Letter #46: A Very Happy Christmas to You!
A few spare Christmas trees here if you need one (in France)
Dear Friend
I hope you have a beautiful Christmas with family, friends, whoever you are spending the day with. And if you are going to enjoy a white Christmas, even better! As a boy I recall sheer joy on the mornings when you’d wake up, open up your curtains on Christmas Day, and see a white blanket everywhere! Christmases with whiteness to them seemed even more magical to me as a boy.
My mum would go to town for Christmas.
It started on December 1st as we began our advent calendar, opening up a new ‘door’ each day, excitement building as you got closer to 25! Funny how time flies these days, back then it went far too slowly in Decembers. At some point in time we’d put all the decorations up downstairs, and I would put some up in my bedroom too.
On Christmas Eve we had to put a stocking at the bottom of the bed, me and my sister. Suspecting Father Christmas was not real, I would, however, never wake up during the night to confirm it was Mum, and sure enough in the morning the stocking was filled with presents and I remained totally unaware of the stocking being filled! I eagerly got down to opening them all.
We had our breakfast, and Mum was the world’s greatest breakfast maker! Then it would be time to sit down at our tree with loads of presents all around and under it. Our tree was always a real one. Presents would be there from grannies and uncles and aunts and godfathers and godmothers and friends as well as our immediately family. There were so many I had to write down who had given me what. How exciting was it, wondering what would be behind the wrapping paper!
When I was asked what I wanted it was always the same for me: book tokens. Then I could go to the bookshop and get loads of books, as I was a total bookworm.
If it was a white Christmas, I’d be outside after the presents, enjoying the snow.
Mid-late morning uncle, aunt and cousins, and maybe close family friends would arrive and the excitement continued. Then lunch, and lots of turkey, stuffing, ham, and all that stuff. Christmas pudding with brandy butter afterwards. Sometimes I would get a sixpence, sometimes not. Pulling crackers, reading the jokes one by one, wearing the hats, fun, laughter and chat all the way! I think most of Britain are officially pigs on the 25th, barely able to move after lunch.
I think mid-afternoon time was when the annual James Bond movie would come on in the afternoon, and that was unmissable.
By tea time or early evening all family and friends had left, and now me and my sister had yet more excitement - my Mum always bought us ‘Christmas Tree presents’, which were small and literally resting in the branches. We’d now have Christmas cake and open up yet more presents!
You would go to bed a seriously happy kid, most content with the most special day of the year.
Then in England it was a full round of football matches on Boxing Day, and cold turkey sandwiches.
These are priceless memories for me.
Here in Thailand it never really feels like Christmas, not like when I lived in England. It’s sunny and warm, and Thailand is a Buddhist nation, so they don’t celebrate Christmas. This means there are no overt signs in the town reminding you of the time of year, but of course, I always know in my own head. We have a tree we always put up every December, and we do all the presents and I always cook the breakfast! I find Christmas reggae tunes on YouTube. We then have a dinner out somewhere, and this year it’ll be the same as last, at an excellent Thai restaurant right by the River Ping here in Chiang Mai. No turkey for me this year!
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So this is my penultimate Letter for 2024. I will bring you my last one either on the 30th or New Year’s Eve. It means I will have managed 47 Letters, so not too bad, just missing out on four or five of them!
I have an exciting plan for a new kind of content for 2025, and as with everything that belongs to the ‘evolutionary way of life’, my big plan is to up my game, so to speak! The 2025 Letters will build on the transformational theme, but at the heart of each week’s Letter will be a truism in life which I feel contains a tremendous source of power for us to really take charge of our life, health and destiny:
understanding is liberating.
Or, more precisely, the understanding of something is the liberation from it.
When we understand what ‘health’ actually means, and how to achieve it, then we can liberate ourselves from ill-health and dependency on doctors, pills, pharmacies. When we understand why our partner reacts in certain ways, which we might find stressful, then we liberate ourselves from our own negative reactions because we can better empathise with our partner, or even realise that it is us triggering them in the first place!
When we understand that mainstream media are serial liars and manipulators of truth and reality, we no longer need to be enslaved by the negative consequences of us trusting them.
When you understand how cancer is caused, you are liberated from it ‘randomly’ striking you.
Of course, understanding something is not enough in itself, we still have to act on the understanding, make changes to our life, or mindset, or perspectives, but without understanding we remain ignorant and have no chance.
It sounds obvious, but I think it’s well worth stating: to be ignorant of something is to ignore it. To ignore is a choice. We may do so knowingly, or unknowingly. But if we orient our life towards the pursuit of understanding, then we constantly shine our light of awareness on more and more aspects of the challenge of being a human, and through this understanding now we can make informed choices and changes in our life.
