy is still a possibility though, which is nice to remember.
Yes, that’s why I’ve taken this Mental Health Day: to remember and spend some time with the “base metals” we transmute into “gold” through doing the work of accepting reality as it is.
That might not make a lot of sense off the bat – or it might … it might make perfect sense to you. Either way, here’s a button if you’re curious about it and would like to connect around this idea:
Meanwhile yes, back to what the Blue Knot counsellor was saying: there is trauma in there and a shadow of course and the sadness is a healthy indication that this trauma is presenting itself to be seen, acknowledged, recognised, embraced, loved.
One of the few things I am confident about is that by not resisting these things that come up from our wounds, the wounds express themselves (in the sense a wound expresses puss) and in doing so, the wound self-heals.
Humans are self-correcting, like everything on Gaia. We just need to allow the process without interrupting it, without distracting ourselves, without self-medicating or working ourselves into the ground or whatever we do to avoid the pain.
If we resist what’s coming up, then we just push it back down into the unconscious where it continues to fester and it will inevitably come up again, only worse and more vague and difficult to understand because each time we push it down it becomes more and more muddled with that big amorphous painbody inside us, like a huge blob of secondhand bluetac we’ve accumulated from every house where we ever hung a poster.
We can learn to be non-resistant by embracing what I am choosing to refer to as ahimsa, which is the classic Sanskrit word for “non-violence”.
Our resistance to reality (including … especially … the reality of the pain that wells up from our unconscious on the daily) is a form of violence.
Metaphysical violence if you will. Psychological self-violence. Through the force of habituated will, we push away what we don’t like about reality.
We can train ourselves to not do this, and if you’d like to learn this with me, get in touch for a
Because that’s a huge part of what I’m doing at Heartwards as a trainer and coach in psychological fitness and integrative wellness: I am training myself in ahimsa, so that I suffer less and can help others to suffer less.
Thereby unleashing happy, healthy and empowered individuals who are resourced enough to do their good service in the world. Because resistance drains a lot of energy, and literally gets us nowhere.
Suffering = Reality x resistance
Happiness = Reality x acceptance
And I envision a culture where we are all able to do this. Where it is respected to take Mental Health Days so we can check in with where our resistance is at because, for example, Gross National Happiness is more valued than Gross Domestic Product in this new culture.
Because what’s the point of being productive all the time if we’re hating ourselves while we’re at it!?
*TRIGGER WARNING* This post discusses childhood abuse, neglect and abandonment. If you feel distressed at anytime, try reaching out to one of the support lines listed here.
I rang Blue Knot yesterday because I found them when I searched online to find a hotline for people whose loved ones live with CPTSD. Nikki’s not been doing so well lately and it’s beginning to take its toll on me. This is something that is hard for me to say and has been hard for me to accept: it’s taking its toll on me; my wife is living with complex trauma, and mostly we manage but sometimes I run out of the capacity to cope with the challenges that come with loving and living with someone who has experienced complex trauma. Our son Zane is also living with complex trauma from being in the womb when Nikki was being abused by his biological father.
On top of that, as I was reminded by the counsellor at Blue Knot, I have my own complex trauma to live with.
I called them to get support as someone whose loved ones have complex trauma in their background, and was reminded that I need support for the complex trauma in my own background.
There is a new-paradigm understanding of trauma emerging – thanks to the likes of Peter Levine and Gabor Mate – and in this view we understand that developmental and relational trauma can result from early-life experiences that were normalised in the suburban 80s when I was being raised:
abandonment, emotional neglect and/or emotional incest, being abused and belittled by your siblings, bullied at school, bashed by thugs as a teenager … these are all experiences in my background, and this list doesn’t even account for the birth trauma itself and the trauma of industrial postnatal care for babies.
Blue Knot reminded me that all of this is real. The symptoms I described on the call were confirmed as trauma related, and I recall ticking many items on the symptoms checklist when I read Levine’s Waking the Tiger. It was affirmed on the call that as parents, we are often triggered when our children go through the age we were when we were traumatised, which is definitely happening as Zane goes into the early teenage years.
It surprises me that I know I live with complex trauma myself, yet it took me feeling my wits’ end in supporting someone else through trauma recovery to remember or have the fact of my own trauma validated. (I think there might be a spectrum distinction between “complex trauma” and CPTSD and I certainly don’t feel like my lived experience of trauma amounts to a disorder, but I certainly exhibit many of the traits.)
