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Ecosystems

We live on a planet where everything is connected. Changes in one place will have some repercussions of various degrees elsewhere.

Our bodies are like the planet we live on. They are well organised, perfectly balanced ecosystems that need to be treated with care and a holistic approach.

Modern medicine, however, seems to have lost the ability to take a bird’s eye view and has in many cases even gone the opposite way, treating each body part as if it existed in total isolation from the rest.

Now, I’m not a medical doctor, but it seems to be logical to me that if you have a broken bone, more often than not, that’s all you need to make sure it’s going to be mended. If for example, your left femur is broken, there is no point in looking at the one on your right leg except ensuring it won’t get a cast when the left leg gets one.

A problem with my stomach though will require a different approach.

The root cause could be coming from a problem in my mouth, something I regularly eat, or even in my intestine. They are all connected and interdependent so when you target one (and sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed) you can’t simply forget the rest. You need to consider how treating one individual organ is going to affect the rest of the body.

I consider myself quite lucky to have a strong healthy body but I see so many people around me, struggling with their health and I’m not totally convinced that the healthcare professionals they trust themselves with, are taking the right approach.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong, not because I don’t want to see people suffer ’cause suffering is part of life, but when suffering is caused by the blinkers that blind us or worse, the ones we trust to know better, then I’d rather we explored alternative ways to avoid it.

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Looking for some reasons to buy organic?

Before I give you some possible answers, please allow me to get this out of my chest.

Why on earth do we call and label traditionally grown fruits and vegetable organic?
Isn’t all the rest that should be labelled non-organic given that is grown with the use of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, GMOs and god knows what other chemicals?

I think so.

I also think that if the labels listed all the chemical compounds used to grow the produce, I’m sure people would think twice before buying them.

Now, I don’t buy organic food because it tastes better.

If you blindfolded me and gave me two tomatoes to taste, one organic and the other from mainstream agriculture, I can’t honestly say that I could tell the difference.

Taste is important, but definitely not the reason for choosing organic. Not for me anyway.

Having said that, I have plenty of valid reasons and here is my list for you to consider:

  • It’s kinder to animals, including humans
  • It’s kinder to the environment
  • It’s safer to eat (sorry but I just don’t trust chemicals and the large corporations that sell them)
  • It’s often packaged in non-plastic containers or free of packaging altogether
  • Generally comes from small, medium size farms that receive less or no funding at all
  • Supports agricultural diversity
  • Encourages and promotes biodiversity
  • It’s non-GMO
  • Meat and dairy (if you still choose to eat them) are free of antibiotics, hormones or other drugs

Yes, for now, organic is still more expensive but with the increase in demand, prices will go down more and more.

 

PS. Blindfolded or not, I can definitely tell the difference between tomatoes grown under the sun and those grown in greenhouses 🙂

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Let’s talk about fitness

I don’t know about you but I think the fitness industry has taken it too far. Indeed so far, that what we see today in magazines, on TV or online, has nothing to do with fitness and portraits an image of being fit that is unsuitable for the majority.

One of the definitions of fitness is “ The quality of being suitable to fulfil a particular role or task”.

If we apply this definition to our bodies, being fit does not mean oversized muscles, broad shoulders, big chests, six packs and a 5% body fat.

In today’s world, where many of us have sedentary jobs or jobs which require very little of our bodies compared to just 50 years ago, there is no need for super strength or massive muscles. A builder, a lumberjack, a factory worker surely needs a stronger body than mine but even for them, there is no need to look like those guys on fitness magazine’s covers.

I believe fitness means something different. It is having a body that is fully functioning, fit for purpose (different for each of us), and that allows us to move easily in the ways we need, to do the things we want to do throughout the day.

But today’s fitness industry is massive, powerful and highly influential and needs us to want one thing and one thing only, to desire a body that looks a certain way.

To fulfil that desire, we are required to invest a good deal of money on fitness programs, gym memberships, supplements and special diets.

The fitness industry always wins while those who have fallen for the illusion they have been sold, often end up with an unhealthy relationship with a body that is still not fit for purpose.

To a degree, I see myself as a recovering victim of this game and in future posts, I’ll do all I can to explain why I’ve chosen to play a different game. One that seems healthier for me, for the environment and for many of other species of animals that share this earth with us.

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It’s never your Inbox

Like you I grew up with the misguided perception that life happens to us and we are simply at the mercy of the external world. This is perfectly understandable because after all we inhabit a body that is constantly stimulated by something coming from the outside. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin somehow all need something external to be activated.

With our bodies constantly bombarded by external stimulants, it’s no wonder that we innocently believe in the illusion that even the way we think and feel, which affects our state of mind, must be the result of our situations and circumstances. Fortunately, that could not be any further from the truth.