Back to the 2025 Letters… so the topic is going to be ‘the human condition and our human potential’. The more we understand who we are, both as individual human beings, and part of the whole of humanity (alive now, and all of humanity that came before us, and all that will come after us), the more we liberate ourselves from unnecessary pain, suffering and problems which arise from our ignorance of what it means to be human.
And until we go through our own spiritual revolution, I would argue we don’t really know who we are.
I am going to share bits from my own book, Menu For A Spiritual Revolution: Health Harmony & Happiness, and from many of the books in my collection. I have in effect been actively ‘studying’ the human condition and our potential for over 30 years. You can think of condition and potential like this: the way we are and why we are this way, and the way we could be and want to be if we make changes to the way we do life.
This is the ultimate tool for you to empower yourself, transform your life and help heal humankind from all it’s madnesses and insanities. It’s why I consider understanding as the father of liberation, and learning as the mother of all skills.
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Despite Christmas being a Christian faith celebration, I’d like to offer a few epithets of wisdom from Buddhism that Gautam Buddha used to teach 2500 years ago!
One of his tenets for engaging in life without suffering was to teach that everything in life is impermanent. When we consciously take this understanding to heart, we can do two things, and it’s what I do pretty much all the time these days (I’ve practised a lot!).
Firstly when something really good is happening in life, I make sure I’m really mindful of it and am staying present so that I can really enjoy it while it’s happening. It might be for an hour, half a day, two weeks, a year, whatever. But since you know it will come to an end some time, make sure to enjoy it while it’s happening to you. Secondly when life feels bad, or you are down or feeling in a poor way for whatever reason, know that this too is only temporary and will come to an end some time soon. In this way we lessen the pain we are feeling, and indeed, this understanding will speed up its demise. Nice!
He always talked of practising mindfulness. I take this to be watching, observing, being aware, responding to and acting in the moment through our conscious mind. Your conscious mind never gets angry, only your subconscious mind does this, or feels resentful, or hateful, or whatever the negative energy is. Somebody says or does something, and before you know it you are angry or resentful or hurt inside you. You might choose to hide it, or it might escape from you before you can stop it. But if you are already in a mindful state, then you are connected with your conscious mind and you can watch your anger erupt, or quickly notice it once it has burst onto the scene. This immediately removes its power to destroy you and those around you.
In the Western, or modern, or materialistic, or consumptive world, there are said to be five sources of power that we seek, in the belief this power will make our life good and make us happy: wealth, fame, sex, fancy food and lots of sleep. Buddhists call them cravings. In Buddhism, the five powers are faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration and insight.
I will return to this theme early in 2025, as the book I have which describes these brings tremendous understandings to us. But if I am to use more commonly used words, which you might find more relatable to your own life, then we get:
faith is confidence and trust in the universe, and therefore in yourself (because the universe invited you here)
diligence is having good intentions and sticking to them through thick and thin
mindfulness is awareness, and I consider self-awareness as our #1 teacher and #1 learning tool in our life; it puts us firmly in connection with the current moment, the only moment in which life actually takes place
concentration is maintaining mindfulness and awareness, staying attentive to what is happening in life right now, what you are doing in life right now
insight for me equates to understanding and in turn to wisdom from experience.
And so there you have it! You might like to reflect upon how much you do of each one, and what the benefits are or can be.
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A word on the course I talked about two weeks before I say good goodbye. I was biting off more than I could chew, and I chose to step back and chill a bit. I am now taking things easy during this Christmas period and for the rest of the year, and then I’ll be refreshed and raring to go and roaring as a lion in 2025. My new Letter content is connected strategically to everything else I’m doing, and it will extend into a pioneering ‘learners club’, yet to be named, but which you can join up to and experience stuff that nobody else is offering online. Not that I know of. And in any case, coming across one needle in a haystack is plenty for anybody!
The world is going through tremendous upheavals and transformation. I say there are five things you need, to ensure you can withstand all the current and upcoming perils and pitfalls, overcome challenges and problems, and proactively embrace life with purpose and passion to enjoy all the opportunities that arise in such momentous times of change and to thrive with good health and happiness.
And to live in harmony, despite the choppy waters.
Become skilled in learning, communication and self-leadership.
Learn and acquire self-knowledge - what your mind, body and soul are, and how they work and how they operate as a holistic whole.
Build self-confidence and self-belief.
These are the 5 Pillars of A Spiritual Revolution, and give you the strongest possible foundation for your life.
Have a fantastic Christmas Day, and Boxing Day if you celebrate it.
I will see you just before 2024 bids farewell to us.
Cheers
Philip