That’s how it goes I guess. The call with Blue Knot reminded me that the trauma I’m living with is very innocuous and hard to detect because the causal events are so normalised in our culture. On top of that, there are no physical scars I can show to prove my trauma is real, and no single causal event that resulted in traumatisation … that’s one of the things about complex trauma: there’s no single event we can pin down as the cause. I wasn’t abused in the sense that is typically understood to result in trauma – a lot of us weren’t, but still we are traumatised. Says something about our culture.
For these reasons, this kind of trauma often flies under the radar, causing a low hum of very subtle misery that is difficult to detect. The lack of self-love and -worth that results from such trauma has also been normalised, like it’s the only way of being we’ve ever really known anyway.
A similar phenomenon is operating when we compare workaholism to heroin addiction: the latter is very obviously a harmful maladaptive coping mechanism that warrants treatment and is probably a symptom of trauma; the former is a harmful maladaptive coping mechanism that warrants treatment and is probably a symptom of trauma, but fails to be recognised as such because work addiction is normalised, even celebrated, yet it can rob someone of their life the same as heroin addiction can.
So a thing that I pledge as a central purpose of Heartwards is to help shed light on this emerging new-paradigm view of trauma, and to help individuals recognise and treat the symptoms of complex trauma they notice in themselves.
If we keep just fumbling along with our pain buried in the unconscious like hands into pockets in the depths of winter, we are going to just continue running ourselves and the planet into the ground as we seek to numb the pain or fill the void by sucking the world dry in our pleasure-seeking avoidance.
The counsellor on the Blue Knot call said something about the unconscious: how we repress our pain and shame and try to hide from it.
We cannot run from it forever. I believe that if we do not embrace and heal it in this lifetime, we will just come back for another round, again and again until we learn.
Even in this lifetime, if we retain the trauma in our body because we don’t learn how to release it, we can think we are successfully avoiding it until it recurs again through a phenomenon described by Levine as “re-enactment”.
I don’t properly understand what re-enactment is or how it works, but I’m going to ask when I call Blue Knot back.
They are a team-based counselling hotline, which means I won’t get the same counsellor each time but apparently they keep good case notes to make up for this, and it means I’ll get diverse perspectives. Their catchphrase is “empowering recovery from complex trauma”.
The person I spoke to was really great, and I recommend getting in touch if you’re living with complex trauma or someone who is. Even if you’re not sure but you have a vague suspicion that something was a bit off in your early development or upbringing, I reckon it’s worth a call. You might find explanations for symptoms that have been bothering you for ages but were just kind of resigned to living with. The number I called was 1300 657 380.
The main thing I got from the call today was that we can’t support our loved ones through recovery from complex trauma when we do not have enough internal resources left in our reserves. The analogy the counsellor used was from a teacup: we cannot share tea from an empty cup. This backs up my oxygen-mask analogy: we can’t help others if we’re dead.
I have only recently been able to start refilling my teacup after a very challenging 18 months or so, especially in the last 6 months while we were living with the abuser who triggered Nikki’s trauma, which I wrote about in other posts. We resolved that we would not leave anyone alone with the perpetrator, in case she caught someone alone and took the opportunity to manipulate or concoct a story while there were no witnesses around.
The main advice from the call today was that the best way for me to support Nikki is by first taking care of myself.
This is not indulgent or selfish, anymore than putting on the oxygen mask is selfish before we start helping others in a plane crash.
We cannot help others when we’re dead – or when our own nervous system is so frazzled that every minor tension creates a flee response.
As I continue doing the work of healing my child self, I will become more able to be available for Nikki and others when needed.
If I neglect the work of healing my own trauma, I will continue fucking out when others need me most,
and worse – I will continue attracting myself to situations where the original trauma response is seeking to exhaust itself. (I think that’s the gist of re-enactment.)
Not “fucking out” … that’s the wrong language, when falling to my knees in despair is really what’s happening each time my own and others’ trauma feels overwhelming.
If I neglect the work of healing my own trauma, I will stagnate among the low hum of misery that expresses itself like puss from the unconscious, and my purpose to help others flourish will languish unrealised.
Yours too maybe.
If any of this resonates with you, get in touch or have a look around at Kokoro 心 Heart, where I’m working to promote a healthy world arising out of healthy minds.