In fact, what the Three Principles teach us is that in any given moment we are not living in the feeling of the world, but we are living in the feeling of our thinking. In other words, it’s always what we think that generates a feeling, and together they create our experience moment by moment. 100% of the time.

Now, when I first started learning about the Principles (also known as the Inside-Out understanding) I could immediately see how that could be true some times, but I had my list of exceptions. What about a stressful day with all those emails to read and respond to? Isn’t that the reason I feel overwhelmed, drained and bad tempered? Or what about the sunny days that always seem to lift my spirit and those rainy ones that make me feel blue? Not to mention how people treat me and the effects it has on my mood. Look at my wife for example, she does know how to push my buttons, doesn’t she? Sure she does! and the list goes on and on.

I’m sure you can come up with your own list, but what if, even in those exceptions, what’s really happening is simply us feeling our thoughts?

Personally, I can see the truth in that. I can see we are all thinking creatures and that our experience is truly generated by the constant dance between a thought and a feeling. It may not seem so obvious all the time, yet I no longer see exceptions. Not even in my Inbox, and you know why? Because I’ve noticed something curious about it. I’ve noticed that some days the list of unread emails in the morning stresses me out and some days it doesn’t. Now, if it were my inbox that created my experience of life, then it should stress me every single time, right? Well, it doesn’t, so it makes sense to me that it’s actually the way I think about it in the moment that creates the feeling of stress, and inevitably my experience of being stressed.

I’m sure you can think of at least one example where you have felt differently in front of the same situation.

I’m going to leave you with that for the moment, with an invitation to consider if you see any truth in what I’ve said and what your exceptions may be.

With Love
Signature_Paolo

 

P.S. If you missed the previous one you can find it here

 

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The answer is there, keep looking.

People come to me when they want to change something in their life, they think there is something wrong with it and needs to be fixed.

Now, there is nothing unusual about that, we are all human beings and we all have our moments when we don’t feel our best, we feel disconnected, and we feel that our situations and circumstances are not exactly ideal so we are compelled to do something to change that.

The way I see it is quite different and in my view nothing’s broken. What we experience is simply our thinking and the emotional pain that comes with it. When we don’t feel at ease all we want is for the pain to go away or at least, to feel more comfortable with it.

The problem isn’t in any of this, having not so nice thoughts is normal, we all do. The problem is in the fact we believe there is something we need to do and most of the times we tend to look for a quick fix, for someone to give us a ‘pill’ and feel better as quickly as possible.

The truth for me is that every time we feel things are not quite the way we think they should be, there is little point in trying to change them as in my experience, although we might be able to do something about them, it takes a lot of effort and drains our energy levels.

What if there was nothing for us to do? What if we understood that all we are experiencing was just our thinking about whatever we feel needs to be different from what it is? What if we were able to see that we live in the feeling of our thinking 100% of the time, not the feeling of the world?

This is the direction I keep looking and point my clients to, ’cause I know that every answers and solutions we seek lie there.

 

 

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My take on Purpose

[divider]On a Friday evening last April, I received a phone call from a chap asking me if I would be interested in giving a talk to their organisation in Oxford the next Tuesday.

Considering that I had already the entire weekend booked up to spend some quality time with my wife, it meant that I would have had only one day, Monday, to decide on the topic and prepare for the talk.

I had already given another talk for the same organisation, and although I knew I wouldn’t get paid, they always manage to gather a good crowd, all the proceeds go to charity, and so…

I replied, “I’d love to!”

The title of the talk was “Living a life of Purpose” and during the course of the evening, I shared my own understanding of the topic based on some of my personal experiences in life. After all isn’t life itself our greatest teacher?

What I’ve learned is very simple.

My only purpose in life is to be me and the purpose of everyone else is to be themselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

We quite often tend to look for something to “do”, like help others, play music, write poetry, work in the fields or in a factory, drive a lorry, write software coding and so on. But these are all just by-products of who we are, they are the results of our actions, not the driving force that creates them.

And the beauty of this understanding lies in the fact that we don’t need to know what to do to know what our purpose in life is, all we need is to express ourselves through spontaneity and will.

That’s our – and only – purpose.

It’s to listen to our inner voice, not the one in our head, that’s another voice of which I may speak of in the future.

The voice I’m talking about is the one that comes from deep within. From a place so deep that if you follow its path you end up in the same place we all hear this voice from. I call it our Heart, others call it God, Mind, Universal Source, Global Energy and a plethora of other names.

What you call it doesn’t matter as long as you acknowledge it’s there.

Can you hear it now? It’s always there, you know? Sometimes it’s louder, some other times it’s just a whisper, but it’s always with us and I suggest you listen to it.

I’ll leave you to “tune in” on this for a few days but look out for the next post as the story may be continued 🙂