This page of resources might also interest you meanwhile.
With Heartwards I am developing courses and training programs in psychological fitness,
because it has come to my attention (in the last 15 years or so) that there are root causes for both happiness and suffering, and I believe those causes are psychological.
I can stop mincing about and worrying that people are going to think that what I’m doing here is quote/unquote woo-woo, because everyone brings their thing to the table, and this is the thing I bring.
We all would like to see a happier and healthier world, and my contribution to bring this about is the offering of psychological-fitness training.
I like the motto “a healthy world arises out of healthy minds”.
And I believe in the idea that a happy and healthy world arises when we learn to see the world (and ourselves) as happy and healthy.
The trick is we have to learn how to choose our conceptions, our cognitions, our thoughts and feelings about what happens in the world: how we perceive and interpret the world makes all the difference.
And the difference is between happiness and suffering.
I just saw on Instagram, an idea I aspire to embody: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
For example, it might be painful to feel we have failed at something that was important to us, but we transmute this and avoid suffering by choosing to see it as an opportunity to learn.
🤯 That’s called a growth mindset.
Now. It’s no great secret that the dichotomy of terms “happiness and suffering” comes from Buddhism, at least in my experience. And the idea that these result from “root causes” is also something I picked up from Buddhism (where the root causes of suffering are called the Three Poisons: desire, aversion and ignorance).
Turn this around and it means the root causes of happiness are things like gratitude, acceptance and wisdom – these are heart qualities we can use psychological-fitness training to cultivate internally, so that happiness is a more-spontaneous and more-frequent response to the world, no matter what state or events are happening around us.
We don’t need to suffer if we have the appropriate psychological skills at our disposal.
The Buddhist conception of suffering has rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, I think.
Another translation of the term dukkha is ‘dissatisfaction’, and dukkha or suffering in this context refers to the dissatisfaction and the vague sense of unease we feel in life when we pursue happiness primarily in the domain of pleasure, motivated by desire and perpetuated by ignorance of the reality that sense gratification can only ever be fleeting, temporary, bound to keep us very much preoccupied with our trip on the hamster wheel of material success.
And it is a trip, in the sense that our preoccupation with the material world is based on delusion or hallucination.
Another way to discuss this without triggering aversion to the terminology of Buddhist psychology is through the dichotomy of hedonia (the pursuit of happiness through primarily external sense gratification) and eudaemonia (the experience of happiness from within).
Whichever way we want to peel the onion, in the end we come to the same conclusion:
We all were told this at some point, that happiness comes from within. But how many of us were told how to find or experience this alleged internal wellspring of happiness?
That’s where psychological fitness comes in: we can train ourselves to embrace reality as it is, and this embrace results naturally in happiness,
which is not always pleasant.
Happiness is another word that’s heavily loaded, and we’d do well to use terms like contentment and equanimity instead, which I’d love to unpack another time.
The point for now is that Heartwards is a spiritual service
in the sense that ‘psychology’ was originally the study of the soul, not just of the mind or of the neuroses of human behaviour.
And all of the great so-called spiritual traditions are, at their heart, modalities of psychotherapy.
So that’s the update for today.
My desire for a sleep-in was frustrated by the cats this morning, and I felt sure my Sunday was ruined: anxiety started, rumination kicked in, and before I knew it I was kicking myself inside the head with all sorts of cognitive distortions.
Then I turned it around because I remembered that happiness is a choice we can make if we are in possession of the right psychological skills.
If that sounds like woo-woo, then carry on, nothing to see here.
If it sounds like something you’d like to learn more about and start applying in your life, get in touch.
Today I had the scent of the buddhas in my nostrils, after a brief and powerful breathwork practice with Keagan Bizzell and the Samford Valley Brotherhood.
Yesterday I experienced the hell of my own anger, but narrowly avoided the vortex of shame and self-loathing that often follow such destructive emotional episodes. I did so by catching myself in time and remembering to practice self-compassion, knowing anger is often a conditioned substitute for sadness. I wrote myself a love letter. It worked. It’s a technique I highly recommend.
The point is, I posted here a while ago about doing really well lately, and since then I have had some really shitty times because I wasn’t able to catch myself in time. By “shitty times” I mean “very difficult internal reactions to triggering external events”, and I don’t at all want to paint a half-truth on the socials.
I’ve been doing well lately, but there’s also been a lot of struggle. And sometimes I experience flow. Mostly I struggle, but the flow state is happening more frequently.
Such are the vicissitudes of life … uphill, down dale, etc. Happiness is rolling with the goods and the bads.
Today is good, but anything could happen. Anything could happen, and today will still be good if I can see the space where interpretation is made, and if I can find choice between happiness and suffering before reaction kicks in.
We can do this, and choose happiness. That’s what I’m learning, and that’s what I want to impart through Heartwards, which I wrote about recently here. And I started a Facebook group / page.
Today I had the scent of the buddhas in my nostrils, yesterday I experienced the hell of my own anger, and such are the vicissitudes of life …
I’m starting a venture called Heartwards, a small business offering personal training for integrative health and wellness.
This is the first time I’ve mentioned it here. I’ve mentioned it to a few friends and others in my networks, but otherwise it’s a very nascent thing.
Now I can mention it elsewhere on the socials and Kokoro 心 Heart and feel like it’s been mentioned before. It won’t be weird if you hear me refer to ‘Heartwards’.
I’m definitely not yet at the stage where I’m doing anything like formal marketing, but it definitely won’t fly if I don’t tell anyone about it. So here’s a banner, which is already out-dated as I develop and re-develop content trying to explain exactly the service I want to provide:
It feels weird, to be honest – starting something like this. I’m doubting myself, wondering why I think I should or could be someone to offer these kinds of services to others. I’m not the healthiest Jimbo on the block. I mean, I’m pretty healthy – much healthier than I was 20 years ago. I’m healthier than many, and less healthy than many others.
The answer(s) I always come back to are:
Another reason for doing this is that I’m developing the sort of service I wish I could find and afford. Kind of like an author writing the book they want to read. I haven’t been able to find or afford a service like this, so I’m developing it myself – it’s easier to justify developing it for others than it is to justify developing it solely for myself.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is just my first public mention of the idea. I won’t go into much more detail here-now, because a) I’m giving up nicotine today and therefore am feeling super vague and fuzzy and weirdly noncommittal and b) I don’t intend to publish a lot about this until it’s more developed. I will publish here if doing so motivates me or helps to justify developing the content, structure, ideas – because publishing here will mean I feel less like I’m operating in a vacuum.
Otherwise, I’m really just mentioning it here so it doesn’t feel weird for me when I reference it in future posts.
I can share a bit of the content I’ve been developing for the business plan.
Our vision at Heartwards is a healthy and sustainable world, where every individual, group and institution is able to cultivate and promote genuine happiness and wellbeing, no matter the challenges we face. We believe a healthy world arises out of healthy minds, and that everyone can reduce suffering and increase happiness.
Our mission at Heartwards is to help facilitate this healthy and sustainable world by equipping individuals, groups and institutions with the resources, knowledge, means and support to cultivate the holistic/integrative health and wellness we need to cope in a world that seems increasingly difficult to navigate. Based on the Pillars of Wellness, we do this by providing one-on-one coaching and accountability support, workshops for groups, in-person and online courses, and resource packages for groups and individuals wanting to develop and maintain lifestyle practices that support their holistic/integrative health and wellness. We help our clients consistently and sustainably prioritise eudaimonic wellness (flourishing) rather than continuing to pursue hedonic pleasure even though we know it leads to suffering rather than happiness.
Our “unique selling proposition” is that Heartwards takes the cliche, happiness comes from within, and turns it into applied eudaimonics. That means we provide clients with the tools and skills they need to actually connect with this elusive treasure that is already within us. By meeting clients where they are at in their busy lifestyles, we help them to become sustainably accountable for their most-important priorities.
Our work is underpinned by the belief that spiritual awareness and health is the foundation of all other experiences of health and wellbeing. Bodhi’s background is Buddhist, but there doesn’t need to be a label from Eastern theological philosophy for us to understand that every individual shares the same deepest aspiration:
to be free from suffering and meet with the causes of genuine (inner) happiness
It is our goal at Heartwards to support others in the spiritual journey that facilitates the sort of wellbeing upon which all other wellbeing is founded – and this is our USP: we don’t mince around and try to leverage the wish for riches or professional success or to live your full potential to entice clients to our products and services; we go straight to the source and help individuals to activate a yearning they already know is there but cannot quite yet identify … the wish the be happy and free from suffering.
Kokoro 心 Heart 